Trada Works Together to Raise a "Barn" (Photo courtesy of Cindy)

Have you ever heard the term “hackathon”?  Odds are you haven’t, so I’ll explain: a hackathon is a software engineering team event typically involving the rapid, collaborative development of software.  Recently, at Trada we conducted our own hackathon, although being the refined and sophisticated team that we are we decided to expand on this theme of “hacking” software.  We involved the entire company in our development event. We called it a “barn raising” because like a good old fashioned barn raising, we brought together all able-bodied members of our corporate community (that’s all 16 of us) and, like craftsman, set out to build a lasting, valuable new feature for the Trada marketplace.  There was no “hacking” here.

Let me tell you a little about the “barn” that we raised…

To run efficiently, the Trada marketplace requires a robust community of paid search experts (we call them optimizers).  The diversity and both breadth and depth of skills of this community are critical to the success of the marketplace.  Campaigns need creative thinkers who can come up with unique keywords and compelling ad copy – all priced optimally – to meet advertiser’s goals.  We want to provide incentives to Optimizers to do their best work and to recognize them when they excel (and when they do not). We also recognize that recognition occurs in many forms. So, with these principles in mind, our main focus of the barn raising event was the development of basic Optimizer Profiles.  Within the Trada marketplace optimizers would be able to expand on their personal profiles by sharing their skills and interests.  Their profiles would include performance statistics (e.g., keywords with clicks, conversions) and an inventory of achievements in the marketplace.  Our initial plan was to make all optimizer profiles public, allowing optimizers to complete their personal information if they chose but requiring the display of their performance statistics and achievements.

Building this functionality is only part of the barn-raising event.  In addition to the typical software requirements gathering, user interface design work, coding and testing that is fundamental to software development, we also considered all cross-functional impacts of this new capability.  There would be marketing and sales tasks to coordinate.  We would want to publicize the new capability in blog posts.  We’d need to communicate with our advertisers and optimizers about the new functionality and explain how it can be used.  We also want to begin the process of exploring how to expand on the functionality by seeking direct feedback from our end users – both advertisers and optimizers.  All of these activities – in addition to the development of the feature – were part of our barn raising.

We set out to do all of this work, including the complete development and testing of the new functionality, in a single day.  We made great progress, but it took a few extra man-hours to complete the development work and another half day to fully test optimizer profiles.  Our hope is that optimizer profiles will encourage optimizers to focus on improving their performance (since it is now quite public).  We expect optimizers to enjoy the pursuit of recognition for their achievements.  And we plan to evolve and enhance this functionality based on the feedback we get from our users.

One of the goals of this modest project was to get everyone at Trada to work together solving the same problem.  We specifically tried to mix up our roles and get as much cross functional experience as possible.  For example, I worked with Anna Sawyer (@annafsawyer) on how the new capability impacts our website strategy and on the creation of related blog posts.  We had account managers helping define software requirements and sales people helping author communications to optimizers and advertisers.  This was a fantastic team building experience.

The barn raising was a big success.  We developed important new functionality, completed all cross functional deliverables related to the new functionality and had a blast while doing it.  And we all got the chance to step out of our traditional roles and experiment with different tasks – all while working more closely with people whom we don’t interact with as much on a normal day. It was an excellent experience, and we’re certain to do it again.