An exclusive look inside Karbon’s first ‘shipathon’

Karbon has just finalized a sprint that’s very different from our usual product development process: this time, the entire company’s joined in.

We call the event a ‘shipathon’—a collaborative event where the entire Karbon team works together to build products and features for our customers. It’s like a hackathon, but instead of spending two days building prototypes, we committed to a full, three-week sprint and delivered functional features.

Redirecting part of everyone’s focus away from their day-to-day jobs for three weeks is a big investment and it’s one that isn’t taken lightly. We’ve put a lot of thought into designing the shipathon, ensuring the experience builds camaraderie, gives non-product teams insight into the product development process, and delights our customers at the end of it all.

Arming product teams with new skill sets

One reason for the shipathon is to allow Karbonites to collaborate with new team members. With so many of us working remotely or from home, it’s a chance for people to build networks outside of existing teams.

We already employ cross-functional product teams at Karbon that bring together different skill sets within the broader product development department. But for the shipathon, we added skills from other parts of the business into the mix.

This means that our existing product teams had some extra team members for the length of the shipathon—everyone from Marketing to HR to Customer Support (and everything in between). These non-product folks add breadth to our usual mix of product managers, engineers, and designers. At the same time, they get to understand more about how we build software at Karbon.

Amelia, Product Manager at Karbon, was the captain of the team that delivered the 'Later' feature for Triage items

Each team had a captain who acted as the guiding light for the team. The captain was responsible for making sure all team members were involved and driving toward the same common goal. Our team captains are not necessarily engineers—in fact, most of them aren’t!