Duck Tales: Hack Days at DuckDuckGo — why we do them, and the role of trust (Ep.25)

In this episode, Gabriel (Founder) and Julia (People Operations) discuss hack days (our version of a hackathon), how we encourage participation, and some of the product changes it’s led to.

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Gabriel: Hello everybody. Welcome to Duck Tales again. I’m Gabriel, the founder of DuckDuckGo. And with me today is Julia. Julia, do you want to introduce yourself?

Julia: Yeah, I’m Julia. I am part of the PeopleOps team. Been at DuckDuckGo for three years and a half. So yeah, almost four. Very excited to be here.

Gabriel: That’s cool. Yeah. It feels like a long time. I’m really bad at time. I know I’ve been working with you for a long time. You’re wearing a DuckDuckGo sweater from our... one more swag like that one. Yeah. Nice. Okay. So today we’re here to talk about hack days, which is something, it’s not exactly PeopleOps, but it’s something that you also just work on here. You’ve been responsible for it for a while. So yeah, tell us, tell us what hack days are.

Julia: Yes.

Gabriel: I know they’ve preceded you and I can talk about that too, but talk about your journey with hack days.

Julia: Yeah. So it’s, I love actually owning hack days because it’s not as... it’s related to culture, but not so specific to HR and PeopleOps. But hack days actually, it’s also known or mostly known as hackathons. A lot of companies in the tech industry do them. It’s a combination of the word hack, meaning creative exploratory programming, and marathon, which is something that you do fairly quick and in a short amount of time. So it’s kind of about working very intensively for a short amount of time and see what you can accomplish. It became popular in the late nineties, beginning of two thousands. And we just happened to call it a little differently. So we call it hack days. At DuckDuckGo, the way that we do that is about three or four weeks throughout the year. We do our hack days. It’s from Wednesday to Friday. So from Wednesday to Friday, we allow folks to just put all their regular work duties on the side, on pause, and using good judgment, of course, and work on anything they want that relates to DuckDuckGo. So full creativity, autonomy, and collaborating with other folks and in other domains. So that’s what it is.

Gabriel: Yeah, so a couple things with it. One is we, you do your largest part of this, so tell me what you think about this, but we’ve really tried to encourage people to do it too. So you don’t have to do it. I mean, that’s one thing, you can continue working your normal working day, but we’ve really tried to encourage as many people as we can to participate and also as we’ve grown to collaborate with others. With the idea being here that when you step away for those kind of three days, you know, without the constraints of like regular project scoping and oversight, and you just kind of left to like build from scratch, you can come up with and try new ideas. And especially if you collaborate and cross-pollinate, and as a result, I mean, we’ll talk about this, but a lot of good things have come about it. So we’ve been really trying to encourage people, but I think some people are kind of reluctant to do that. Worried they’re going to fall behind on their work or whatever. So yeah, so maybe you can speak to how we try to encourage people.

Julia: Yeah, it’s an interesting part of... So our culture has a lot of autonomy and one of our values is to build trust. So we treat people with trust, we trust folks when they are hired, we trust our hiring process. So we know they’re going to use good judgment, they’re going to put their work on the side if they can, they’re going to keep doing the things that they have to do and balance things out. But it is interesting because as folks come from other organizations, they do have... like some folks, some people have a fear of like, no, I’m going to leave my work behind. I don’t know how this works. Like, is it going to be okay if I actually put it on hold? Thankfully, we’ve been doing it for a while and a lot of people participate. So I feel like after you’ve gone through the first one and you see how many people participate, you’re like, this is actually a big thing here. And it’s cool to do it. So we try to motivate in a way that we build our culture, just like letting people know, like we trust you. We trust you and you can make that judgment call. We’re all grownups here. We all know it’s a business. We all know what we have to do. So it’s, I think that’s the way that we motivate. We also try to ask people to plan ahead. So we remind folks when we post the whole calendar of the hack days in the beginning of the year. So folks already know when that’s going to happen and they can kind of make sure that things that are more pressing in their regular work is taken care of in advance. And we announce a couple of weeks before it happens, so folks also have that just as a reminder. So those are some of the things that we do to motivate them. And they can also, if they’re not able to do the hack days that week, they can actually make it up to hack days in another week. So if that week actually just becomes something like, you know what, now I have to actually focus on my work, I won’t be able to pause things, they can do that in another week that seems more suiting for them.

