A Look into Our Innovation Jam and Hackathon Events
At Synchronoss, innovation is at the heart of everything we do. It drives our products, enhances our services, and shapes the future of our company. To foster this spirit of creativity and innovation, we organize two flagship employee events: Innovation Jam and Hackathon. These events are more than just internal competitions; they are platforms that bring our team together, push the boundaries of technology, and turn great ideas into reality.
Innovation Jam: Where Ideas Take Flight
Our Innovation Jam is designed to bring Synchronoss employees together across the business, fostering teamwork and collaboration to explore innovative ideas that enhance our products, services, and processes. This event provides an exciting opportunity for employees to come together, brainstorm new ideas, propose potential features, suggest process improvements, and identify savings opportunities.
A panel of external judges from leading telecom and technology companies provide an objective evaluation of the ideas, ensuring that the best and most feasible innovations rise to the top. One of the standout successes from a previous Innovation Jam was the integration of a winning idea into our Verizon Cloud product. As a result, Verizon Cloud 23.3 included the “Smart Scan” functionality in the Private Folder section of the app. Another innovation was the addition of Spotlight into our Personal Cloud 24.4, which provides targeted tips and information needed for users to navigate the app successfully and unlock all the benefits. These new features are testaments to the power of employee collaboration.
This year’s Innovation Jam, scheduled for September 27, features a common track of themes centered on subscriber growth, AI utilization, and cost-to-serve improvements. This approach will enable us to prioritize what truly matters: generating high-impact ideas that can drive growth and efficiency.
Hackathon: Turning Ideas into Reality
While Innovation Jam is all about ideation, Synchronoss’ Hackathon is where these ideas are brought to life. Hackathon is a ‘codefest’ – a high-energy event where software engineers, architects, and domain experts come together to build new functional prototypes in a short amount of time. With clear requirements provided for what to create, the development and testing environments to use, and what to submit, teams work on a common set of challenges, racing against the clock to develop innovative solutions.
Our most recent Hackathon, held in June 2024, was a resounding success. Themed around “Virality,” teams focused on developing features that could rapidly engage users and spread across platforms. The ideas that emerged—Mobile App Widgets, Sharing, and Stickers—were not only creative but also showed significant potential for quick deployment to customers. The success criteria were clear: the user experience, innovative solutions, technical implementation, and the realizable business value of working code.
The level of participation, engagement, and intensity exceeded our expectations. The quality and completeness of the code developed was outstanding, with many implementations showing strong potential for integration into our product lineup. In fact, the Hackathon was so successful that we have developed a playbook to help us organize future events even more efficiently.
What’s Next?
The Product Management (PdM) team is now conducting “deep-dives” on ideas from the Hackathon to prioritize those that can be fast-tracked into our product roadmap. Our goal is to bring these innovations to market as quickly as possible, ensuring that customers benefit from the latest and greatest features.
As we look forward to the next Innovation Jam and future Hackathons, we remain committed to fostering a culture of innovation at Synchronoss. These events are not just about competition; they are about collaboration, creativity, and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. We can’t wait to see what our talented teams come up with next!
