
We just wrapped up the 7th hackathon since our founding and continuing with our third annual use of the week-long format. A hackathon is an opportunity to unlock the creativity and innovative spirit of our global team. Team members have the opportunity to take a week to collaborate, be creative, and build a product or feature that could one day reach Members. Several popular Peloton features started or were inspired by hackathon projects including: Auto-Resistance, 3rd Party Treadmill Metrics, target metrics for our Members during rides, the Peloton Guide, QR Code Log-in feature, and the Peloton Android Widget.
This year, we had 55 completed projects from 198 hackers, representing teams across Product, Emerging Business, Engineering, Legal, Instructors and other groups across the company. Many of these hackers pushed themselves to learn something new working outside of their core job / skill set. The excitement during the week is contagious, in part coming from members of competing teams and organizational boundaries helping each other achieve the best possible outcomes.
Over the course of the week we saw collaboration and hacks across our global footprint, including team members from Taiwan, Woodville, NYC, Plano, and Remote.
While the hackathon is about allowing the team the space to be creative and learn, we have found some friendly competition adds a fun element. During the hackathon week, team members have the opportunity to spend three and a half days building their hack. Some team members maximize that time by working through the night. Then all completed projects run through our people’s choice judging round where we leverage a pairwise comparison model and tooling initially open sourced from hack-mit. During our People’s choice judging round we had 8,648 votes cast by 285 individuals assisting with the People’s choice judging process.
The top five projects from that People’s choice judging round then proceed to a shark tank style session where those teams pitch and demo their hacks, while fielding questions from the Lead Team.

While it is fun to see what comes out on top of the friendly competition, the most exciting part is seeing how energized the team leaves and what ends up in the hands of our millions of Peloton members.
Want to see more? Check this out this video!