Innovating to Delight Our Users - Noom’s Annual Hackathon

6 organizers, 27 teams, 400 supporters, 10 winners.

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Noom hosted its largest ever company hackathon this fall!??

The annual Noom hackathon promotes exploration and risk-taking, encouraging employees to? set aside three days of regular responsibilities to devote themselves to a marathon of stretching the bounds of innovation. No idea is too wild or too ambitious to pursue, and participating in the Noom hackathon often revives creativity and the drive to spark something new.

“Delight our customers.”

This year’s hackathon theme was “Delight our customers.”? Users are the heart of Noom. The people using Noom to make big changes in their lives and health on a daily basis inspire us. Fittingly, our hackathon theme focused on creating the very best consumer experiences– including even our internal “customers”: the fantastic coaches, support teams, and engineers who support our users every day.?

The Countdown Begins…

Creating connections virtually can be hard, and with much of Noom being remote, we had to get creative and everyone rose to the challenge. Our Noom employees made an incredible effort to build new connections and form hackathon teams that transcended physical geography. Each newly formed team then got to hacking over three days. To keep these clever minds fueled for the journey, Noom sprinkled in some fun events like cookie decorating and a happy hour in addition to the exciting kick-off. Noom also partnered with Google to organize a 90-minute interactive session with an intro to their AI platform and some lessons on prompt engineering.

Breaking convention, forming bonds

Typically when the term “hackathon” comes up, we envision a group of engineers bent over a laptop screen, staring at a screen full of code together. Noom recognizes that the best ideas are born through collaboration, especially collaboration amongst people with their own unique perspectives. That’s why the 2023 hackathon encouraged everyone at Noom, not just those with technical skills to participate. As a result, our teams were more diverse and had a broader scope of projects. Prizes were awarded for the best ‘Code-free’ project and the greatest ‘Cross-functional impact,’ -- won by a team of coaches and engineers who developed individualized learning opportunities for our users.?

Showcase time!

400 eager attendees and 27 demo projects later, the Hackathon showcase demonstrated the power of great minds coming together for the delight of our users. From projects to reward users with motivational badges, to AI personalized content and new orientation videos – Noom hackathon projects covered a wide spectrum of ideas and received overwhelming support. The hackathon channel had over 200 messages during the showcase and the atmosphere was one of excitement, camaraderie, and pride!

Celebrating success

The Noom hackathon had several prize categories including a People’s Choice Award and the Best Use of AI to celebrate the success of our participants. As an organizer, the greatest victory was being able to witness the dedication, passion and hard work that Noom employees put into delighting our customers!

Next time you love a new feature in the Noom app, its origins may trace back to our 2023 hackathon. While several awards were given away, we know the true winners are our customers who courageously partner with us to empower everyone, everywhere to live a better, healthier life.