Hackathon use case guide
This guide provides strategic use cases and inspiration for running internal hackathons that align with common business goals and organizational needs.
How to use this guide
You can use these use cases to drive participation, select a theme, and get buy-in from leadership.
- For Planning: Use the "Recommended Organizer Team" column to identify which departments might be best suited to own a hackathon targeting a specific problem.
- For Promotion: Reference the "Description" column to quickly communicate the ROI of the event (e.g., "Automate It: Streamline business processes for more productivity").
| Use Case | Recommended Organizer Team | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Guest collaboration hackathon | Customer Success, Sales Engineering, Product Teams | Invite external users (customers, partners) to securely collaborate on solutions using your product. This drives feature adoption and gathers invaluable product feedback. |
| Generative AI skill building | Engineering, Learning & Development (L&D) | Focus the entire hackathon on building new applications or internal tools using a specific AI model or API. This quickly upskills the team and identifies viable new product ideas. |
| Crush the OKRs | Team leads (think outside the tech team!) | When quarterly goals are falling behind, team up to crush the goals before the quarter ends. |
| Clear the Backlog | Tech, DevOps, and QA | Developing solutions for existing bugs or enhancing developer operations is more fun when it’s gamified. Repeat as necessary. |
| Automate It | Business, administrative, and operations teams | When business is quieter around holidays, it’s a great opportunity to streamline processes. Build out Slackbots, Zapier automations, and templates for more productivity. |
| Stress Test It | Tech, IT, and Security | Keeping up with compliance is important, but no one’s favorite. Stress test your business continuity plan, document your steps, and check another task off the list. |
| Future Idea Repository | Company-wide | Everyone has a great idea for a hackathon project after the hackathon ends. Keep an open hackathon to store these ideas for the next one. A list of great ideas is useful for more than just hackathons. |