Building Scheduled Campaigns | Squarespace Hack Week

My favorite thing about Hack Week is that you can try the craziest idea you have and see how it succeeds or fails, and either way, it's probably going to be entertaining.

A lot of the engineers choose to, choose to work on things that are actually Squarespace features, new parts of the product. Nobody tells them that, you know, the only rules for Hack Week are work on something, Come and present it to us on Friday. So when you see those teams presenting together on Friday, that's— those are my favorite days of the year.

We always knew that scheduling for a specific date in advance was kind of a table stakes feature for email marketing campaigns, and that it was on our roadmap to do. We just didn't really have concrete plans to do it. For Hack Week, I was kind of looking at things that were on our future roadmap and just trying to think what would be interesting to work on during that time and see how far I could get. And scheduled campaigns, I thought, was an interesting idea. So I just went for it.

We'd been thinking about the scheduled campaigns feature basically since we started building email campaigns, but we hadn't worked out the mechanics of how the user interactions were going to happen, how a user would schedule their campaign, and how that campaign would actually get sent out. And a lot of those questions got answered during Hack Week. There would have been less excitement for this feature, and it would have gone out slower without the Hack Week project.

The first time that I knew that this was something they not only thought of working on but actually put together was the Friday demos. The excitement after that, I remember talking to Natalie, and She was like, you know, did you see that? And then the next steps are, okay, well, let's see how real it is. How far are we from actually shipping it?

Once people see it, you know, you get a lot of people's eyes light up. You get product managers seeing how valuable something can be in a demo, and then they start asking when this is actually gonna happen, and then that encourages teams to actually put those things on their roadmaps.

What Hack Week got us with scheduled campaigns was really that last 20% that typically ends up being 80% of the work. was the thing that got flushed out in, in Hack Week, and that was immensely valuable because that last 20% can very easily turn into 80% of the work.