Reimagining Spotify's Hack Week

Please note: This portfolio snapshot has been carefully curated to exclude sensitive or confidential information.

What the hack?

Hack Week is Spotify's annual flagship innovation event. Running since 2013, it's famous for bringing to life features like Discover Weekly and Spotify for Kids. For five days, employees across the business are invited to pause their regular work, pitch new ideas, and work in teams to bring them to life. I joined Spotify's Hack Week Operations team to produce this virtual event for its 2022 and 2023 editions, focusing on communications and design. As an independent contractor turned agency leader, Say it Good studio collaborated with Spotify's R&D teams to level up the Hack Week legacy for its distributed-first work culture.

Part I: Hacking for a cooler planet

As the world transitioned to remote work and Spotify embraced its “work from anywhere" philosophy, Hack Week was in need of a new approach. At the time, Spotify had just announced their pledge to reach net zero emissions by 2030, and the Hack Week Operations team took this opportunity to put forward a climate action inspired theme, calling it "Making the Planet Cooler".

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Evolving a legacy

Our challenge was to create an inclusive, engaging, and easy virtual-first hacking experience for all Spotifiers across the business. We needed to guide participants, whether new to hacking or not, on how to participate and get the most out of it. We also wanted to inspire great ideas in line with its climate action theme and company goals.

As the communications lead, I designed an integrated campaign that encompassed a microsite, newsletters, educational resources, employee storytelling, explainer videos, leadership comms, and countless emoji-rich Slack messages.

Over four months, we managed the campaign internally across multiple channels, fostering engagement and participation. My role was to ensure that every Spotify employee felt well-informed at every step, from unveiling the campaign theme to executing a virtual Hack Fair (think: science fair for adults) and Hack Awards ceremony.

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Highlights

• Hack Hub
  ‍We developed a one-stop-shop microsite where Spotifiers could get all the information they needed, keeping it up to date in real time.
• Theme
  ‍Recognizing that individuals have varying levels of climate literacy and interest, we developed toolkits designed to help climate education and idea generation across diverse perspectives and topics, from climate justice to net zero.‍
• Comms
  ‍I developed and executed internal communications, collaborating with different departments and senior leadership to amplify the Hack Week message across Spotify's internal ecosystem.
  

A smashing success

The 2022 edition of Hack Week marked a significant cultural event at Spotify. We boosted engagement and participation, with over 50% of the R&D department taking part, and nearly half of the participants being new to hacking. Hundreds of hack projects were created, many of which centered around climate action. One notable example of a successful project is "TV Dark Mode," a feature that was released in late 2023 and helps conserve energy during streaming.

The event was instrumental in generating momentum for Spotify's climate action initiatives. Following the event, climate action was called out as one of Spotify's five core engineering pillars. This momentum persists as Spotify charts its course toward net zero.

"Equipped with knowledge and inspiration, 2,441 Spotifiers spent five days hacking around the clock from over one hundred locations worldwide. They came up with hundreds of ideas and demos, from a green tour planner for artists to a climate footprint calculator for listeners. Two other ideas that came out of that Hack Week — a climate engineering handbook and open source software for tracking your cloud emissions — are great examples of how we’re making climate action more accessible to engineers, both inside and outside Spotify." - Spotify Engineering Blog