Hackathon Innovation Ritual: How we grow our best ideas

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Tactical Guide: How to run a Hackathon in your company

FAQ

”We have one rule in our Hackathons: you're not allowed to ship“ - SSM

💡 Organizers: Update the FAQ to refer to your company and add the most frequently asked questions you are asked ahead of the Hackathon.

What’s a Hackathon?

Hackathons are 48-hour events where our employees form teams (typically 5-7 people) to work on innovative projects of their choosing. These projects are generally ‘moon shot’ ideas: they are intended to be adventurous and looking far into the future, not something to be shipped at the end of the week (or even in the same quarter or year).

Don't feel pigeon-holed into your specialty. If you're in a non-technical role and want to try out something technical (or vice versa), GO FOR IT! This is a chance to stretch boundaries.

Similarly, hackathon projects need not be technical changes, many great hackathon projects have been docs, mocks, and write-ups.

Interested in hearing Shishir talk about Hackathons at Coda? 👇👇👇

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What should I do before the Hackathon?

Review the

Hackathon Theme⁠

Suggest and vote on ideas in

Ideation⁠

Broken link⁠

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What does a Hackathon entail?

Adding ideas: Add your ideas in

Ideation⁠

as soon as you can, to ensure people have ample time to review and upvote them

Upvote ideas: Choose your favorites from the list (and maybe commit to pitching one or more) in

All Active Ideas⁠

and give them a like

Pitches: Each pitcher has 60 seconds to pitch their idea to the team

Forming teams: Join a team based on the project you find most interesting (doesn't have to be related to your role!)

Hacking: Join your team's Slack channel and determine the type of communication preferred to collaborate

Presentations: On Friday, each team gets 8 minutes to demo the work they've done.

The following Monday, teams that are interested will have the opportunity to present their work to investors and community champions.

Write-ups: Write an overview of your project, including key learnings and TL;DR

What if my idea has been explored before?

There's more than one way to solve the same problem! Three separate past hackathon projects looked at forms, each with a very different angle. The diversity of these explorations helped us later productize much of that thinking in Layouts.

If someone tells you your idea's been done before, don't let that stop you ー dig into the previous idea to see what was done before, and perhaps you have a novel approach or some ideas that can help develop a concept in a different way!

What’s the connection to the product roadmap?

The learnings and demos will likely influence how we plan work. But a big part of hackathons is creativity. And creativity often leads us down unpredictable paths. Most of the demos may not land on the product but they will have fulfilled a significant learning and will no doubt inform how we approach that area in the future.

Some ideas stretch our thinking on things Coda could do. Others go the other direction and take something we've already built or at least discussed but produce a very different take on it. We've found a lot of value from both approaches.

Your project idea may not be scheduled any time in the near future, but don't forget Controls, Gantt, Charts, the Scale format, Packs and many more of what we now consider core features started out as Hackathon ideas!

What’s the development model?

Given the short time constraint for the hackathon, we recommend working off a branch with no intention of merging into master. Per SSM:

“We have one rule in our Hackathons: you’re not allowed to ship"⁠

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We also recommend spinning up a public slack channel and arranging your desks close to each other (or opening a shared zoom) to foster collaboration.

Hackathons are not a time to start work which you intend to merge into master at the end. It is a time to hack on ideas you are excited about for the future, and show off a proof of concept to the team.

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