Portfolio: Gift Card Marketplace
In roughly September 2018, our CTO at Zip decided to run an internal Hackathon where Zipsters could form teams and work together to build a product or enhancement to an existing Zip product.
All together approximately 14 teams participated, including ours - Team Gifted.
I pulled the team together a few weeks before the Hackathon. The idea that I pitched to my team members was to begin selling gift cards from the Zip Stores page - where consumers could use their Zip account balance to buy them.
I managed to get 4 others to join our team (a product designer and three engineers).
The hackathon went for roughly 36 hours, during which our team architected a scalable solution that could plug and play multiple gift card aggregation platforms in to it, designed the user experience, came up with an omni-channel marketing strategy including social, developed a commercial model, built out a pitch deck, developed a functional MVP and then pitched the MVP to the entire Zip business.
After much deliberation from the judges, it was announced that we (with our gift card project) had placed third amongst the 14 teams. A couple of weeks later, we were informed that the MVP that we had built for the hackathon would get more resourcing and would go on to be published as a consumer-facing product to the Zip consumer base. Only one other project from the Hackathon also got resourcing for a roll-out to the Zip base, but that one never made it to a full-scale roll-out.
The gift card project, however - did. And it has gone on to be amongst our top channels of revenue for the Zip business.