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Recently, Convivans from around the globe came together for our 2024 Conviva Hackathon – a celebration of innovation, creativity, and customer-focused problem-solving. This year, participating teams gathered to design new ways to enhance the Conviva Operational Data Platform and deliver value with greater speed, ease, and efficiency.
Spanning our three global research and development offices in Foster City, Beijing, and Bangalore, teams gathered to solve a variety of challenges. Projects ranged from streamlining the data integration process using AI and enhanced Large Language Models (LLMs) for improved platform efficiency to highlighting the revenue implications of user-impacting quality of experience issues.
This is a beloved annual tradition, drawing participants from Product, Engineering, Customer Success, and Marketing teams. In total, 39 teams spent 4 days ideating; building proofs of concept; and creating demos, videos, and posters to summarize their ideas.
The hackathon culminated in a series of concept pitches where teams presented their ideas to peers from across the company. These sessions provided an opportunity for employees to ask questions about each project and for all attendees to engage in the culture of innovation that sets Conviva apart.
Fueling Big Ideas: Conviva’s Commitment to a Culture of Innovation
Conviva’s foundational roots in Carnegie Mellon University’s technology labs underline its legacy of innovation, from groundbreaking technological advancements to initiatives for fostering creativity like the annual hackathon. The hackathon exemplifies Conviva’s core values of “Curiosity & Desire to Learn” and “Eagerness to Understand & Solve Customer Problems,” encouraging employees across departments to step back from daily routines, challenge norms, and develop bold, innovative solutions for pressing issues.
“Hackathons can provide great inspiration for the future of Conviva,” said Mingli Deng, Product Manager at Conviva and Hackathon Organizer. “It was amazing to see how skillfully everyone combined Conviva’s opportunities with cutting-edge technology. The energy during the pitches, along with the intense discussions and rapid idea iteration, was remarkable.”
That innovative mindset continues far beyond the hackathon. Some of the most impactful enhancements around Digital Experience Monitoring to the Conviva platform were born from past hackathons, and our engineering team is already implementing several of the 2024 projects. Stay tuned for more details!
The Top Prize-Winning Project: Spotlight on Streamlining Integration & Accelerating Proofs of Concept
Team Aha including the following participants:
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- Chenchen Ma, Sr. Data Scientist
- Jingyuan Zhang, Sr. Software Engineer
- Qichu Gong, Sr. Staff Engineer
- Yongnan Song, Frontend Engineer
- Zhinan Zou, Sr. Engineer
Their project, titled “Upgrade to Conviva with No Integration,” focused on reducing friction during the proof-of-concept (POC) process. By leveraging existing SDKs and data, the team created a solution to quickly experience the power of the Conviva Operational Data Platform without the need for additional integration.
We sat down with the winning team to get their insights on why they chose to address this challenge and how they see the hackathon playing a role in the continued development of the Conviva platform.
What inspired your team to tackle this specific challenge, and how did you approach the problem-solving process during the hackathon?
At Conviva, putting the customer first drives everything we do. Building on our platform’s Experience-Centric Operations (ECO) value proposition, we recognized a key challenge: while prospective customers are eager to experience our platform, asking them to integrate a new SDK can slow down proof of value. So, we created a solution that leverages prospects’ existing SDKs and data, allowing them to access real-time quality of experience insights with minimal effort. The result was a gateway that acts as a “welcoming door,” seamlessly accepting existing data sources and unlocking real-time, actionable metrics.
How does participating in this hackathon and working on this project make you feel about being a part of Conviva’s culture of innovation?
Our project engaged nearly all core components of our Platform. This required an end-to-end view of the system, and addressing the technical challenges required us both to delve deep into our expertise and to leverage the wisdom of our peers in other teams for creating an intricate data flow.Their support was invaluable, providing valuable context and helping us identify and fix issues in the debugging environment. This collaboration showcased Conviva’s culture of innovation and teamwork, for which we are deeply grateful.
How do you see your project impacting Conviva’s technology direction, and what would be your next steps if given more time to develop it?
Our project aims to reduce the time-to-value from days to hours, enabling faster feedback, iteration, and product enhancement. By simplifying and accelerating the onboarding process, we’re not only empowering Conviva’s sales and marketing teams to operate more efficiently but also positioning Conviva as a leader in delivering real-time insights across industries.
As for the next step, we believe there’s more potential to unlock. Conviva is an Operational Data Platform (ODP), meaning we can ingest and provide value over any type of operational data and help our customers tie data-driven insights from diverse datasets into tangible experience-centric business outcomes. While our focus for this project was on ecommerce, we see enormous opportunities across industries and use cases, like healthcare, finance, and social media.
Looking Ahead
As the 2024 Conviva Hackathon wraps up, we extend our gratitude to all the participants, judges, and attendees who brought this event to life. Your creativity, collaboration, and energy were the driving forces behind its success. We’re already looking ahead to future opportunities to foster innovation and celebrate the ingenuity of our incredible team.
“Innovation is in Conviva’s DNA and our innovative mindset drives Conviva forward across our daily collaborations”, said Hui Zhang, Chairman and CTO of Conviva. “Even so, our 2024 Hackathon is a really special event that showcases our team’s creativity in adopting cutting edge technologies like LLM/GenAI and Time-State Analytics to solve the hardest problems of real-time operational analytics”.
Here’s to another year of bold ideas, innovative thinking, and groundbreaking solutions!
