Hack Day – April 2013

On April 4-5th, the product and engineering teams conducted our third Hack Day event.  Similar to events we have held in the past, this was a period of time for members of our product development organization to explore their own ideas to improve Zoosk.  To make it interesting, we awarded cash prizes for the best ideas.  Anyone could participate – either working independently or partnering up with others.  While we didn’t want to limit creativity, we encouraged Hack Day ideas that could contribute to Zoosk in one of three ways:

• Represent a new feature that would grow the Zoosk business
• Generate an efficiency that would lower the cost/time to get things done
• Provide a new means of driving users to Zoosk products

The event ran from Thursday morning straight through to 4pm on Friday.  We had 24 teams with 40 individual participants working on projects.  We concluded the event with presentations by the teams to our judging committee, which consisted of our executive team.  The judges had some difficult decisions to make.  After much deliberation, the judges selected the following winners:

1st Place:  Mobile Chat… better (Chris K.)
2nd Place:  Ravamping Help and Customer Support   (Khyati D.)
3rd Place:  Marketing Search   (Craig A.)

We also had a People’s Choice award, which was voted on by all participants.  The winner was Better, More Violent Search  (Keith K.)

Overall, it was a great event.  Several of the ideas will be pipelined into our product development funnel.  We are already looking forward to our next Hack Day event in six months.