How to Maximize Impact from Your Hackathon

At Microsoft, we just had our 6th annual Hackathon, the largest private hackathon in the world.  It topped last year’s Hackathon by a nice margin.  Since hackathons are in the air, here’s the first piece of a series addressing a major concern, ensuring that you get the results you’re looking for.

If you want to get the most from a hackathon, this post is for you.  Since I’ve been on the organizing side of many, great and small, here’s my perspective on setting up your event for impact.

However, if you’re looking for advice on planning logistics, you won’t find that here.  Others have written plenty about how to organize and run these events.  Instead, let’s begin with a solid foundation, taking a design thinking or first principles approach.

Before planning anything else–like picking the date, booking the room, ordering the food–ask yourself the fundamental questions:  Why do you want to have a Hackathon?  What do you hope to get out of the Hackathon?  It’s going back to Covey’s second habit: Begin with the end in mind.

Doing this will help you avoid the most common frustration with hackathons: so many ideas dressed up with nowhere to go.

So, why do you want to run a Hackathon?

People tend to have one or more of these five objectives:

1. To have a morale event
2. To show that you’re listening to your people or practicing innovation techniques
3. To develop your people
4. To change your culture
5. To have business value

See the flow chart below for the cheat sheet on what to do in each case.  These are not mutually exclusive and often work better together.

Morale Events

If you’re looking for a morale event, something more fun than go-carts or a happy hour, you’re in luck.  This is a great way to get the people on your team engaged with things that they’re excited about, want to learn, or have been on the back-burner for a long time.  A Hackathon can boost morale.  And if people work on things close enough to home, those projects can often go somewhere, too.  Pick a different venue, have good food and drinks (often much cheaper than other morale events), and ensure somebody is watching.

Appearances

If you’re doing this to show your team you’re listening or show the outside world you’re into the hacking thing, that’s relatively easy, too.  Note though, this is commonly known as innovation theatre.  Just be aware when you do this, it can boomerang back on you.  People may get frustrated if nothing comes out of your hackathon.  However, if this is your only goal, go ahead and run a great event, and then publicize the heck out of having done it to maximize your credit.  You may incidentally get some longer-term value, too, that you can capture and talk about.  When it comes to appearances, long-term value looks even better.

People Development

If you’re looking to develop your people, to get them thinking and acting differently, then you need to really empower them to take the time off and keep encouraging them to act differently, then take this back to their day jobs.  Repeat this often!  Though, they will get frustrated if others aren’t developing and their organization isn’t changing. For this, you need to also focus on changing the culture.

Culture Change

If you’re looking for culture change, now things get to be a lot harder.  This is an ambitious and worthwhile goal, and really this is where hackathons can excel.  This is especially true when you pair it with other activities like culture clubs, cultural activation internal marketing and PR, amenities around creation, changes to recruiting and internal feedback.  All of the usual culture change stuff.  That’s out of scope for this post, but I’ll cover it elsewhere on this site.  This is what I call working on the SOIL. (Read How to Unlock Your Innovation Growth with Fruits, Trees, and Soil for more on this.)

I encourage all programs to start here.  Though eventually, you’ll also need to focus on business value, otherwise you’ll erode the cultural change work. 

Business Value

Hackathons that address the twin goals of culture change + business value are my favorites. To ensure the best business value, you need to create different pathways for different types of projects such as products, social good, and internal culture and processes.

The next post will focus on how to set up these pathways.

Leave a Little for Others

If you find this useful, want to learn more, or have something to share, please leave your comments. We’re all in this together.