Hackathon in the company: how to do it and why to participate in it

    Initially, hackathons appeared as independent competitions in the development community, but today they are often satisfied with many IT companies, not only for invited developers, but also for their own employees.

    We want to share the experience we recently gained by arranging an “internal” hackathon for 70 people in the Wrike team. For the company, its benefits are obvious - an additional opportunity to unlock the potential of employees and break in the most viable business ideas. However, the question was no less important - what are the benefits of participating in a corporate hackathon for the employees themselves. You can often hear a skeptical point of view that such a hackathon is a way to get highly paid specialists to work for free after hours.

    Therefore, we decided to seriously consider how to make this competition interesting and useful for the participants and came to five conclusions.


    Role-playing games


    One of the most interesting opportunities that a hackathon gives is to try yourself in a different role and use skills that are not applied in daily work. For example, so that developers can better understand how the process of thinking through new functionality is built, only those who are not in ordinary life could play the role of product project-overs. In addition, when working on prototypes, sometimes it was necessary to use languages ​​that the participants did not work on a daily basis. For example, backend developers were very inspired to create a prototype Android application. Testers also took pleasure in writing code. But, of course, in difficult cases, participants could consult with colleagues specializing in a particular technology.

    Business as a condition for victory


    As a rule, developers more often solve technical problems than they think over the impact of their work on the market and company business. The conditions of the hackathon were designed so that the teams could feel like the founders of a startup and evaluate, among other things, the business value of their idea. The evaluation criteria for projects included the ability of the prototype to have a critical impact on the sales funnel in our market. To guarantee the fairness of the assessment, the hackathon jury included top managers with extensive experience in launching products and market promotion.

    Do for yourself


    Wrike do in Wrike . I mean, we use our own service in working on it, so we know firsthand what it is especially good at and what can be improved. For employees who lacked one or another opportunity, the hackathon gave an excellent chance to promote their idea, translate it into a prototype and, ultimately, achieve its release (three ideas are already in the works). Before the start of the hackathon, we created an idea bank where everyone could add his own, and teams could use any of the ideas left in the bank. Thanks to such a brainstorming, any employee could share his thoughts, even without taking part in the hackathon.

    Look from the other side


    Several hackathon projects have been created using the Wrike API. So the developers got the opportunity to check the convenience of working with it in terms of potential integrations. This allowed developers to identify things that are invisible in everyday work and optimize the API.

    Healthy excitement


    Probably the most attractive part of the hackathon is the excitement of competition, when teams are ready to sacrifice sleep and rest for a day to realize their idea. It is very difficult to recreate the same level of involvement and motivation in daily work in the company, so this was a useful shake-up for both employees and management.

    Of course, almost no one takes part in the hackathon for the prize, but a good promotion becomes an additional incentive and a way to emphasize the importance of hackathon projects for the company. Reflecting on the award, we determined two conditions for ourselves.

    • At cost, it should be approximately equivalent to the cost of time spent on projects so that no one has a sense of injustice.
    • It should be something professionally interesting, ideally - something that a person would not do for himself.

    As a result, we stopped on a trip for the five winning teams to Dublin, where one of the Wrike offices is located. It turned out such a business trip, where the winners could meet with colleagues from another city and spend their free time in Ireland.

    And of course, we are very interested in the experience of conducting hackathons in other companies, so if you have one, welcome to comment!

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