Retail Hacking

How excited is for a developer to be able to build something from scratch quickly? And for a designer to think in a featureAnd how often is it possible in the day-by-day jobs?

We can build great environments, great teams, but the truth is that from monday to friday, developers have to follow processes, rules, good practices and normally has few moments to be really a hacker, to be creative, to enjoy what they are building and build it really quick to see this working soon. And as a leader we have to search a way to let them exercise the hacker side of them, the creative mind, but we need them to deliver constantly, with good frequency, quality and following processes and good practices most of the time.

We started with a product scope in mind, but in the first hours of the day we discovered that some of the tools we wanted to build would not be possible until we had our app and page reviewed and approved by facebook, what would take around 2 or 3 days. This was the first challenge and a great exercize to review and spin off the product and choose new features and a new path to get back to work and focus. At 6pm, we had a simple platform, with user registration, login, configuration, and features like:

Beside all of this, we finish the day really tired, but really excited and proud of what the team were able to do. Everyone in the team were able to contribute, everyone felt that learn a lot during the day. Before the retail hacking starts, I had one great doubt that was how we could integrate in this activity the two new interns that started to work with us less than one week before and were still in the onboard learning a lot. In the end of the day, I realized that the energy is so big in a exercize like this, the energy is so contagious in a hacking day, that there is always a way to everyone to contribute, and the interns helped a lot the team building some layouts in the interface and even some features for the user flow(login, edit, configure, ..)

This was the first Retail Hacking of many that we want to do, the next steps are discover how we can keep doing this over time, with more people in the team, with more learns and delivering more great "products" in the end of each hacking.

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