At Ozone, we've always believed the best ideas come from those moments when different disciplines, different perspectives, and different problems meet in the same room. Labs Live is a structured attempt to make things happen faster, and more deliberately.
Next week, we're running a full Labs Live session. While it’s not our first outing of the concept we are using this internal session to interrogate and set what the future framework could look like. And it will be big – we're bringing together teams from product, engineering, and data in the UK, Ethiopia, and Poland. Normally, these are the people who lead, run and participate in our hackathons, typically fast-moving, technically heavy hacks designed to ship product at pace. This time we’ll be bringing others into the fold.
For this session, ‘stakeholder’ colleagues from across the rest of the business – Sales, Marketing, Publisher Services, Finance – step into the role that, in a real-world Labs Live, would be played by our advertiser or publisher partners. They are bringing the problems, not necessarily technical problems, but everyday ones. That could be a workflow that doesn't scale. A question that keeps coming up in client meetings. A gap between what we know and what we can currently show. This is where it gets interesting and where we can create immediate impact.
We have five strategic themes we're working across: audience activation and measurement, efficiency gains, agentic infrastructure, data licensing, and bidstream monetisation. While these might sound like engineering priorities, the actual challenges that sit beneath them are often far more human. The outputs will be about making things faster, clearer, and more useful for the people trying to do their jobs.
What this session gives us is a chance to test the Labs Live model before we open it up fully to external partners. Can we bridge the gap between highly technical teams and non-technical problem-owners? Can we create enough structure to move quickly without losing the messiness that good ideas need? Can we get from a blank wall of challenges to working prototypes in a day or two?
We're expecting around twenty projects to be explored across the session. If three to four of those are strong enough to productise, we'll consider that a success. But honestly, even the ones that don't make it will teach us something about where the real problems are, and how we might tackle them differently.
Labs Live isn't a replacement for the deep technical hackathons we already run. It's a new layer to a format designed to bring the weight of our engineering and data capability to bear on problems that come from every corner of the business. And eventually, every corner of our partners' businesses too.
That's the experiment. We'll let you know how it goes.