We recently organized a Hackathon at Sirdab. The idea was to shake things up and explore AI for fun and profit. The event itself was super fun and it produced some impressive projects.

But it's what happened afterwards that was more interesting.

More than a week later, people in and outside engineering seem more upbeat, energetic, and driven to innovate. Some have continued experimenting with promising ideas, and some even pushed useful pet projects to production or tried new tools to improve our day to day. Not one of them asked for a whiff of a permission to do so, and I absolutely loved it.

I believe this can be explained by how everything a company or its leadership does or says has the secondary effect of reinforcing expectations and norms.

The hackathon guidelines were:

• Work on whatever you want (implicitly communicated norm: we trust your judgment)
• With whoever you want (self-organize to get the job done)
• Skip your standard day job during the hackathon. Move your meetings and calls. Do a few hours if that's all you can spare (you really don't need that much time to conduct a fruitful experiment)
• Everyone is expected to participate (we genuinely believe everyone has something awesome to contribute)
• Anyone who hacks must present their work to the company at the end-of-event presentations (look at how smart & awesome your coworkers are!)
• There will be awards (pretty please, be a try hard)

And so a week onwards, I either still see this in people's behavior (e.g: someone randomly decided to push a chatbot to production that's been generating some pretty good qualified leads for the sales team) or in how many people have, unprompted, referenced how energized they felt by the hackathon and how they want to keep trying new ideas. The event materially impacted people's vibe and mindset for the better.

I guess I knew this on some level because every company I worked at had hackathons[1]. But it's been long enough since I'd done one that I feel like I'm relearning that one of the biggest benefits of a regular hackathon lies outside the actual projects produced during the event. It's about the hackathon mindset: that every person in the company is not only able, but expected to spot problems, find opportunities, and innovate. That trusting yourself and taking risks is often a great way to make an impact. That each individual can add their unique stamp on the company by making their ideas come alive. And that the true Hackathon isn't about some time-bound event; it's about a mindset.

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🦶📝

[1] A previous employer of mine, LiveRamp, was initially conceived as a hackweek project in another company called Rapleaf. It's now a public company $RAMP with hundreds of millions in revenue and a few thousand employees. It sort of sets a high bar.