Gabriel: Yeah, I was going to mention that if you didn’t, because it’s a subtle thing that we eventually did. I think another subtle one, but it’s just, it’s not even something we’ve done, but to your point, since so many people participate, is a lot of the leadership also participates. And I think, yeah, and I participate sometimes. And so when people see that, I think it may give more permission for people to do so, you know? Yeah, exactly.

Julia: You participate! Yeah, that’s an example thing.

Gabriel: And then on the other side of it, I know we’re gonna wrap this up, but maybe not as a good time, is like, you know, I agree, we have a good cadence now of like encouragement and lead up and stuff, but then the end of it is also kind of fun, as like kind of the end of the hack days. So what happens at the end of hack days?

Julia: Well, so we do hack days for several reasons, but one of the reasons is engagement. And one of the really cool things about hack days is you have from Wednesday to Friday, for those who don’t know, every Friday at DuckDuckGo, we have an all-company meeting. So we all get together. We talk about company updates. It’s kind of like what a town hall, a traditional town hall call would look like, but with our cool twist. So for hack days weeks, we actually try to, we cancel all the other meetings and that’s the only one that stays. And during that meeting, we have a showcase specifically for hack days. So that week is just about the showcase. We allow folks to talk about what they worked on for two minutes. We actually have to time it, which is kind of, it’s one of the things that...

Gabriel: We have a lot of people now. Yeah. Yeah.

Julia: I do not like. I’ve been really hard not to interrupt people and to just let them do it, but we are growing as an organization, so it becomes quite challenging as we grow the amount of hack days demos that we have. But during that call, you just get to listen to everything that folks created in three days. And it’s really fascinating because you get to see, well, for me, for example, I’m not in the tech team, so it’s really interesting to see how tech folks are thinking about the product, what are they doing to make things better? And from any other domain, you just get to see how people work and how fast they can accomplish things and how, you get to know more of the products because obviously they’re demoing things. So it’s kind of a win-win even if you don’t participate because you just get to learn a bunch and you just leave that call so motivated and so inspired because you get to see we are really a big bunch of like really smart people who are overachievers. So it’s really crazy what we can achieve like in three days. And it’s just like beautiful to see and you just leave that call feeling proud and feeling inspired and then you get your own ideas from it and you get to reach out to the folks who worked on things that you found interesting and just like talk to them about your feedback on that. So that is really special and I think that is the most special and impactful part of hack days, aside from, of course, the fact that it ends up impacting our products because several things are shipped and also internal processes are improved throughout those projects. So, yeah, it’s really exciting and really beautiful to see.

Gabriel: Yeah, agreed. I mean, let’s talk about that last part for a bit. So you can work on anything. We don’t even say you need to work on something that needs to ship. You know, like people can work on kind of pie in the sky ideas or little improvements they want to make. But some people do work on either internal improvements for like work process or development process or actual changes in the product that do end up shipping or spark ideas that end up shipping. And we do encourage that. I mean, so we had one, I’m just thinking of the Duck Tales episodes we did. We did one episode with, I think with Rachel, with the AI, no AI image filter that came out of hack days. Are there any others that jump out to you of like projects we did the last year or so that we ended up shipping?

Julia: Oh yes. I love that one. It’s so interesting that you say that because that is one of my favorites, basically, as someone who creates some imaging myself, as someone as an artist myself, I actually really appreciate that functionality of being able to filter out AI images and just be able to see what was actually created by humans. So I love that one. There are many, many things that I think were impactful. In the internal processes piece, it’s hard to say it because I would have to explain the actual process.

