Retail Hacking

How excited is for a developer to be able to build something from scratch quickly? And for a designer to think in a featureAnd how often is it possible in the day-by-day jobs?

We can build great environments, great teams, but the truth is that from monday to friday, developers have to follow processes, rules, good practices and normally has few moments to be really a hacker, to be creative, to enjoy what they are building and build it really quick to see this working soon. And as a leader we have to search a way to let them exercise the hacker side of them, the creative mind, but we need them to deliver constantly, with good frequency, quality and following processes and good practices most of the time.

A couple of months ago, Paulo Hashimoto bring me a discussion about how we could exercise those skills in our product and engineering team at SumOne and bring an idea to the table: stop following processes for one day and build something from scratch from 8am to 6pm. I liked the idea, talked with Thiago Victorino, leader of SumOne product team, and together we start to thinking how to organize and do this with our teams. We named this activity as "Retail Hacking" and defined some goals to accomplish with this:

• Team building: We want to use the activity to create stronger relationships between product team(product managers and ux designers) and engineering team(software developers)
• Prototype: We could work on ideas and requests from our clients that we did not prioritize yet, or ideas that we already thought about but did not have time to work on
• Exercize: The most important, a day to be free of day-by-day processes and rules to build something quick from scratch and exercize creative and the ability to make quick decisions and, why not, review decisions and spin off quickly too.

With all of this defined, and choose one day, and this was last friday, August 31th, when we realized our first Retail Hacking. We started to work at 8am with the main goal to build something related to Messenger Marketing.

We started with a product scope in mind, but in the first hours of the day we discovered that some of the tools we wanted to build would not be possible until we had our app and page reviewed and approved by facebook, what would take around 2 or 3 days. This was the first challenge and a great exercize to review and spin off the product and choose new features and a new path to get back to work and focus. At 6pm, we had a simple platform, with user registration, login, configuration, and features like:

• List of facebook fan page subscribers;
• Integration to send messages to fan page subscribers;
• List of messages of the fan page and a way to answer all the messages;
• Possibility to configure automated responses for messages using regex;
• Pre formatted messages with call to actions;
• And all of this with a good interface and UX for the "MVP".

Beside all of this, we finish the day really tired, but really excited and proud of what the team were able to do. Everyone in the team were able to contribute, everyone felt that learn a lot during the day. Before the retail hacking starts, I had one great doubt that was how we could integrate in this activity the two new interns that started to work with us less than one week before and were still in the onboard learning a lot. In the end of the day, I realized that the energy is so big in a exercize like this, the energy is so contagious in a hacking day, that there is always a way to everyone to contribute, and the interns helped a lot the team building some layouts in the interface and even some features for the user flow(login, edit, configure, ..)

This was the first Retail Hacking of many that we want to do, the next steps are discover how we can keep doing this over time, with more people in the team, with more learns and delivering more great "products" in the end of each hacking.