Hack Week: A Week Of Innovation And Experimentation

Technological innovation and disruption are at the core of what we do. These values are expressed in how we built our company, how we build our teams, how we operate and what we deliver to our clients. Hack Week, just one example of this expression, gives technology team members the opportunity to step away from their day-to-day projects to experiment with emerging technologies, build impactful solutions and collaborate with others across Technology.

This program provides team members with a recurring, full week of dedicated innovation time. The week is split into 4 days of building, then on Friday we host a show and tell, spotlighting just some of the cool stuff that was hacked. The size and scale of innovation, and how far ahead of the curve that solution is, is entirely up to the teams to decide. Some experiments are completed and delivered during the week, others extend into multiple hack weeks, while some more may be prioritized into our teams’ work backlogs for continued work during a release.

Hack Week provides multiple ways for participants to engage. Team members can self-assemble around their own creative ideas, or get involved in curated challenges proposed by our business partners. They can take advantage of various learning opportunities and workshops or collaborate in unique experiments with some of our partners in the technology world like AWS, Microsoft, Google and IBM. This ensures that there’s something for everyone, whether you’re an expert self-starter or a collaborator who excels at bringing out the best in others.

We’ve seen amazing engagement through Hack Week, with thousands of team members participating, resulting in over 1,700 experiments to date. Our teams have:

• Experimented with machine learning
• Built an installable browser that tests how websites look to people who have visual impairments
• Proposed new business models
• Explored how virtual reality (VR) can be used for team member training

Contributed to philanthropic technology efforts for the city of Detroit

I’m excited for another year of hack weeks, the creative solutions and the unexpected roads we’ll travel down. If you’re curious about Hack Week and joining our team, check out our career opportunities, and maybe I’ll see you at the next Hack Week!