What is a Hackathon? (And How We Run Them at Fellow)
This article describes what a hackathon is, how they usually work, and how running these events can benefit your company.
What is a hackathon?
A hackathon is a friendly tech competition with a relatively short duration, usually 24 hours, with the main idea being “Just do something cool!”. It’s a perfect opportunity to step out of your comfort zone and try something new. Hackathons give you the chance to work together with people from other teams, use new technologies, perform interesting experiments, and showcase your creativity.
The main goal is to implement a working prototype of a project which can be presented by the end of the event. It takes more than just programmers and designers to build an amazing company and in a similar vein, hackathons are made even more impactful when the entire company gets involved. Project managers can pitch their idea for the next big feature, marketing specialists can explore new and innovative promo campaigns, customer success teams can unearth valuable insights from users, etc. The possibilities are limitless!
Hackathon projects don’t have to be something that will become the part of the product and be released soon. The spirit of the hackathon is to experiment and research, not just work on day-to-day tasks more intensely. To illustrate, I’ll show some examples of my past hackathon projects in the next section.
Last, but not least, an important part of any hackathon is lots of pizza and coffee 😄.
What do people do at a hackathon?
At the beginning of the event, everybody is thinking, discussing, sharing ideas and forming teams. At Fellow, our hackathon teams can range from 1 to 4 people which feels like an ideal size for a 24 hour project.
Teams are free to discuss ideas, brainstorm, and plan beforehand but the main rule is — “no coding, designing, or starting on the project until the day of”. Everything should be implemented during the 24 hour hackathon time period.
In general the ideas are limited only by your creativity, but for internal company hackathons, the ideas should add some value to the base product or help improve internal workflows at the company. So while training a machine learning model on pictures of your cat to highlight them on your webcam video is a fun project, it may not be the best idea for this type of event. Don’t worry, everyone will still know that your cat is cute and awesome 😺.
In my personal experience at Fellow, I don’t work with the note editor all that often so the hackathon gave me a chance to learn about and work on a new part of the product. I implemented a small typeahead plugin to insert emojis into a note and the project eventually ended up going live in production! Now, you can type the colon symbol, start typing an emoji name, and you will get a list of relevant emojis:
Once the project is complete, next comes the most important part: presentations and voting. To keep things brief, each team is only given 10 minutes to present. They need to describe their project, highlight advantages, demonstrate functionality (in the case of a prototype), and explain the value to the company. Of course that’s just a generic presentation structure. A hackathon is a highly creative environment, so nobody minds if you make your presentation full of memes and puppies 🐶.
After all the presentations are complete, everybody casts their votes for the winning projects and prizes are awarded.
The benefits of participating in a hackathon
The most immediate benefit is the opportunity to have fun and choose what you want to work on. During hackathons, you aren’t solving business problems directly or working on routine tasks. You are working on something you find interesting and organizing your day and workflow based on how you want.
Hackathons are also a great environment to work on your soft skills. Participants can obtain new management skills such as delegating tasks, planning presentations, and writing more clearly. Since participants are usually working in smaller and unfamiliar teams, it’s also a good opportunity to improve communication skills while getting to know the different parts of the company.
The greatest benefit of all is the educational experience. You may try using new technologies, work on a new part of the product for the first time, or just challenge yourself to think really big. You might be wondering “Can I really do this in 24 hours? Should I narrow my idea?” but don’t be afraid to take a chance. Hackathons are a space for growth and experimentation so don’t let the fear of failure stop you from making the most of your experience.
Last, but not least, hackathons are a great way to bolster team camaraderie. At Fellow, one of our main company values is Fellowship. Our recurring hackathons help us realize our values and increase team cohesion.
Why managers and leaders should organize hackathons
Okay, it seems like hackathons are good time for employees since they get to dedicate 24 hours to fun and education, but how can they help business owners?
First of all, hackathons are a great source of new ideas and uncommon solutions. Usually, projects guided by senior management and new features are all planned by the same group of people. Hackathon projects are new ideas with basic implementations, and after some polishing, are ready to ship to production. Leaders often find themselves thinking, “That’s actually a great idea I never thought about that. Let’s ship it!”. At Fellow, almost half of all hackathon projects find their way into the product some time soon after the event!
Secondly, leaders should consider hackathons as a long term investment in their team. Dedicating two whole work days to a hackathon might sound like a poor use of time, but it will payback dividends in multiple ways. Hackathons help introduce new ideas and approaches, they increase collective knowledge of the codebase, and they foster a friendly team-building atmosphere within the company.
Finally, the unique combination of education and team-building experienced during a hackathon help prevent employee burnout and keep people engaged and fulfilled by their work.
Conclusion
For us at Fellow, hackathons have become an important part of the development workflow. Of course, they require some planning and organization like choosing the right time for the event to make sure core business operations aren’t negatively impacted. At some companies, it’s not always possible for everyone to stop what they’re doing to devote time to a hackathon. One solution would be to split the company and organize two events at different times, whatever needs to happen to make the hackathon a reality. The benefits become clear when more and more ideas that started off as simple “hacks” turn into business successes.
I hope this article will motivate you to organize hackathons at your company and embrace a culture of research and experimentation, which will help make your team more productive and lead to greater success for the business as a whole.
