How not to win a hackathon and build a great product at the same time? (Part 2)

4 min readNov 27, 2018

I woke up the following morning and still wanted to do it. Thankfully, my soon-to-be teammates were with me on this. So, the first step was to apply …and we needed a team name for that. Eventually, we came up with

Techila Sunrise (by Logiscool)

You get the pun, ha? Success is guaranteed! Or at least that is what we have thought at that time…

Ádám, the lead developer (who is the product owner, too) was the only one of us who had any experience in hackathons and startup competitions. So, we trusted him, as we usually do. He is a smart guy. And it has been clear for us that we depend on his skills A LOT!

Some days later they announced the challenges. As this was a coding hackathon, our destiny mostly depended on the team’s coding skills.

What were our preferences?

If we knew anything about image processing algorithms we might have crafted something great for the cause of fighting against cancer… but we didn’t.
If we wanted to make the world a better place by creating a beautiful visualisation for international money transfers… it would have been great, but we didn’t really click with the topic.
If we wanted to solve theoretical mathematical problems for the biggest Hungarian banking network… we had to have a team of mathematicians only.

Finally, we chose the future of communication. It was love at first sight. No. But we thought that this subject had enough room to come up with creative and fun solutions. Which we did, eventually.

A bit about the team. Now, there are two guys who are experts in their field, but not very sociable. And three girls, two of them kind of talkative and with BA backgrounds, plus me (I am an introvert, too).

Would our team work? Could developers and liberal art people understand each other? How would someone be a useful part of the team on a coding hackathon who doesn’t know anything about coding? What are 48 hours enough for? …these were just some of our concerns.

In my experience, creating a great product doesn’t only depend on coding skills. Frankly, you can be an awesome developer, but if no one is interested in your product or no one can use it, it’s kind of useless.

Therefore, I decided to facilitate a design thinking workshop for these amazing people. Previously, I participated in several workshops using this method and read a lot of articles but never organized one by myself. Boy, I was anxious.

For short, design thinking is a product design method that focuses on the human needs. The main idea is that at first you only know the problem, but not the solution. Your brain will come up with several solutions, but you have to put those away. You will get to the best possible one eventually, through several stages.

*https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/design-thinking*

Now, as a first step, there must be a real life problem that all of us could relate to (=emphasize).

So, I chose topic of having lunch in the office.

You might think it was not of a big deal, but for the end of the one-hour workshop we’ve had paper-prototypes and pitches of two awesome mobile app concepts:

The first one is for vegan people who like to cook at home and bring their food to the office: a service that sends you the perfectly measured and hand-picked ingredients which you can cook at home and bring your own food to the office. This way you would be perfectly sure that there are no allergenic materials or anything of animal origin.
The other app would solve the problem that some elderly people are facing nowadays: they would hire the grandmas to cook meals, and the grandpas to deliver the food. All these would work in a tinderish way, you could choose your preferred granny to cook for you. This way you would have tasty homemade meal for cheap and these people would have the chance to amend their pension and feel useful.

In my opinion these are fantastic ideas! I am not sure about the feasibility though, but it hasn’t been the purpose of this workshop. Anyway, as their first encounter with this method they came up with marvelous plans that none us wouldn’t have thought at the beginning!

The other income is that apparently the workshop has been great from team building point of view, too.

Everything seemed to be in its place…. until the big day came.

To be continued…

Part 1: https://medium.com/@saroltatrk/how-not-to-win-a-hackathon-and-build-a-great-product-at-the-same-time-part-1-834c2fc6e7fe

How not to win a hackathon and build a great product at the same time? (Part 2)

Written by Sarolta Török