Graham McNicoll

One of the things we tell a lot of our customers is that it's the number of at-bats that will ultimately lead to your success as an experimentation-driven company. Hack weeks tie into that, because it encourages your team to think creatively, and you increase your chances of one of them being a really big, really cool idea. Typically when we see pushback against hack weeks, it's because teams already have things prioritized and don't want to take a week off. And if you multiply the week by the number of engineers, or product people, or the whole company, it can get very expensive. So it's pretty nerve-wracking to assign that kind of time. But I think you'll be really surprised by the value you get out of it. Not just the actual features built in the hack week, but the ongoing culture of saying yes to projects, and knowing you can ship things really fast when you want to.