Why our hackathon is open to every function

Engineers love romanticizing the idea of disappearing into a cave and cutting themselves off from the world to build something great. Which sounds incredible until your calendar reminds you that your next free block of uninterrupted "cave time" is at least 3 years from now.

Day-to-day engineering is so constrained by customer requirements, deadlines, technical debt, etc that it leaves very little space to just tinker with an idea that isn't on the roadmap yet. This Friday, we are kicking off our latest #hackathon at Prodigal so people can explore possibilities while loosening those constraints.

And this isn't a vanity project where everyone builds a toy and goes back to their regular sprint on Monday. We've run multiple editions over the years, and some of those experiments have also made their way into production. ScoreGenie, our Agentic QA system, was one of last year's winning projects and is now an actively sold core product offering.

This year, we've gone one step further and opened it up to everyone across all functions because our customer-facing roles are often much closer to customer pain points. With AI tools drastically reducing the entry barrier to building prototypes, now even our non-engineering team members can build functional items through prompting. More importantly, this experience helps them break out of the static friction of using some of these AI tools and realise what is possible.

Above all, the value comes from learning how to take an idea all the way from idea→prototype→demo. And with the tight timeline there’s a healthy bias towards shipping something tangible rather than debating endlessly.

We've essentially given 90 people permission to ignore their job descriptions for a weekend. What could go wrong?