Low-code / no-code is changing what it means to run a hackathon

In April, my team launched Workato’s first ever internal hackathon. It was an exciting idea from Stephanie Dwight, who quickly picked up on Workato’s company builder culture just four months into the job. Before building even began, we were amazed to realize over one third of our 800+ Workato employees registered to compete.?

In my experience with hackathons, participation is typically limited to very technical people and groups.? If the tools in question are complex or involve code, this approach makes sense. But the great thing about working with low-code/no-code tools is that anyone can use them. With a safe environment, people from around the company can and should bring their ideas to life.

Line-of-business colleagues have ideas and knowledge of how to improve the productivity of their department.? They are the key to better processes, competitive differentiation, and even agile responses to market changes. My colleague Bharath Yadla points out that digital transformation is transformation first, digital second. It means that simply buying the latest tech trend doesn’t lead to automatic success - people do.

A hackathon is a great way to harness these ideas in a meaningful way - and it is also a great way for BT or IT to step into the forefront of the low-code movement. I encourage any of my peers in technology leadership to try this approach at their companies. Here are a few learnings that I would share from what we have learned in the last few months of our own hackathon:

Make it fun

Stephanie brought some much-needed energy to the process, and we pushed the company by constantly sharing how many people had registered, and worked to create FOMO for anyone who had not done so. In addition, we ponied up some serious cash prizes (5 $1,000 awards) for winners to show that we were serious.

Remove friction

The easier we can make signing up and getting started, the better. At Workato, we wanted to empower creativity, so we made signing up as easy as clicking a button in Slack. After all, what is an automation hackathon without an automated sign up process??

Once a team registered, it kicked off a series of automated provisionings, from a federated Workato workspace for the team to collaborate in a non-production hackathon environment, and a Google drive for uploading video submissions.?

Open the gates for everyone

As I mentioned earlier, the more people who can participate, the better. In the end, most of the employees were focused on designing automations that could improve their own everyday processes - which is exactly what we want to encourage.?

Encourage diverse participation

Diversity fosters innovation. We were delighted to see our hackathon lead to the creation of many global teams. At Workato, it was not unusual to see Singapore, USA, Japan, and Europe represented on a single team.

Give it a name

On the BT team we weren’t afraid to ask for help! We went to the brand team and asked them to design some creative assets and help us with some copy to get the process going. We wanted to build some internal excitement and we knew that garnering some professional help with the visuals and language could go a long way.?

65% of the hacks that were proposed internally were improvements to employee productivity. Winners ranged from production-ready recipe review automations that could be picked up and used by any of our customers today to an automated deck generator that compiles slides for GTM teams based on customer data, industry, and use case. We know our company is better off having done an internal hackathon, and we’re already planning on our event for next year. What will you gain from an internal low-code, no-code hackathon at your company? There is only one way to find out.

You can learn more about how my team ran the hackathon here. Also, feel free to reach out to me directly or leave a note in the comments if I can help with any questions!