Gabriel: There’s been a lot of good internal improvements though. Yeah, like people make people’s lives easier. Yeah.

Julia: Yes, for sure. And there are small things like, for example, the automation that we did for when you’re out of the office, you actually get to update all your tools at once instead of having to go one by one. That’s really impactful and saves a bunch of time. We also had one for that you can just read the title of an Asana task in Mattermost, which saves a bunch of time so you don’t have to click to see what it is. So these small tweaks that are really important. From the product perspective, I think there was one about hiding distracting items from any website that I think is really, is very connected to what we do in our ethos of like user-first approach and giving people optionality. Also like vertical tabs. I feel like it’s one that folks ask for a lot. So that’s cool.

Gabriel: Yeah, the last hack days we had tons of vertical tab projects. We haven’t shipped those yet, but I think they will be coming and people will be very excited about that when we do.

Julia: Yes, we’re excited about those. I feel like it’s a big one and people love it. And I think, did the Easter eggs come from hack days?

Gabriel: Oh yeah, yes I did. Yeah, yeah, that’s true. I forgot about that. That was the project that I worked on.

Julia: That’s a favorite. Everybody loves it and gives a bunch of ideas. I think that’s really fun and very delightful. So yeah, some of it, but you probably know way more because you’ve been doing this for...

Gabriel: No, those are just a good example. So yeah, I mean, the point I just had was like, yeah, I think without really even trying, people really do improve things and we should kind of ship them and they make them into the product. I guess we could end with something about hack days are part of what we’ve been calling special days, or I don’t know if you’ve changed the name of that, but I think that’s what we still call it. And kind of like, it started with just hack days a long time ago before you joined, but then we had tried some other things too. Like we basically found that like, you know, about a quarter, four times a year is the right cadence for hack days, but there’s still some needs for other days to kind of take some time apart from regular work. And at some point in the past we had called them low-hanging fruit days or quick wins days. And it was kind of like these things that kind of fall through the cracks that maybe take just a few days or even you can knock out a bunch in a few days, but that we never end up doing because they’re small little tasks and they just don’t get prioritized. So that’s evolved, it’s evolved since you’ve been here too, but now maybe you could talk about what we do in the other months just briefly. Like I think we’re just calling this quick win days now, right?

Julia: Yeah, so for the sake of everybody who is listening, at DuckDuckGo we have something that we call special days. So special days is the umbrella terminology for hack days and quick wins. I feel a little bit bad for quick wins because hack days has way more hype to it. It’s a known terminology in other places.

Gabriel: Yeah. Just like this episode, we’re tacking it on to the end, but I think it’s still important just to mention because it’s an interesting concept that we’ve come up with.

Julia: For sure, for sure. So quick win days basically are things that you can do quickly. So it’s the same concept in a sense that it’s from Wednesday to Friday and you get to like pause certain work using good judgment and work on quick wins and things that you can accomplish really quickly or within that timeframe. I also do want to mention though that some things initiate as a hack days or a quick win. And then we realize the potential of that idea. And even if the person cannot end or finalize the whole thing in three days, we might just keep going because after the showcase, we realized the impact of it. So we have a very structured way that we work at DuckDuckGo. So having that space for creativity is really important. So going back to quick wins, those days are pretty much about getting low-hanging fruit taken care of. And a lot of people, a lot of our functional teams actually plan around it a lot. So what they do is that when they are working on specific projects and they see quick wins within those projects, they kind of just separate that for when we have the quick wins. And then they get a bunch of stuff done. So that’s really exciting because it becomes very productive. And it becomes a conversation within the teams. Like what are the small improvements that we can do in specific things or what are the little steps that we can go beyond in certain projects? So it actually becomes really impactful to have those days. So right now, as we evolved hack days and special days in general, we have tried to combine them. We have tried them separately. We have tried having themes connected to them. So at some point, the themes were connected to our objectives, which are our project roadmaps that are contributing to our top priorities and organization. So we have tried several things. Right now, what we do is that we have them separately, and it’s every two months. So basically, you have three hack days, three hack weeks a year and three quick win weeks a year. We try to skip weeks that are super busy like when we have our performance review process or things like that, people are involved in giving feedback. But yeah, that’s basically what those are. Also have recently implemented the... the difference with quick wins is that we don’t have the showcase, but we do tell people like, you worked on something really cool, do a demo. There’s always room for demos in our company meetings. So that’s really fun. And we are trying to increase that. And we also try to encourage people to work on not necessarily create something or work on something, but also learn something. So if there is a different domain that you want to learn about, or if there is... right now, we are highly encouraging people to test AI capabilities and what it can do, how far can it go? What are things that we can accomplish with it? What are the different tools that are out there that we can use? So quick wins also serve that purpose a lot. Like you don’t have to create something, just like learn, explore, do things that are going to help you do better work. So yeah, for hack days, we also implemented Hack Days Awards, which is one of the reasons why there’s a bit more of a hype with hack days than quick wins. So at this point we have an award, we have four awards.

