How to combine the role of a developer and a team captain?

What is Urban.Tech Mosow?

Hello everybody! I will tell you a little about the UTM 2019 hackathon. It will be a long story, but I promise you will be interested!

Urban Tech Moscow is the largest international hackathon and accelerator to develop new digital services and products for the urban environment, necessary for Moscow and its residents. This event was attended by absolutely everyone, people from all different industries and countries - IT specialists, designers, marketers, analysts, project managers and those who are already doing their business. Specialists from other countries, such as: Kazakhstan, the Czech Republic, Israel, Belarus, Latvia and Armenia, also did not leave this event unattended. The main prize is 10'000'000 RUB. Each direction included two tasks, and having solved one of them, you could get 1'000'000 RUB. Description tasks here: Urban.Tech Moscow tasks

In this hackathon, I was the team captain "DoITNow" and developer of the market for cloud programs and startup applications based on expert evaluations.

That is for solving the problem you can get a prize of the mayor of Moscow

Also, each participant was given a warm sweater and a beautiful backpack

There were enough backpacks for everyone, though for team members who worked through the Internet, backpacks did not give out

Also issued notebooks, pens and brochures from Kaspersky:

There was also the opportunity to talk with experts about our solution and improve it. There were representatives of #Kaspersky, #Mail, #SberCloud, #VTB and others experts.

For example, Kaspersky’s stand:

For example, here is the stand for SberCloud, which we had constantly, since Marketplace experts were from there:

Since the hackathon lasted 60 hours, there was a big clock in the main hall counting down every minute:

There was also a cafe with a variety of delicious food, beginning with coffee, tea, cookies, croissants to kebabs with chicken and a variety of salads and such tasty things:

The hackathon took place on the place of a previously built museum, therefore, for example, the name of one of the floors is the name of the Romanovs:

The sleeping places were in a place that looked like a large maze, which we called the mausoleum for sleeping. There was a dim light, and it was very long, and one could walk on it, as in a maze, choosing a mattress with a warm blanket and pillow. For example, I do not really like mattresses and I make a bed of a large number of poufs and drown in them, wrapped in a blanket so that no one can find me in the morning. The room in the picture below already has portraits of Putin and Medvedev, so a very elite room:

How to combine the role of a developer and a team captain?

In this article I want to talk about how I tried to combine the role of the developer and the captain of my team "DoITNow" at the hackathon UTM2019, which took place from November 29 to December 2 in Moscow. To begin with, I’m a developer, and by stereotypes it’s not my nature to have good soft skills, but this time I decided to break stereotypes and create my own team to participate in the hackathon. I was already familiar with some members of the team at previous hackathons, but the main goal was to assemble a team with common goals and necessary competencies and participate in a new hackathon.

The first thing I did was write to each potential participant and find out whether he was interested in it and whether he would have time for it. Everyone I wrote to was interesting to go and demonstrate my skills in a team. After that, I gathered them all together - I just created a conference in VK. Through these manipulations, I recognized the needs and gathered the right people in one place, I only planned to be a backend developer, so I took a UX / UI designer whom we accidentally met when we went to the last hackathon, then I took a person who combined three roles: marketer, business analyst and CEO optimization and novice frontend developer. At first it was necessary to understand what we needed to do, so I delegated this to a person who is engaged in business analysis and is a marketer. Then, on the basis of the information received, he proposed to arrange brainstorming and phoned. After the joint brainstorming, everyone had a rough idea of what to do, then I designed a sample user flows for how the application should work and sent it.

After these actions, it was clear to everyone what needs to be done, but it was necessary to understand where to start and delegate responsibility, as each competence says. I didn’t do this and nobody did it, the hackathon was already close, but nobody did anything, because someone had work or other things, but most importantly, nobody set specific tasks. I tried to do everything alone and the backend and frontend and time passed. Later I realized that it was necessary to delegate tasks to each participant, but at that time I did not realize this. Then I gave the task to the designer, but he didn’t do it completely because of the work. It is necessary to indicate all the data of the team members and shoot a video with our idea to solve the problem.

The last day for filing applications for participation came, but it was quiet in our chat, I decided to remind everyone that some of the participants didn’t want to go, but as a result I filled in the application for participation as a captain and shot a video with our solution, although it was unusual for me. As a result, we all went to the hackathon together and there I already delegated tasks to each participant and we worked together, each fulfilling its role. And I performed not only the role of the developer, but also solved the tasks of interaction between team members and the distribution of tasks between them, since some team members worked through the Internet and had to solve some organizational issues related to the hackathon.

As a result, I presented and talked about our decision to the experts, and delegated questions of the business part to my teammate, while we thought through critical questions in advance that each of us would answer. As a result, we performed quite worthily, although we did not win, as there were solutions that the experts liked more. But I got a lot of experience in managing a team, establishing interaction between team members, delegating tasks and fulfilling my role as a developer! The main moral is that you need to stop thinking that you will do everything yourself, but you need to learn how to delegate responsibility and tasks. Good luck to everyone and cool hackathons!