Blogg

Updated May 2, 2023: Overleaf Labs is currently not taking additional signups.

Introducing Overleaf Labs, a framework for experimentation and innovation in the space of collaborative writing and publishing. Overleaf Labs will allow innovative internal ideas to flourish and be explored, and also a way to work in collaboration with partners to conduct research on new ways of making the process of writing research papers and technical documents quicker and easier.

Most product teams see the value of product discovery but find it difficult to allocate resources to it, often ending up not doing discovery at all. In this post we show you how we integrated product discovery methods into our ways of working in three key steps. We also talk you through the benefits that we derived from this and how we used a discovery sprint to de-risk 3 ideas. Enjoy!

As a fully remote company, we have always looked for ways to keep people working together. One thing that works well for us is to run remote hackathons, where our engineers get together to work on something unusual. These have been successful enough that we have made them a quarterly event.

We have posted previously about our process on our first blog post about how we got this started and our one in October 2020. We’ve refined our process over this time, and I’d like to share some advice on what we’ve learned from running them successfully over a year and a half.

It’s been a year since our blog post on how we started doing remote hackathons. So many things have changed globally in the meantime, but it seems that our remote-first working practices have been our best resource during this unprecedented year.

During this time, we have done other remote hackathons; the last one, which we did just a few weeks ago, was particularly interesting for the variety of projects that came out. Here we want to share a few highlights.