Hackathon Innovation Ritual: How we grow our best ideas

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Tactical Guide: How to run a Hackathon in your company

This page explains the preparation needed for the Hackathon. The following pages help the organizers and participants through the different phases of the Hackathon.

How to use this document

Check out

this page⁠

on how to create a copy of this document, and how to use it!

Preparation Timelines

As early as possible

Block time in team’s calendar (see below for the meetings and durations we suggest) and announce the Hackathon

4 weeks+ ahead of time

Assemble the team of organizers. We use a team of 4 Hackathon organizers - ideally from different departments/teams - and ensure that at least one of the organizers has been part of the previous Hackathon to pass on the lessons learned.

Brainstorm and decide on the theme

And start organizing the schwag (it might relate to the theme, and you will need more time than you think for schwag)

Start communicating to everyone that Hackathon is approaching and explaining what Hackathon is (e.g. via email/slack announcements or during company-wide meetings)

2 weeks ahead of time

Make sure you adjust our template (this doc) to your organization’s specific needs

Hackathon week

See below

Optional: Organizers can hide the Pitching page and all subsequent pages and unhide it only as the Pitching, Team Formation etc phase approaches

After the Hackathon week

Thank the organizers and the participants. Congratulate the winning teams.

Nudge teams to share their demos/presentations/notes so they can be easily accessed in the future

Hackathon week

At Coda, a Hackathon is 2 days of Hacking Thu/Fri with a few meetings upfront to get organized. The event ends with internal demos. External demos are an optional component but we would recommend to leave that out for your first couple of Hackathons.

Event

Day

Meeting

Notes

Hackathon Intro

Fr before Hackathon

30 mins

Explain the Hackathon schedule, open the Ideation part of the Hackathon doc up for idea submission (share this document with every potential participant)

💡 Ideation

Monday

no meeting needed

No meetings needed. Throughout the day anyone submits ideas in the doc, marks ideas they like, and selects ideas they are willing to pitch on tuesday

🏏 Pitches

Tue morning

1 hr

People pitch ideas they are excited about

Team Formation

Tue/Wed

no meeting needed

Participants self-organize into teams with help from the Hackathon doc (Team formation section). We encourage teams to try and recruit aggressively who they need. Wed afternoon organizers reach out and help stragglers find a team.

🥾 Hacking Kickoff

Thu morning

30 min

Short kickoff meeting, resolve any open questions and then START HACKING!! Some teams will cheat by starting to hack before the kickoff - which is allowed under Rule #3)

👽 Hackathon

Thu

All day blocked for Hackathon, no other meetings the entire day

Teams are hacking. Organizers typically join a team and help hacking but need to spend some of their time checking in with teams if they run into difficulties etc

👽 Hackathon continued

Fri

Morning blocked for Hackathon, no other meetings the entire morning

Demos

Friday afternoon

2 hrs

Teams present their results. Everybody gives feedback to the teams. Optional: Everyone votes on the People’s Choice Awards

Optional: External demos

Monday following week

2 hrs

tbd

Closing

Some time in the week after

No meeting needed

Ensure teams link their demo and finish their summary for their project in the days after the Hackathon. Announce winners, send thank you emails and the takeaways from the event.

There are no rows in this table

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Phases of the Hackathon Explained

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Ideation⁠

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In the ideation phase ideas are generated and collected — typically many more ideas than can be worked on during the Hackathon. Participants read through the submitted ideas, like their favourites in the doc, and add their own. If someone is particularly interested in one idea, they should pitch them.

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Pitching⁠

Team Formation⁠

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This phases starts with a pitching meeting in which a subset of the generated ideas get pitched by whoever is interested in it. This narrows down the selection of ideas. After the pitching teams form around the pitched ideas. It is quite common that only a fraction of pitched ideas find a team and proceed.

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Hacking⁠

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The core of the Hackathon is the Hacking phase, where the teams work hard to build a great demo, in code, as mocks, or as presentation.

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Demos⁠

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The Hackathon week ends with all projects doing a demo.

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Reflection⁠

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In the hours and days after the demos are shown it is important to collect all the material from the different teams for future reference. We also have teams vote on the best demo and give each other feedback and kudos, strengthening the team building aspects of the Hackathon.

Feedback

Anyone else run hackathons in Coda? We would love to hear how you do it.

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