We're sitting here in our fabulous offices in Guadalajara prepping for our first ShipIt event (well, almost all of us. Laurie is stuck in Phoenix since she got bumped off her overbooked connection and won't get here until tomorrow.) It's getting pretty exciting! We are overbooked and now have 45 people signed up, so there's definitely a buzz about it.
Each of the teams has picked out a project that they think will improve their product or their team's productivity. They have come up with some great ideas for what they want to work on, so we're psyched about how the day will go.
At the end of the 24 hours, everyone will be judging the winners, using poker chips. One $500 chip, 4 $100 chips and 2 $50 chips for each of the participants, while management and senior management get $2000 or $3000 in chips respectively. The projects will be judged on a set of criteria:
- Does it provide value?
- Is it practical?
- Easy to understand?
- Delight to use?
- Potential downstream add-ons?
- Can it be built (productized) quickly?
And of course, we'll be having fun on the way, with great food for the event! Thursday afternoon, everyone will need to turn in their projects, and then they'll have 2 hours to prep their presentations because they will only have 3 minutes to present everything they have done. As usual, we have a slew of fun prizes for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd place teams. In addition, management can bestow a chip giving the team additional time at work to finish their ideas! We're really excited to see what comes out of the day--some of these projects look amazing!