Zoosk Hack Day, July 2012

On July 26-27, our Product and Engineering teams will be conducting a Hack Day.  Similar to the event we held in September 2011, this will be a period of time for members of our product development organization to explore their own ideas to improve Zoosk.  Out of this, we hope to get some team building, professional development, fun and maybe a few big product improvements.  To make it interesting, we will also award cash prizes for the best ideas.

Anyone can participate – either working independently or partnering up with others.  While we don’t want to limit creativity, we encourage 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 teams will start work next week on Thursday morning, continue all day (and probably into the night), and wrap up by noon on Friday.  At that point, we’ll gather around pizza and beer, and each team will demo their idea to a panel of judges made up of our executive team.

In last September’s Hack Day session, the teams produced some great ideas: a new way to search for other members, a fraud detection technique using photo analysis, voice messaging between members, enhanced data visualization for BI, a code clean-up tool, a database object mapper, and many more…  Some of the ideas were quickly rolled out, other projects were tweaked a bit.  Regardless of the outcome, the teams got a chance to explore and learn, which makes us a better organization.

I am looking forward to seeing what comes out of next week’s Hack Day.  We’ll be live tweeting during Hack Day via @ZooskEngineers using hashtag #ZooskHackDay. Feel free to join the discussion.