Zalando conducted their annual Hack week in December: Five days of open innovation and experimentation taking place in the Berlin and Dortmund tech offices with over 900 participating employees. The Hack Week has a simple objective: For a full week, every Zalando technologist is given the opportunity to pause their daily business to pursue an idea or project that somehow contributes to their business or work culture. It was an honour for LeanIX to be invited this time to support one innovative project with a team of developers.
A truly cross-functional team
Our core project team was composed of four employees of Zalando Technology and three LeanIX developers with a complementary set of skills: Enterprise Architecture, Enterprise Procurement, Stups.io Development, Java Backend Development and Web Frontend Development. The team got together on Monday morning to kick-off with a brainstorming session. The purpose of our project was two-fold: 1) Automate the detection of dependencies between applications and visualize them in a convenient way. 2) Enable every employee to get better insights into the IT landscape. After a brief SCRUM-like planning session, small teams started hacking all day long during the week.
The big innovation fair
During the week you could feel the extraordinary vibe of creativity and motivation to get the code running before the big innovation fair on Friday afternoon. With the help of a joint team breakfast batteries were recharged for the final hours and we were able to finish all that we had planned. For the fair some projects were selected to be presented in a small booth to allow all other teams and the management to see and try out what had been built. While our project also got one of the rare spots to present, other highlights included for example the project "The refugee clothing app" that helps refugess find and access donated clothing. Also this time there were many projects with a lot of "out of the box" thinking, similar to the shoe launched into space during last Hack Week.
Turning innovation into reality
This week was a truly outstanding experience for all of us: Very quickly people from completely different backgrounds and even companies can team up, achieve so much during a short timeframe and have a lot of fun at the same time. We are convinced that Hack Week is an outstanding concept (Interview with orga team) to keep up and foster innovation spirit even if a company like Zalando has grown out of the typical Startup size. While we cannot reveal more details yet, we are excited to see the major part of the created features and integrations becoming generally available in leanIX and being used in production soon. Stay tuned :-)
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