Hack Days
Hack days are one of the great innovations in the tech community of the last few years. Wikipedia credits their development to my friend Chad, now with Etsy, and they exist in every corner of the world today.
Hack days bring together engineers from a range of backgrounds and encourage them to team up and create something interesting, functional, and entirely operational, within one day. No feature lists, no road maps - just completed and delivered output. Its a powerful mechanism to get teams focused on the absolute core functionality that a product must contain in order to serve a useful purpose.
I have seen lots of great tools come out of hack days, some of which have gone on to become fully-fledged companies. The live tube map above (showing the precise position of all London Underground trains as they pass around the system, in close to real time) is a classic example - simple and straightforward with a genuinely useful purpose.
If you zoom in on the map at the click-thru link, you can get pretty mesmerized watching the trains move around. Kind of like a digital train set.
