ShipIt Days

Where 20% Time was highly decentralized, ShipIt Days were centrally coordinated by Price and his team. The company would set aside two days every quarter to host ShipIt Days in each local office, with the winning teams participating in a company-wide contest to determine the ultimate champion. Price explained how ShipIt Days were key to fostering a culture of innovation at Atlassian:

Rome wasn’t built in a day. But that’s the time it takes for some of Atlassian’s greatest innovations, product features, and workplace enhancements to come to life.

Every quarter, we run a 24-hour hackathon called ShipIt where we drop everything to make something awesome. It embodies our culture of innovation and puts weight behind a sacred company value: “Be the change you seek.”

For many companies, innovation is something that is talked about, but focused on technical teams. At ShipIt, people from every department form ad-hoc teams to pitch in on the push for innovation—from Engineering and Design, to Legal and Finance. And it’s exciting! We pull long hours for the thrill of chasing an idea and collaborating with people that we don’t work with on a daily basis. ShipIt builds camaraderie across the company, and injects creativity into our products, operations, and processes.

Many employees here at Atlassian describe ShipIt as “24 hours of opportunity.” Atlassians at every level participate, from last week’s hires to senior executives and CEOs. And we’re all given the same challenge: drop our day-to-day work to identify and solve problems. Projects can be technical or non-technical, of any shape and size, applicable to small teams, or to the entire company.

We purposefully have few rules, so that we have the freedom to dig in and create whatever we wish. Past initiatives include identifying ethically sourced clothing for the Atlassian Foundation; creating expat guides for newly transferred Atlassians; and countless enhancements to the popular services we offer our customers including JIRA, HipChat, and Confluence. Even one of the fastest-growing products in Atlassian’s history, JIRA Service Desk, was born out of ShipIt not too long ago.

While the principles behind ShipIt have remained the same since the beginning, the scale has changed significantly. Our first ShipIt included 14 developers in one location. ShipIt 33 will be our biggest yet, spanning eight offices with 300 teams composed of more than 1,000 Atlassians. It kicks off this Thursday in Sydney and ends Friday in San Francisco. And this time, we’re flying the finalists from each office to Sydney for the first ever in-person global finals.

We don’t know what slick new features, full-blown products, and everyday hacks will come out of ShipIt 33. But we know they’ll improve the company, the customer experience, and ultimately the world around us. The opportunity to be crowned winner amongst your peers—in a company of innovators—is not taken lightly around here.

Dominic Price

http://blogs.atlassian.com/2015/12/atlassians-shipit-hackathon-for-technical-and-non-technical-teams/

**Shipment Orders**

All ShipIt Day ideas began as shipment orders, which were posted around the office for employees to read.

Atlassian's ShipIt Days were time set aside for all Atlassians to work on whatever they wanted to improve the company's products, physical spaces, operations, or culture. Price tended to run ShipIt Days with a fairly open format where employees could do whatever they wanted as long as the work somehow related to Atlassian's products.

The Value of ShipIt Days

In a blog post on ShipIt Day best practices, Masioli explained some of the key values created by hosting ShipIt Days and outlined several recommendations for companies looking to host their own hackathons:

Employees were empowered to fix the problems that they knew existed in their organizations but never found the time to address.
Many ShipIt projects aimed to scratch an itch: to fix that problem that had been around forever and never got fixed because "nobody had the time right now." Not only that, but empowering employees to fix the problems that they saw as valuable said a great deal about trust and how much management valued the people that their organization had hired.
ShipIt was bottom-up research for companies.
Instead of picking a select few people to perform R&D operations for a company over a long time in the hope that they would generate something useful, Atlassian gave that power to everybody in the company for a much shorter time.
ShipIt broke down the silos in an organization—it got everybody talking to each other across teams.
In many large companies, a common complaint is that different parts of the organization simply don't talk to each other. A ShipIt flipped that paradigm on its head. In a ShipIt project, there were many people with goals that often stretched across multiple facets of the organization. Projects like that required communication with whichever people could help get the job done. In a ShipIt, everybody came together to ignore company boundaries and just get the job done.
ShipIt builds community.
In a ShipIt, many of the everyday procedural bottlenecks in a company were broken down, and everybody talked directly to the people they needed to talk to. All chains of command were ignored and, instead, people swarmed on projects. Management, development, QA, support, marketing, sales and more: everybody forgot their titles for one day. Instead, they all joined a project and just got the job done. The collaboration created social connections that proved useful and fun for years to come. Above all, ShipIt built community.

ShipIt Day Ideas

Think back to the question posed at the beginning of the case—which types of innovations were ShipIt Days most likely to create? Were they more likely to create incremental product improvements, or disruptive innovations that transformed the company and shifted the trajectory of the firm?

ShipIt Days

Dom's Blog Post

The thought behind ShipIt Days

ShipIt Day Ideas