Rocking on with Roktathon

Here at Rokt, we consider ourselves a team of curious explorers. We strive to challenge ourselves every day and to create the spaces where we can make things happen. We dare to fail because that’s where progress is really made. These are the qualities that helped us to come up with one of our four core values: Conquering New Frontiers.

The Roktathon (Rokt + hackathon- get it?) has become an integral aspect in embodying this important value. It provides our team the opportunity to cross-functionally collaborate and innovate on solutions that can be within or outside the scope of our day-to-day responsibilities. We encourage our team to look at solutions that impact our core business, whether that be a new feature, fixing a technical bug, creating a new process or just improving our offices.

Our 2nd Roktathon took place during our most recent quarterly company get together at our Sydney office. At the end of each quarter, one of our two biggest regions host a week-long gathering of the local offices and new hires. Our Q2 end of quarter included our team in APAC – Singapore, Japan, Sydney, Melbourne and New Zealand and our 24 new hires from all of our global offices.

These are the qualities that helped us to come up with one of our four core values: Conquering New Frontiers.

Like any good competition, strict ground rules were laid out:

1) Each team had 24 hours to build out their solutions

2) Solutions must add tangible value to the company (i.e. no coffee bots)

3) Presentation decks must be completed by the specified deadline

4) All groups must give their presentation in 3 mins with an additional 2 mins solely for Q+A

So what did 80 working minds across 18 teams come up with? Some inventive names… Crtl Alt Elite, The Eyes Have It and Obsessively Humble Ride Conquerors (a clever nod to all of our Rokt values) and even more innovative solutions. Teams presented on new product offerings, expanding the scope of our technological capabilities for our clients and ways to make Rokt an even better place to work at.

APAC clearly brought their A game as the stakes were quite high: the winning ideas would be considered for further company investment to develop them into real life solutions. And of course unofficial lifetime bragging rights.

The competition yielded four winning teams comprised of members spanning across multiple departments. The winning idea included a Rokt Personal assistant that would integrate with our communication channels so users can gain valuable insight from the Rokt platform and also a ‘recognizer’ technology which would identify the probabilistic and deterministic methods of identifying consumers.

It was an impressive day for our APAC teams, churning out some great ideas in only 24 hours. Now imagine what we can do with years worth of time…

Want to see what it takes to become a Rokt’star? Check out our careers page.