How to organize a remote hackathon
At Mobimeo, we see innovation and creativity as key ingredients in a recipe for success. Recently, we put these intentions into practice with a fully-remote hackathon. If you ever want to set up something similar and look for inspiration, here are our four things to consider when preparing and running a remote hackathon.
Tap into creativity from diverse sources.
To make the hackathon a success, preparation is everything. Make sure to get everyone on board and to include all ideas.
In preparation for our hackathon, everyone was welcome to pitch their ideas, regardless of experience level or technical background. Since one of the goals of the hackathon was to foster innovation and creativity, team members from all product and engineering teams were encouraged to submit topics. Any and all topics related to our vision, A world of greener cities and effortless mobility, were welcome. About a week before the hackathon, topics began to take shape: first within a collective spreadsheet and later in a lively pitch meeting.
Adjust the format to the participants, not the other way around.
Idea pitches are crucial, but ideally it shouldn’t come down to one meeting. Finding flexible ways to make sure that all those who are interested in joining have a chance to participate is key. This means that participants should have a way to get familiar with the collected ideas, even if they are not able to take part in the pitch meeting.
That’s why we decided to take an async approach to pitching and forming teams. At any time, folks could check out the current ideas on a collective spreadsheet, pose questions, volunteer to join, and vote for ideas. The pitching process was rounded out in a group call. One of the highlights was a pre-recorded pitch that involved both an inspiring problem statement and dazzling visual effects!
Over the next few days, teams began to form. Eventually, we settled on a whopping eleven different ideas to be worked on over the course of the hackathon! Topics were as diverse as our teams, and tackled problems such as: automating and simplifying internal processes, measuring and deciphering our carbon footprint, and incorporating new features into our mobility platform.
Folks, who wanted to participate but were unable to join a team, were encouraged to join the judges panel for the Day 2 presentation and awards ceremony.
Plan enough, but not too much.
Finally, Day 1 of the hackathon has arrived. Now, all the preparation work is done and it’s up to the teams to make the best out of their ideas. But before you jump into work, here is one last recommendation: Give the teams a transparent timeline, so that they know on every step of the way how much time they have left and what they need to present when.
We started Day 1 with a kickoff meeting to both generate enthusiasm and align expectations for the showcase presentation. Following the kickoff, teams had two days of completely self-organized work. The only criteria was that they should finish by Day 2 showcase.
How this worked in practice differed from team to team. Since hackathon teams were made up of engineers, designers, and product specialists from different domains, they also brought different levels of understanding to the feature, which the team was aiming to implement. In this situation, separate “onboarding” meetings were needed to get everyone up to speed.
Since we’ve been working remotely for some time now, we already had many tools at our disposal to foster collaboration. It was not necessary to add any additional tools for the purpose of the hackathon, and teams were able to choose what worked best for them.
In addition to bringing their topics to life, teams also created clever presentations to compete for one of three top prizes.
Celebrate!
The final component of a hackathon is the presentation and awards ceremony. We’d wager that a remote setting yields some advantages for this event, such as: allowing teams to discover new ways to make their presentations lively and interactive, shifting easily between multiple presenters, and incorporating multiple locations without leaving out folks who are not “in the room.”
After two days of bringing their ideas to life, all departments came together to celebrate the accomplishments of the eleven hackathon teams. Each team had a chance to present their solutions, which were judged based on: innovation, completeness, and presentation.
For Mobimeo Product and Engineering teams, our first fully-remote hackathon was a success. We had fun. We worked with colleagues outside of our domain. We challenged ourselves to deliver in a short amount of time. Afterwards, we implemented some of the projects into our daily work as internal tools, which is even more than we had expected! We hope that this post gives you some inspiration on how you can do this too, and provides a glimpse into how we work at Mobimeo.
