How to get the most out of a company hackathon

Goal

Start with defining a clear goal that you want to achieve with the hackathon. Is it improving team work, integrating new team members? Is it cross functional team building (customer success with product development for example)? Or do you have technical challenges that you want everyone to work on together? More than one goal is fine too of course, but having a clear picture what you want to achieve with a significant investment of company resources will help you with planning the hackathon and evaluating the results afterwards.

Theme

Once you have a clear goal try to pick a theme a that captures the essence of the hackathon in a fun way. It will probably be something that is not easily understood outside of your company, but anyone in your company should get it right away.

Team setup

Consider multi-department teams — hackathons are perfect opportunities to promote cross team cooperation (product & dev, customer success & dev etc). Two developers and one person from another team is my favorite setup.

Environment Setup

Make sure to create a (shared) environment where teams can safely experiment and build. The environment should be a ‘believable’ copy of the production environment. Deployment Pipeline: Configure a simple CI/CD pipeline that allows teams to quickly deploy their prototypes into a staging or sandbox environment. This could be as simple as a GitHub Actions pipeline that automatically deploys to a test server.

Note: IMO a company hackathon should demand that all teams must demo their product from a ‘hackathon sandbox’ deployment, ie not simply running from a local laptop!

Tooling and Resources

Decide on what (new) tools and resource are available and what can or cannot be brough from the outside. A hackathon can be a great way to try out new tech or help a broader group a people to get acquinted with new tools.

Ideally there is a setup that can be easily checked out that can be the basis for each team to get going.

Pre-Hackathon Training/Setup session

Assuming you created a proper environment, a one hour session the day before the hackathon where everyone can get their environment up and running and have any issues with it ironed out will save a lot of stress and time lost during the hackathon.

This is also a good time for the rules and the schedule to be shared.

Hackathon schedule

Sprint 1: The team define the scope of their project, create whatever form of mockup/functional design and describe how they are going to demo the final project. This is a shared document that will become part of the judging. At the end of this sprint every team will do a 5min presentation on what they are going to build, how they will demo it and their plan of attack.

Sprint 2: Build. Create a check-in point somewhere halfway were you check on progress with every team. It might be needed to adjust the original plan (reduce scope?) to make sure the team can still come up with a working demo at the end.

Sprint 3: The final round that is focused on deployability and the demo.

For a one day hackathon go with 2 hours for sprint 1, 5 hours for sprint 2 and 2 hours for the final round. And then demos!

Demo time

Every team should demo their solution and detail the ‘how’ of their solution. Make sure to have these sessions timed. 5 min demo 5 min ‘how’ max.

Judging and Awards

Judging Criteria: These should be shared in advance and should be related to both your goal and theme. Consider to have all teams (and company employees not on the teams) to be part of the judging by creating a simple form with a few questions like:

‘Consider to have every one in the hackathon and everyone attending the demos fill out a simple judging form for each project. Here’s a suggestion:

It should be really fun for each team to see the feedback afterwards. The feedback can also help guide the awards — but the awards can also be (partly) judged be a jury.

Prizes: Consider awarding prizes for categories like “Best Prompt Engineering,” “Most Creative Use of AI,” and “Best Production-Ready Solution.” They should probably related to your goals in some way and ideally the prizes would be align with the Theme as well. Be creative!

Post-Hackathon Debrief, Integration

Knowledge Sharing: After the hackathon, hold a debrief session to discuss what was learned Share best practices and consider creating internal documentation based on the hackathon experience.

Tip: record the sessions and let the AI help (Especially if you also record all the team presentations as well, you will be able to create some really good follow up documentation.)

Next Steps: Identify the most promising projects from the hackathon and create a plan to further develop and deploy them into production. And of course — set a date for the next hackathon!