Every, a small media company, boosts product innovation with special five-day hackathons called “Think Week” held twice a year. Teams made of writers, engineers, and leaders quickly turn hidden ideas into real products. Subscribers watch live demos and vote for the best ideas, and the winners get built right away. Even the bosses join in, coding and fixing bugs. This teamwork has led to fast, useful inventions and a growing list of tips on what does and doesn’t work.
How does Every accelerate product innovation using institutional memory?
Every accelerates product innovation by hosting biannual five-day “Think Week” hackathons, where cross-functional teams transform undocumented knowledge into shippable products. Subscribers join live demos to vote, with high-scoring features fast-tracked for development, resulting in a significantly higher production rate than traditional hackathons.
Every, the boutique media company behind Cora and Spiral, turns institutional memory into a weekend sport. Twice a year the entire outfit – writers, designers, engineers and the C-suite – decamps for a five-day internal hackathon branded “Think Week.” The goal is to harvest the undocumented tricks that usually live in Slack DMs, Figma comments and the heads of senior engineers, then package them into shippable products before Monday stand-up.
The recipe is deliberately tight: participants form trios that must include at least one non-technical member, pick a problem that has annoyed them in the past month, and finish with a three-minute demo broadcast live to paying subscribers. Subscribers vote in real time, and any feature that scores above 4.2/5 is fast-tracked into the next sprint. In the last cycle, 38 % of hacks reached production within ten working days, compared with an 11 % conversion rate at traditional two-day corporate hackathons tracked by DeveloperWeek 2024.
Leadership does more than spectate. Co-founder Dan Shipper writes production-ready code alongside interns, while CEO Nathan Baschez fields bug reports from the demo chat. The approach has yielded practical wins: an AI wrapper that turns meeting transcripts into Jira tickets (now used by 62 % of the subscriber base) and Spiral’s motion-capture keyboard, both born during Think Weeks.
Customer participation is the twist that textbooks rarely mention. Every mails a private Zoom link to 2,000 core subscribers the morning of demos, turning feedback into a kind of live beta program. Projects that bomb in front of users are archived in an internal wiki along with the reasons why, creating a searchable catalogue of “what not to build” that new hires still consult six quarters later.
Every media company Think Week hackathon product innovation institutional memory
