Sift’s 2023 hackathon spotlights our “Start with the customer” company value
One of our core values at Sift is “Start with the customer”— meaning we always start with solving real-world customer problems. In the ever-changing world of technology, one thing remains constant: The customer is at the core of our business. We prioritize our “Start with the customer” value during every discussion because our success is intricately tied to the success of our customers.
Simplifying the customer experience is not just a strategic objective, but the core of Sift’s yearly hackathon. During the challenge, teams across departments and countries came together to streamline our development platform, monitoring services and onboarding processes to provide the best possible customer experience.
The entire organization came together, both cross-functionally and globally, to solve some of the most complex challenges our customers face. We hosted a week-long hackathon to bring our global workforce together and create teams that were mixed by business functions, geographic locations, and levels of experience. This year, we had twenty-five teams participate in the hackathon, with projects that spanned from identifying fraud trends, to simplifying ML training pipelines, to chatbots using Generative AI functionality. Of those twenty-five projects, three teams won the people’s choice and judge’s choice awards, with the first-place winner being selected by both voters and judges.
As pointed out by one of the past hackathon winners, Chirag Maheshwari: “A lot of ideas are at their inception during the hackathon and get built up if they look promising.” We had a number of projects that got released to production from Hackathon 2022. For instance, the release of scheduled console banners that helped with timely customer announcements. Moreover, the Dashboard for Product Health is widely used across engineering for root cause analysis of customer issues. Projects like customer business metric monitoring help us inform our customers of any unexpected changes in a timely manner. Our hackathon projects often wind up in our Sift portfolio, and are a great way to innovate cross-functionally. One strong example of this is our industry-leading Sift Console that many fraud operations teams use on a daily basis.
Each year, I continue to be impressed by the innovation that happens in just a week at Sift during the hackathon. Our teams continue to create software solutions to add to our portfolio, benefit our customers, and fuel the engine that powers Digital Trust & Safety. The organization truly comes together to innovate by keeping our customers at the core of problem solving. It’s a celebratory week that inspires the entire company and encourages creative thinking beyond conventional boundaries!
