Hackathon Planning

What is a Hackathon?

A hackathon is typically a two-day event, where cross-functional teams of tech and business participants collaborate to explore new ideas, solve problems and build solutions, with the support of mentors, then showcase Proof of Concepts in pitch demos to a panel of judges.

Organising a Hackathon?

Hackathon planning requires 8-12 weeks of preparation and I can help guide you with Hackathon consullting or end-to-end Hackathon Project Management. Including:

  • Hackathon Scoping and choosing the best format

  • Defining appropriate hackathon challenges

  • Selecting and briefing hackathon mentors and judges

  • Creating communication guidelines and design assets

  • Ensuring recruitment of participants

  • Facilitating the hackathon for a smooth event

Internal, external or conference hackathons

Hackathon Consulting

From $10K

  • 2-hour hackathon consulting session to guide your hackathon

  • Hackathon planning templates for your team to execute the event

  • Feedback on design and comms

  • Three, further consulting calls

Hackathon Project Management

From $30K

Hackathon Consulting plus:

  • Full Hackathon Planning

  • Communication and Design Assets

  • Hackathon Project Management

  • Weekly 1-hour consulting calls

Food, hackathon rewards and hackathon goodies to be organised by your team.

Pro Hackathon Facilitation

From $35K

Hackathon Project Management plus:

  • Hackathon event facilitation to ensure a smooth event (online, in-person)

  • Team coaching/mentoring

  • Mentor and Judging briefs

  • Training sessions

Case Study

100 Participants

Internal company-wide online Hackathon for a global alternative investment firm

3 months preparation time

Hackathon Goal: Cross-departmental collaboration and production-ready solutions

“We hired Maria to organize our firm’s first-ever Hackathon and it was a huge success! Maria brought a wide breadth of skills to all aspects of the Hackathon, including organizing and planning the event, recruiting the firm’s business members to participate, creating marketing content, orchestrating ideation sessions, providing valuable feedback on product design, and facilitating the event itself. Furthermore, Maria brought cutting-edge tools to our organization that will have a long-lasting effect on the way that we operate.

Maria was flexible in her planning of the event, catering the details around our organization’s specific goals of bringing together our business and IT teams with an emphasis on developing relationships and demonstrating how quickly our business and IT teams can come together to solve problems.”

— Investment Firm, USA

  • Cross-Functional teams

    We met our target of 60% business, 40% IT participants through a strong communication strategy.

    team mates working together

  • 13 projects

    13 (of 30 submitted projects) were developed through ideation sessions then coded and presented at thee hackathon.

  • 100%

    100% Satisfaction. Hackathon Participants said they would like to participate in another hackathon.

Participants’ hackathon experience

“The best part was learning from others on my team. We built a tool that surpassed expectations and it was great to get time off to focus on a project.”

“It was great to have the bandwidth to think and execute in a different capacity during the hackathon - I don’t often have the opportunity to be creative and implement new ideas”

“I specifically enjoyed the cross-collaboration, working directly with developers without a lot of red tape or required approvals…”

“It was really motivating to see all that was and can be accomplished.”