Top 5 tips for running a successful hackathon

For over two decades, hackathons have been used as a way for developers to come together to collaborate and solve a common problem or challenge. Becoming more commonplace in recent years, hackathons offer developers the chance to get out of a day-to-day routine, tackle a new challenge, and create just for the joy of it – offering an enticing opportunity to stay sharp and explore new skills. But hackathons not only benefit developers, they can also be a very useful tool for the companies that host them.  

More and more companies are using hackathons as a means of driving innovation, creating community, enhancing recruitment and even securing positive publicity. In fact, over 80% of Fortune 100 companies run hackathons for these very reasons.  

In recent years, Lenovo’s Cloud and Software (CSW) group has embraced hackathons as a way to provide Lenovo employees and partners with opportunities to collaborate across departments (and even time zones), learn new skills, and create without fear of failure. These events reinforce Lenovo’s culture of growth and innovation and encourage employees to consider how they can continually improve the customer experience, another core tenet of our business.  

One way we enable developers to accomplish this is through the use of Lenovo’s cloud developer platform. On it, developers can access a set of reusable core services so they can focus less time on routine infrastructure build and more time on innovation – enabling them to program applications faster and more efficiently. Considering the tight timeframes of a hackathon, this extra time to work on advanced and customized features can make all the difference when it comes to producing a product that exceeds customer expectations.  

Whatever the goal is, hosting a hackathon is not as simple as setting a date and sending out an email to solicit entries. As organizers of our annual CSW hackathons have learned, there are some important steps to ensuring a successful event. To help others who may be planning to host their own hackathon, our team has compiled five tips for running a successful event.  

1. Encourage Participants to Build Cross-Functional Teams 

Because hackathons are designed for developers, it’s easy to assume that other departments in the company don’t need to be involved. But to make the event a success, it’s important for participants to create cross-functional teams, especially in larger companies. 

To state it simply, cross-functional teams achieve better results, whether they’re organizing a hackathon or working on any other project. They’re more collaborative, more engaged, and more productive. Additionally, it’s a more enjoyable experience to work with people from different departments, drawing on the strengths of others and learning from their unique perspectives. 

When you bring in people from marketing, PR, HR, and other departments, you give the event volume. You’re able to draw on the thinking and experience of these individuals to find ways to get people excited about the event and bolster participation. Building such a team is a science in itself, but some key considerations include creating a team identity, prioritizing clear communication, and establishing a well-defined decision-making process. 

A good hackathon team will be able to center the event on the company’s larger goals and make sure it reflects the company culture. These are critical to ensuring that participants understand what the event is about, and that it helps to further the company’s mission. 

 2. Create a Brand Identity for the Event 

When done well, brands are memorable and instantly recognizable. They communicate volumes with just a few words, pictures, or symbols. It’s important to ensure that your hackathon event has a consistent and distinguishable brand identity.  

Lenovo’s second CSW hackathon adopted a new brand identity featuring a space and astronaut theme, and it made an incredible difference in the participation levels for the event. More importantly, it also gave the hackathon organizers a sense of focus and team comradery. Having a strong brand helped the organizers plan and execute elements that reinforced that brand allowing them to more effectively communicate across the company. 

3. Promote the Event in Creative Ways 

The key to any successful event is successfully getting the word out about it, which requires promoting it in creative ways. Whether it’s an internal or an external audience, people are constantly inundated with meetings and requests. The Lenovo hackathon team used every channel it could to reach its audience and encourage them to participate in the company-wide event. 

The foundational channel was an internal SharePoint site that contained the basic information about the hackathon. The organizers also set up a channel in Teams to allow people who signed up for the event to communicate with organizers and each other. Email, newsletters, and even posters were all used to build awareness for the event and drive people to the event website to learn more. 

Lenovo’s needs were unique, but that will be true of any organization. What works for one may not work for another, so it’s important that hackathon organizers consider all channels as a means of reaching their target audiences. 

4. Plan for a Diverse Audience 

For the Lenovo event, the audience was internal, but it was also global, spanning different time zones, cultures, and of course, languages.  

This presented a high degree of complexity because the team had to consider the audience’s varying needs. For example, they couldn’t send an email on a Friday morning and expect everyone in the company to receive it. Lenovo’s Beijing headquarters is 12 hours ahead of its Raleigh headquarters, meaning employees wouldn’t get the message until Monday. 

But, time zones were actually among the least of the concerns. Information needed to be translated and reviewed for all communications, meaning the organizers had to build in time for additional review cycles. 

Another point of diversity in our hackathon came in the technical background of participants. In 2022, we opened our hackathon event up to the entire company, regardless of function or programming ability. We wanted to hear from anyone who had an idea and we put the mechanisms in place to support those individuals with a programming team of developers to bring their vision to life. Having participants who weren’t familiar with coding language, however, meant that we had to be mindful of how we described aspects of the event, using plain language, so that everyone could understand and feel included.  

The point is that when planning a hackathon, organizers should take the diversity of their audience into account. If they inadvertently alienate large segments of the audience, the overall success of the event could suffer. 

 5. Implement Feedback Channels 

A hackathon is an effective way to put a company’s systems and products to the test. Lenovo uses its hackathon to promote our cloud developer platform to internal developers, demonstrating its ability to help them create innovative solutions quickly. 

The value in having so many people use the platform is to see how well it works and where improvements can be made. But that only works if there are processes to obtain useful feedback about the tool. The team also solicited feedback about the event itself. 

Hackathon organizers should consider how they will obtain feedback, and what information they are looking for during the planning stages. That will ensure they get the insights they need to make future hackathons better, as well as to improve how they serve their customers. 

Part of the Culture 

The 2022 Lenovo CSW Hackathon featured 114 teams from around the world, collaborating across departments to devise new ways to solve customer problems. The event yielded dozens of creative ideas, some of which could become fully-developed solutions in Lenovo’s portfolio. 

That kind of creativity only happens when it’s encouraged to happen. Developers participated in the event knowing that there was no consequence for failure. All they had to do was dream big and have a little fun with their colleagues. 

Eliminating that fear of failure is an important part of the culture at Lenovo, because it results in better ideas. If developers are worried about their solutions not working, they take the “safe” route. But taking fear out of the equation leads to bigger, better ideas. The hackathon helped to reinforce that culture at Lenovo.  

For any organization considering their own hackathon, the tips listed above can be helpful in ensuring a successful event. But having a culture that values creativity and innovation is the most important ingredient to a successful hackathon. 

Learn more about the 2022 Lenovo CSW Hackathon here.