For three days, Shift pauses (almost) everything.
No roadmap pressure or “is this realistic?” conversations slowing things down. Just one goal: build something that makes Shift better.
That’s hack week.
Hack week has been part of Shift since 2015. What started as a smaller, developer-focused experiment has grown into something much bigger. Eleven years in, it’s now a company-wide reset, a moment where everyone steps away from their day-to-day work and leans into curiosity instead.
This year was different.
Every year there is a different theme for hack week and this year the theme was AI. AI lowered the barrier to building and a new term “vibe coding” was coined. Suddenly, it wasn’t just engineers shipping ideas. Marketing, customer support, and product teams were all building too, jumping in and figuring things out as they went. All of Shift participated.
Curious of what hack week looks like from the POV of a Shiftie? Check out Kris’ vlog below to get a glimpse of what it looks like on the inside.
A glimpse at what came out of it
We’re keeping most of the projects under wraps, but what stood out was the range.
Some teams explored new ways to make the browser more accessible. Others focused inward, building tools to speed up how we test, ship, or make decisions. A few pushed into more experimental territory, exploring ideas that might shape where Shift goes next. Ideas different from anything else we’ve ever created or thought was possible.
All of it moved things forward.
Three days of momentum
Day two is usually where the cracks show.
What sounded simple on day one gets complicated fast. Things don’t work the way you expected. Some teams realize halfway through they’re building the wrong thing and pivot entirely.
People start trading ideas, debugging things together, or jumping into problems they weren’t originally part of. It’s less about ownership and more about getting something to work.
By day three, it turns into a bit of a push to get something demo-able. Enough to show what you were trying to do and where it could go.
Demo day
You don’t know what the other teams have been working on, but the one thing you can always count on is that demo day will always be fun and slightly unhinged.
You never really know what you’re going to get. One team might show up with a full skit and an outfit change (one year, a Shiftie showed up in a full chef’s outfit. Shout out to Reed). Another might drop a highly edited video packed with perfectly timed memes (you know who you are). It’s one of the few moments where people can get as creative as they want with how they present. “Is this too weird?” is a question where the answer will always be “no”.
And honestly, pulling off a great presentation is its own skill.
At the end, everyone votes for the most applicable, most creative, best idea, and best presentation. The winners get their name added to the hack week trophy, an oversized thumbs-up that has become a bit of a legend internally (see trophy in the image above).
Our values, in action
Hack week isn’t just about the output, it’s a reflection of Shift’s four values.
You see people step into unfamiliar territory and build things they’ve never built before. That’s ‘do hard things’.
You see cross-team collaboration happen naturally. That’s ‘go together’.
You see the care people bring to what they’re building. That’s ‘make it awesome’.
And you feel the support across the team, the willingness to help and build alongside each other. That’s ‘go with heart’.
Why it matters
Not everything from hack week makes it into the product, and that’s never been the point.
What matters is what it unlocks. New ways of thinking, confidence in building, and ideas that wouldn’t exist otherwise. It creates space to explore without over-filtering and reminds us that Shift is something we actively shape together.
Eleven years in, hack week continues to grow.
More people, more ideas, more ambition. The details change, but the core stays the same. A few days to step back, think bigger, and build freely alongside a team that cares deeply about what they’re creating.
Can’t wait for what we build next year.
