How do you win a Hackathon? (3/4)

So we chose the right team and established the winning mindset, what's next? Next is choosing the idea that gets you past the preliminaries. Note I said "preliminaries" and not "finals", because that's where your first go/no-go challenge is.

Most corporate hackathons start with a submission phase, where employees are invited to submit their ideas, usually a pitch deck or short video detailing the idea. Then, reviewers go through all the submissions and grade them based on one or more criteria like relevance to the challenge, feasibility, originality, impact, etc. There may be other criteria, but these are often there. At some point, the reviewers will combine all the ideas they graded into one big list, sort it based on rating, and start the selection process together. Reviewers usually set two cutoff points: One for top scorers - anything above this point is a no-brainer, i.e. ideas so good it's clear they should be moving on. The other is for bottom scorers - anything below this point is just not good enough.

Between these two cutoff points are ideas ranked "ok" to "pretty good". Here the reviewers spend most of their time, debating which should make it to the next stage.

YOU DO NOT WANT TO BE IN THAT GROUP, because moving up out of it could just be a matter of luck. You want your idea in the "no brainer" group, so it sails on through without debate. How do you do this? Look for an idea that is:

  • Revolutionary: You really need to move the needle. If your idea is providing an incremental benefit, it'll be lumped into the reviewer's mental bucket of "improvement ideas" where it'll have lots of neighbors. You want your idea to stand out among all others. You want the reviewer's reaction to be "I gotta see that!" and not "OK", or "Interesting", or "Neat".
  • Clearly relatable: It needs to be solving a problem that everyone can relate to. If you address some obscure element of the business or the code, there's a chance the reviewer won't know it, and that's unnecessary friction for you.
  • Clearly understandable: If the reviewers can't understand the idea, they won't see how brilliant it is. Make sure anyone who hears or reads it will get it.
  • Feasible: The idea needs to at least feel like it can be done. You don't want the reviewer to dismiss it offhand on the pretext that it's impossible. It's ok to have something that's challenging or even pushing the envelope of "doable", but if there's no clear way of how it can be done, the idea is likely to be cut.

So your idea has to be revolutionary. Look for something outstanding, outspoken, and just a bit outrageous. It needs to get eyebrows raised. It needs to change the game in a way no incremental idea can compete with. Then make sure it's relatable, clear and feasible and you've jumped over to the next step.

Find that, and then you're ready for the last ingredient of your hackathon-winning pie: the Wow.



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