Gabriel: You...

Julia: They are connected to what we’re trying to do with our product. So delight, dependability, and discovery. And then we have a fourth one for improving internal processes. And you, Gabriel, select the winners, which is really exciting for folks to just have that. And yeah, we give them a prize. We have swag that’s with special logos for our hack days. So that’s really exciting. We love swag at DuckDuckGo. So that is something that motivates people.

Gabriel: Heh heh heh.

Julia: Yeah, so I hope that answered your question about quick wins.

Gabriel: Okay, last thing, last thing. Yeah, it totally did. And part of the reason I asked was, I like about quick wins days is too, what you said is it’s not just engineering. Like it’s very clear that anyone has quick tasks across all the functional teams. Because with hack days, and this is maybe a problem with the name, like I think people assume it’s just engineering, but we have really tried to encourage non-engineering. And to your last point there, I’ll make this point that if you can... you can add anything for us to close out if you want. You know, we have been encouraging people to learn new things or use AI and I feel like AI has now really opened up in the last few days a clear path for even more non-engineers to get involved. Like, John, who’s been on this before, did his automations for... anyone can now like make automations or even build a small website and just try different things.

Julia: Yes.

Gabriel: And my hope is that we get even more kind of non-engineering, product design folks doing stuff.

Julia: Yeah, it’s so interesting because usually when we’re trying to automate something, we ask IT, like we, as in PeopleOps and folks who are not tech, that are in the non-tech teams, we usually need support to automate anything. And now we’re like able to automate things ourselves. And it’s really exciting. So we’re kind of like, are we, are we coding now? Yeah, I like it. Coding.

Gabriel: Yeah, yeah, you are.

Julia: And I mean, of course it’s all very basic stuff that we’re doing still as people who are not in tech, but it’s really exciting to see what you can accomplish with AI and what you can accomplish with just having that autonomy and freedom to just go and do it and do it yourself. And it’s all about curiosity, which is one of the things that I really love about hack days and the freedom that you get. It’s, you really, you can work on anything and you can explore anything and you can go in any team and be like, hey, I want to learn something about finance or the legal department or whatever. And just like actually be able to explore and get out. Even the folks who are in tech get out of the tech zone and kind of explore other things they can be impactful with. And so yeah, I love hack days. I think it’s super exciting. Like we, at some point we had less frequency and people had a very emotional response to it. So it’s clear to me that people really love it and that it has a huge impact. We have an engagement survey question about hack days and it’s usually pretty positive. So yeah, I’m very proud of the program. We do have some challenges like the growth and how we’re gonna manage the amount of demos and all of that, but I’m super happy to own it. And this was really exciting. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me here. It’s fun to talk about.

Gabriel: Yes, thank you for coming. I also love hack days and thank you everyone for listening. See you next time.

Julia: Thank you. Bye.

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