In 2022, when my team won an invitation for lunch after a long hard day of work, I had come to my employer's office in Munich to work with my current team for the first time. Well, I had been to the office before, but the company was quasi-remote-only since the pandemic, and we all prefer to work from home. So we decided to meet for a special event: the company-wide “ship it day”.
Several times a year, we get to work a project with 100% concentration for one day only. We made a really nice prototype and scribbled together a presentation that got us the first place in the internal competition. However, the best was still to come: Almost a year, my team got the opportunity to work on the feature for real and bring it to production and our customers, the digital subscribers of Süddeutsche Zeitung.
On the ship it day, we wanted to challenge ourselves and developed a plan to make it possible for subscribers to send non-free articles to friends and family without a subscription: The article-gift feature. I am really excited, that now, the feature is live! We published a story describing our process and some challenges on the way on our medium blog, so if you are interested in learning more, see here: How we took the article-gifting feature from hackathon to live.
Thanks to my colleagues Julia Kandler, Felix Ebert and Sandra Hartung. It was so much fun!