Hack Days: Homecoming
Hackathons are pretty well-trodden tradition at technology companies, but Clover isn’t just a technology company. We have a growing clinical and insurance operation running a Medicare Advantage health plan, and we must serve our members day in and day out. There are no timeouts when people look to us to be their partners in care. So how can we “shut down” the company and hack? We do what Clover does best: we do something uniquely ours.
Hack Days at Clover happen twice a year, across all of our offices: San Francisco, Jersey City and San Antonio. We take two days out of our schedule to build wonderful, ambitious things. Then we spend a whole Friday presenting these hacks and celebrating everything. Oh, and we do it with as much involvement from teams through the business as possible. Some of the best hacks over the years have been done with member experience or clinical teams working directly with engineers, designers and product managers.
When you really think about, that’s what Clover is all about. These highly skilled disciplines coming together to build something fundamentally different. We hack at Clover because it’s fun to form completely new teams and build things without rules. You can imagine in a growing company, especially one split across two coasts with an office in the middle that you just can’t possibly meet everyone or work with every team. Hack Days allow us to set aside org structure and geography to build moonshots.
During our second Hack Days of 2017, we introduced a custom application to manage the whole process of hacking. In keeping with Hack Days tradition, no tests were written and deploys were not zero downtime. We started documenting teams, projects and ideas. Without really thinking about it, we built a time machine that shows the trajectory of Clover Health, from the bottom up. Hack Days are now one of the clearest pictures of what we’ve already built, and what changes in 6 months time (Hint: A LOT) between events.
One of the main reasons for Hack Days, and by far the one closest to my heart, is that we use the allotted time to eliminate risk to the business. Close enough is not good enough when it comes to someone’s healthcare and at Clover our members are our priority. Striving to meet the lofty requirement of providing the best possible care can often reduce one’s appetite for risk. That’s why when we hack, we don’t put anything into production. No exceptions. If it’s a great idea, you can be sure an industrious Product Manager will figure out how to get it onto a backlog — don’t worry about that. Freed from the concern of production ready quality, everyone can focus exclusively on taking huge “risks” to see if there’s merit behind them.
What we end up building during Hack Days reflects our shared mission. Everyone here has chosen this place because they want to improve lives. Every day Clover Nurses and Medical Assistants visit members directly in their homes using software written by Clover’s technology team. A winning hack from our most recent event in April 2018 focused on the Medical Assistant experience using the application. It was a such crowd pleaser it won the coveted Hackers Choice Award and Best Presentation as voted on by the entire company. However, not everything we build is Clinical. For example Clover sends a staggering amount of physical mail to members, physicians, labs, hospitals, etc., so someone built an application that could track every letter and made viewing or resending them as easy as pressing a link, and won the Hacker’s Choice.
Now that Hack Days are firmly a tradition at Clover, what’s next? Every subsequent event ratchets up the expected production value, while keeping the whimsy and aspirations of the very first. As we look forward to our next Hack Days in 2018 we want to start sharing the amazing ideas our people have with the rest of the world. We might even open source our tracking tool — but don’t count on tests!
If this sounds like the kind of environment you’re interested in, consider joining us! We’re hiring engineers for both our San Francisco and Jersey City offices, check out our careers page. Happy Hacking.
