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Key Takeaways Structured as five-day sprints, hack weeks provide a balance between focused work and avoiding burnout.
Hack weeks promote team building and serve as a platform for tackling big ideas, with recent sessions focusing on AI advancements.
For some people, the idea of “group projects” causes a reflexive spasm of dread, complete with unpleasant flashbacks to high school assignments where one person always seemed to drop the ball and tank everyone’s grade as a result.
In my opinion, workplace collaboration is unfairly maligned. Consider a different image, say, the movie Armageddon, or even Ocean’s 11, in which a crack team of experts combines their unique strengths to tackle a daunting task (saving mankind from an asteroid and robbing a trio of casinos, respectively). It’s with this latter scenario in mind, minus the criminal activity, that I present a possibly controversial take: every company should have hack weeks.
Hack weeks can take various forms, but for us at Jotform, they look like five-day sprints that give our product teams the opportunity to focus on a single idea, free from the distractions of their day-to-day workloads. Hack weeks have produced some of our most important innovations, including a revamped Jotform Enterprise and Jotform Cards.
If you’re considering incorporating hack weeks into your business, or even if you’re just curious about why hack week evangelists like me are so wild about them, read on.
Single versus multi-day sprints
I implemented the idea of hackathons in the early years of running Jotform, when we were only a fledgling team with a handful of people. The original concept was to spend just a single day laser-focused on a project. But these frenzied days turned into nights, and by the time our laptops were finally shut, the team was exhausted. We experimented with adding a second day, but these two-day episodes began to swallow weekends, too. What was supposed to be a creative exercise was beginning to feel tiring.
So instead of trying to squeeze everything into the shortest amount of time possible, we expanded the sprints into a full five days. This gives everyone time to fully develop their ideas, kick the tires and come up with something genuinely useful, rather than half-baked and rushed.
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