It’s not just your team that is stuck
- Some engineers and product folks are already using AI code assistants on the side.
- Nobody is quite sure what’s officially allowed and what isn’t.
- The people who are comfortable with the tools use them for personal projects but haven’t figured out how to work that way with a team.
- The board is pushing to shift how engineering works without a clear plan for how to get there.
- Leadership teams are stuck between the pressure to adopt and the friction of actually doing it.
A hackathon doesn’t fix that by giving people a break. It fixes it by giving people a real problem, real tools, and permission to fail in front of each other. Take our playbook for a successful hackathon and move your team to adopt new ways of working and produce results for the business faster.
How to run a successful hackathon
Announce the hackathon and why it’s happening
Announce at least four weeks out.
Longer if your team runs in two-week sprints. People need time to think about what they want to build.
The announcement matters more than most teams think. Before you share a date, share the why. Why is the business dedicating time to this? How does it fit into your broader AI strategy? What changes after?
Skip this step and you’ll get polite participation. Do it well and you’ll get investment.
Solicit project ideas that solve real problems for your teams or your users
A hackathon brief should start with a problem statement, not a solution.
Provide a template: problem, goal, who it affects, what will be different.
Projects can go in two directions: something that improves your product for users, or an internal tool that makes your team faster. Both are valid. Both produce something real.
Open submissions to the whole team. The people closest to the broken workflow may not be in product or
engineers. They’re in Customer Support, HR, Finance and Operations.
engineers. They’re in Customer Support, HR, Finance and Operations.
Before the event, identify subject matter experts for each project and get sponsor sign-off on the shortlist.
Allow teams to be self forming and have a fail safe
Set a team size. Three to five people works well. Let people self-form or register as individuals; then assemble the individuals into teams yourself. Non-engineers are not optional extras. A subject matter expert on a team changes what gets built.
Don’t assign projects before the event starts if you’re offering prizes. Keep that reveal for the start of the day. Ask teams to rank their top three project choices and assign one from their list. It’s a small thing that makes a real difference to engagement.
Decide who will own the logistics and allocate a budget.
This is the work nobody wants to do and everybody notices when it’s wrong.
Decide what tools you’ll use and issue licenses at least two weeks before the event. Send setup instructions at the same time. On the day, provide a helpline for unexpected issues: connectivity, access, merge conflicts.
Create repositories for each team in advance. Include instructions for coding practices, UI/UX standards, and any design system in use. If teams will need access to third-party systems, sort out permissions early. If that’s not possible, decide in advance whether they’ll use mock data or mock services.
On the day of the hackathon, ensure coaches available and reachable. If your team is distributed, set up Zoom rooms or equivalent and be explicit about time zones and check-in points. If you’re running in person, collocation is an advantage. Use it.
Don’t throw people in cold, offer training and support ahead of time
If team members are new to AI coding tools, or new to using them as a team, three weeks of on-demand or live training before the event is not optional.
A hackathon exposes the skill gap fast. Pre-training keeps people focused on the problem instead of fighting with setup.
Identify expert coaches and make it easy to reach them. Consider giving each team a golden ticket: one hour of time from a domain or AI tools expert, redeemable during the build day.
Prizes
For prizes, bragging rights and money both work. So do things like picking the name for the new conference rooms or choosing company swag. Know your team’s motivators.
Celebrate the finish line and share learnings
Demo in a randomized order with a hard time limit. Teams present what they built, what they learned, and what would need to happen to take it further. Hands off keyboards when the first team starts. No last-minute commits.
For voting, rank-choice works well. Mix popular vote with a judges’ vote if you want more structure. Tally publicly, announce clearly. (Gritmind has a voting app, if you want to use it, let us know.)
What a hackathon actually changes
The durable outcome isn’t any single project. It’s that building with AI stops being something a few people do on the side and becomes something the whole team has done together. That shift, from AI as a personal habit to AI as a team default, is what you’re actually investing in.
A well-run hackathon is a forcing function. It addresses patchy adoption, the absence of a clear policy, and the pressure from leadership and the market, in a single day. Here’s what it gives the fpeople who have to make that case.
Wins for the CTO
- Identify which teams move fast with AI tools and which ones need more support.
- Validate which problems are genuinely suited to AI-assisted development and which aren’t (and why).
- Leave with a clear picture of where to invest in training, tooling and process, grounded in what your actual team did in a real environment.
Wins for the CFO
- One day of team time and a modest tools budget versus six months of costly slow, uneven adoption with nothing to show for it.
- Make better bets. At the end of the hackathon, you have working prototypes, not decks about working prototypes. You know which AI investments are worth making before you make them.
If you want to run a hackathon and want the logistics off your plate, Gritmind can facilitate the full event, including pre-hackathon training, expert coaching, and our AI-built voting app. Get in touch to talk through what that looks like for your team.