Sprint Week Unleashes Creativity and Innovation at SugarCRM

Every year, SugarCRM hosts a hackathon known as "Sprint Week," an entire week in which members of Product and Engineering teams set aside their daily tasks to dive into a world of creativity and exploration. This dedicated week encourages our teams to learn new technologies, enhance our products, and come up with the wildest features they can imagine. At Sprint Week, imagination is the only limit. 

To be clear, not everything built during sprint week becomes a shippable solution that is included in the Sugar product. Sprint Week gives the opportunity to our teams to research and prototype technology they are not used to and they're curious about. Discovery is the true goal. 

But many Sprint Week innovations do become part of Sugar product, for example, Dark Mode, Focus Drawers, and Sidebar Navigation were first pitched and demoed in our previous Sprint Weeks, as well as other behind-the-scenes infrastructure solutions used internally that improves our operations and therefore customer experience. 

A Week for Hacking

Sprint Week kicks off with a 30-minute session to pump everyone up for the week ahead. Each team is given about 3 minutes to pitch their projects to the attendees. It’s an exciting time when we get to know the team members and more importantly, the project names, believe me, people are very creative when it comes to their project names. 

After the kick-off, teams have the whole week to work on their projects. As they go, Sugar and its partners provide full support for them to complete their projects, including sandboxes, paid licenses, training, and collaboration between teams and experts in the area. A special thanks to AWS for providing an office hours channel, which they kept open to support us throughout this hackathon. 

This year, we had 42 awesome projects pitched and presented, spanning various categories: 

UI/UX Concepts:

• Subpanels Drilldown 
• Copy & Paste Related Records 
• ROI Calculator for Sugar Market 
• Subscribe for Record Notifications 
• Formula Builder and Decoder Using AI  

Security Improvements:

• Applying AI to Detect Security Vulnerabilities  
• Application Security Orchestration and Correlation (ASOC) - A Security Aggregator Tool for Managers (SIM)  

Integrations:

• Zoom/Teams Integration into Connect Scheduler 
• SugarCRM GO (Carplay Integration) 
• Smart Question Answering in the Customer Portal Using AI 
• CSV Importer 

Code/Architecture Enhancements:

• AI-Powered Search That Understands Your Needs 
• Automation of Hotfixes in the Cloud 

How about those project names? 

• C12H22O11 
• Old men yells 
• Bugnik 
• Sweet Potatoes 
• CrystalBall Crew 

Sneak peek at UI/UX Concepts

Now, let's delve into some of the UI/UX concepts we picked out of Sprint Week. It's important to keep in mind that what you're about to see was built in five days. 

Formula Builder

This project is aimed at end-users who need to understand how their data is calculated in a readable format easy to understand. 

A dedicated Formula assistant provides the user with an easy way of describing what the formula should do in plain text and AI will create the formula for you. 

Formula decoder gives you the ability to interpret a complex Sugar formula and translate that into plain understandable text. 

Formula Builder adds a button to decode the formula for each “calculated field” in any screen so end-users can understand where and how that info has been generated. 

Copy/Paste related records

This project introduces copy/paste of related records to improve end-users' experience while relating records between modules. 

Select the list of records the user wants to relate to another record and paste it at their convenience.  

Confetti Buttons

How about introducing some gamification to your ActionButtons? Imagine your sales rep has closed a massive deal for your company, you can celebrate with them when they close that Opp. 

Wrapping up 

Due to some strategic partnerships and projects that I've been working on, I could not participate this year, but I was there sneaking a peak all over the place trying to learn here and there. 

Overall, Generative AI took over the hackathon! Our teams were "hungry" to learn and apply it to their projects and I believe they accomplished that. GenAI takes "let the platform do the work" to another level.  

I managed to set some time aside to watch most of the demo sessions and see all of these brilliant people coming together to build so much in such a short period of time; it amazes me to my core. Those who attended might have thought the demos were screenshots or PowerPoint presentations but no, teams were challenged to present live working demos with code interacting with AI models! Live!  

I'm really looking forward to seeing which of these 42 amazing projects will make their way into our final product. The future is bright, innovation has no bounds, and it’s clear that our products team takes the mission statement of “Let the platform do the work” to heart.