dotdigital Hack Week 2020

This is our yearly challenge to our software engineers, product designers, deliverability consultants, and systems administrators to come up with forward-thinking hacks and put them into practice, ready to demo at the end of the week.

Not all hacks make it into the platform but watch this space through 2021 and you might be pleasantly surprised!

2020 Hack Week was all about improvement to Dotdigital as well as our corporate systems. This year’s Hack Week was fully remote and all 10 teams taking part created slick demo videos to show their hacks off to the entire company.

Engineers normally based in our offices in Manchester, Croydon, Cape Town, Warsaw, and Minsk took part, so it was a truly international event!

Why Hack Week?

At Dotdigital, we have some of the best people in the technology industry. Hack Week gives them the space to get their creative juices flowing and encourages innovation, collaboration, and a chance to work on things they might otherwise not have got a chance to.

This year was our eighth annual Hack Week. Over the years we have seen many amazing hacks, some of which have subsequently made their way into Dotdigital, benefitting all our customers and partners.

The winners of 2020

The judging panel for 2020 included judges from Product, Software Engineering, Technical Solutions, and HR. The entries for 2020 were all of an extremely high standard and made the judges’ decision incredibly hard. Here are the winners of the different categories:

Most Valuable Idea – Product Configurator by Computer Says Yo!

The team spotted an opportunity to streamline the process of generating quotes thereby getting them out to our customers faster.

This hack included a proof of concept as to the feasibility of embedding the Pricing Calculator into our corporate CRM. This idea adds tremendous value to both our customers and our staff.

Most Innovative Idea – Eco Mode for Dotdigital by The Wet Bandits

dotdigital is undergoing a green revolution, and it’s time for us to make our software green too! Dotdigital ‘Eco-mode’ would give users the opportunity to opt into becoming a certified ‘green’ user, which could make some of the following adjustments to user experience:

• Dark mode: ‘On-trend’ dark UI theme, which could reduce power consumption on a user’s device/display up to 58.5% on some devices!
• Green-messaging: Our copy will be fine-tuned where possible/appropriate to help the user be more energy efficient in their usage of the platform.
• “Green-screens”: Optimize polling/refreshing that is done, where appropriate, and/or give the user the information and ability to pause and stop this themselves.
• “Green-rewards”: Potential rewards and incentives for opting into Eco Mode.

CTO Award – Segment Analytics by Fruity Moon

This hack supercharged Dotdigital segments, surfacing large volumes of RFM data against each segment. This would give our customers a new level of insight into their customer base while allowing a customer to export them for analysis of segments over the course of time.

Best Hack 2020 – Product Configurator by Computer Says Yo!

Not only was the Product Configurator the winner of the Most Valuable Idea award, it was also voted as the overall best hack by the delegates who attended the Hack Week presentations.

The customer and operational time savings combined with the great technical solution demonstrated meant this hack achieved 8% more of the popular vote than the next best-loved hack and was a clear winner.

Bonus Awards:

Best Team Name – URLicorns

Best Hack Video – Perks & Recreation

Join us and hack too

If experimenting with new technology and solving customer engagement problems in new and innovative ways seems like something you’d excel at, have a look at our open positions over at careers.dotdigital.com. We are always on the lookout for outstanding technologists and are going through a period of growth with many open roles globally.