Hi everyone! I’m Kayoreena from the Engineering Office!

From March 23rd to March 27th, we’ll be holding Mercari Hack Week, a technology hackathon for Mercari’s engineers.

What is Mercari Hack Week?

Mercari Hack Week is a week-long technology hackathon for Mercari engineers held every six months. During this Hack Week, engineers take a break from their usual product development, and develop what they want, where they want, with the team they want. It’s a great opportunity for teams and members that don’t collaborate often to work together on projects.

Why do we hold Mercari Hack Week?

This is the second Hack Week at Mercari. One of the reasons Hack Week was introduced is that the number of engineers at Mercari has grown rapidly, practically tripling in only two years, but at the same time, it has become more difficult for engineers to have the freedom to make decisions and do things on their own.
To counter this, we decided to set aside time every six months for engineers to create things they want to do, using whatever methods they want. This became Hack Week. During Hack Week, we put normal product development on hold, so engineers can focus on coming up with their own ideas and implementing them without having to worry about their usual duties. Fostering a culture of taking initiative like this for engineers is crucial for Mercari to realize drastic growth. Hack Week also aims to help engineers share best practices and improve their technological skills by working with members in different teams and positions, and to spice up the usual six-month/one-year development schedule.

This blog entry also explains the goals of Hack Week.

This Mercari Hack Week comes with a twist—working from home!

We planned a lot of activities for the month leading up to Mercari Hack Week, but due to the company’s response to COVID-19, we had to switch to holding all activities online at the last minute as most employees are working from home. Near the end of February, we opened a special internal portal site for Hack Week and an Idea Board for people to post their ideas. The Idea Board is also a place for people to recruit project members, and it’s not limited to engineers, either—anyone at Mercari can participate.

We also held open door sessions online, and we even ran our Idea Pitch session (a session for members to present their ideas for Hack Week) online on 3/18.

On the last day of Hack Week, Demo Day, participants will present the projects they created. We’ll be giving out awards for surprising ideas, innovative uses of new technology, and projects with the potential to have a big impact on Mercari users.

Creating opportunities for exciting technology

We may be working from home, but I hope to see many members taking Hack Week’s concept of “developing what you want where you want” to heart and taking on bold challenges with new ideas and technology. I can’t wait to see everyone’s ideas and projects using new technology turn into new innovations!

Hack Week is almost here! What kind of ideas will we see this time?

Keep checking back on Mercan for reports from the week!