‍What is a Hero Hackathon?

A hackathon is where a group of Hero Teams developers who wouldn’t normally work with each other, come together for two days to focus their creativity and knowledge to tackle real-life opportunities or challenges for clients.

Without the constraints of budgets or legacy systems, the team is free to look at products, features or technologies with fresh eyes and imagine new ways to create value - generating concepts that often translate into live solutions.

“Hackathons have been a great way of getting our teams to collaborate with those they don’t typically work with day to day, helping them to think outside the box. Our clients (and us!) have been amazed at what is produced in such a short amount of time, often asking ‘how quickly we can get these into production?’” 

- Stephen Hammond, Chief Operating Officer , Hero Teams

What are the benefits of a hackathon?

As well as generating practical, innovative and production-ready solutions, Hackathons provide a whole host of other benefits to our teams, too: 

• Bringing different people together and making them step outside their comfort zones can be very empowering and is great for team collaboration and cooperation.  
• Opportunities to meet new people, experiment with new technology and explore new models, and it always promotes a bit of friendly competition in the battle of ideas. 
• It’s a great way to discover new languages, test frameworks and implement ideas, as well as look at solutions from the perspective of other people in different roles. 
• Above all, it provides a two-day escape from routine projects and is a chance to have some fun, share experiences and build team morale.  

So, how do they work?

Before the event, we work with our clients to set a topic area that will bring value to their business and clients. A couple of days before the hackathon starts, a theme and agenda will be developed and shared with the randomly allocated teams. 

Day 1: We kick off with a company-wide welcome followed by a team brainstorming where ideas and timings are agreed. Then the teams will move on to brainstorming, coding and prototyping. 

Day 2: The teams finalise their Proof of Concepts (POCs), create pitch presentations and showcase their working mockups to each other. The client is also invited to the teams’ presentations and, of course, they participate in voting for the winner. 

Accelerating innovation and sharing skills

Hero hackathons always generate a lot of creative prototypes and ideas. While some can be ‘out there’, many have the potential to be developed into live features with a little polishing. 

For example, in a past hackathon a client was having major headaches integrating their evolving range of products and microservices that had grown complex over time. 

By using an application programming interface (API) management tool, one of our teams built a working prototype that was able to aggregate the various services into a simple unified interface that significantly reduced integration hassles and management time. 

For over a decade, we’ve partnered with software development teams to scale up their skills and transform ideas into results. To explore how we can help your business, please get in touch.