01 — Opening hook
First week at the LEGO Group, I won the Partner Hackathon 2023 with a team I'd never met before 🏆 — 88 participants, including 10 designers, 59 engineers, and 10 product managers, tackling real partner challenges over 2 days offsite.
#JustImagine #BehindTheBricks #ComeAndPlay
02 — The challenge
As a designer embedded in the Partner space, the challenge was understanding a highly complex domain quickly, identifying where I could add the most value, and staying aligned across multiple teams moving in parallel.
03 — The hackathon solution
Our team proposed a unified API layer enabling real-time product asset tracking and audit across all B2B e-commerce touchpoints — one source of truth for every partner interaction. At Showtime, all 8 teams presented to a wider company audience, each chasing the B2B department's north star. It was a rare moment of cross-team visibility: ideas on the table, priorities openly discussed, alignment built in real time.
04 — The lasting impact
The APIs initiative had legs well beyond the event — it sparked ongoing conversations across the internal and external API ecosystem and evolved into a cross-organizational engineering initiative focused on developer experience and API infrastructure.
05 — My ongoing contribution
Together with my engineer teammate, I helped initiate a series of workshops across e-commerce and Partner departments to build an "API product portfolio" ecosystem — improving how we deliver multilingual content, pricing, and ads across partner channels. We established an ongoing API development process with internal teams to collect pain points, scope implementation, align with company goals, and prioritize within the 3-5 year strategy.
