I liked that you mentioned that everyone had to contribute and no one got a "hall pass" to do real work, but I often need to manage our customer requests and it's difficult to say "I can't help you for 1-3 days because we're focusing on team building".
We do one of these quarterly and I'm trying to think how I can avoid being the worst hackweek teammate ever next time around. Maybe it is saying that we'll have limited availability for 1-3 days to some customers.
One benefit of doing a hackathon around the holidays is that support volume is generally way down as well (at least in an enterprise software world). That being said, one of our internal company values is (bear with me for the impending cliche) "customer first", and that's a golden rule for the team, so if something major comes up that would indeed take precedence. For minor things, it's not crazy to adjust the SLA. Some companies adjust support SLAs for all-company meetings, conferences, offsites, and so on.
I liked that you mentioned that everyone had to contribute and no one got a "hall pass" to do real work, but I often need to manage our customer requests and it's difficult to say "I can't help you for 1-3 days because we're focusing on team building".
We do one of these quarterly and I'm trying to think how I can avoid being the worst hackweek teammate ever next time around. Maybe it is saying that we'll have limited availability for 1-3 days to some customers.