Winning a hackathon requires more than just a great idea; it necessitates the right team, strategy, and effective presentation skills. Participants should understand the hackathon's objectives, validate their ideas, and be prepared for rapid prototyping, while prioritizing tasks and communication. Strong preparation for pitching their solution is also critical and should be integrated throughout the event.

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Applause from you, AK, and 18 others
George Krasadakis
Product Architect | Tech Inventor | Entrepreneur. Writing on Innovation and Product
Development; Views, ideas and opinions are my own.
May 23, 2017 · 6 min read
How to win the hackathon!
Is a great idea enough to win a hackathon?
In my tech career, I had the opportunity to experience hackathons
from many di erent angles: as a participant, an organizer, a sponsor; a
process advisor and technology provider; in plenty of cases as a winner or
leader of winning teams; with both startup and corporate contexts.
As published in startups.co; images: pixabay

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I’ve experienced the challenges in leading talented
teams under the time pressure of a hackathon; the
stress levels of pitching ideas to leadership teams
Here is my advice to those ambitious hackathon participants:
No matter the type (corporate or public one) a hackathon is always a
great opportunity to showcase your talent and skills: yes, hackathons
are also about team spirit, innovation, collaboration and fun but the
primary motivation of the typical participant is to win it and capitalize
on that (reputation, opportunity, networking).
The competition is tough, the event itself is demanding with several
hours or even days of ideation, coding, iterations and in some cases
team challenges.
Is a great idea enough to win a hackathon? The short
answer is NO.
You also need the right team, working practices, mentality and the
right strategy. Consider the following practical hints to … hack the next
hackathon.
What is this hackathon really about?
Understand the purpose and set the right focus
The purpose of a hackathon is not always that clear. In many cases the
objective—from the organizer’s point of view- is to boost collaboration
and team spirit; or to promote a particular technology; or to solve a
di cult problem and generate novel ideas.
You need to read between the lines and get the full context: the timing,
the theme and the recent history of hackathons can unveil the ‘hidden
objectives’ and let you better de ne your strategy.
Also, the type of the deliverable, the evaluation criteria, the voting
process and the synthesis of the panel of judges can help you gure out
the priorities, design your communication strategy, set the focus areas
and form the right messages to include in your presentation.
Is your idea really novel?

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Document your (great) idea(s) upfront
Write down your idea(s) before the start of the hackathon; a short
summary of your idea in the form of an one pager describing the
problem you are about to solve, your innovative solution, your
assumptions and the technologies involved will prove to be very
helpful; for you and your team. Also de ne there the target output of
your project (what will you try to build? a functional prototype, a
concept + wireframes, a physical prototype, a predictive model?)
Having summarized your idea into a single page, you need to do a
reality check: you might think that you have the ‘killer idea’ or that you
have just discovered something really novel; but, in our online and
interconnected world, the chances to come up with a unique, novel
idea tend to zero. You should validate your concept—do a quick web
search to gather information on its uniqueness, feasibility and cost of a
potential implementation. Even if you nd similar technologies and
solutions already o ered out there, you might still have (or be able to
nd) di erentiators to help you compete with the current players; or
you might nd yourself killing your idea and proceeding with an
alternative one.
Do you have the right team?
You need talent + special characters
You must think and act as entrepreneur at this point: you need to make
optimal use of the resources available and manage to impress your
‘customers’ and ‘sell’ you concept—all within an extremely short time
frame.
Synthesizing the right team to work on your idea is critical: both the
size of the team but also its diversity in terms of skills and characters
can make a huge di erence.
You do need the right technical expertise; you also need to execute
rapidly, with quick decisions, fast iterations and agility. The characters
in your team should be compatible with the fast pace of the hackathon:
add the wrong characters in the mix and you will possibly end up with
a nervous break-down after a couple of hours.
Hackathons are extremely fast-paced and
demanding so there is no space for formalities,

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processes and ‘by-the-book’ practices. It is about
‘making the impossible happen in no time’ and you
need to form your team with this in mind.
You need a strong product leader with clear vision and awareness of
the technological capabilities; you need technical experts with agile
engineering mentality; you also need a member to start thinking from
the very beginning on how to present the idea/ concept/ output of your
e orts.
Are you ready for rapid prototyping?
Make assumptions, hard-code, reuse components; move fast
You need to build an impressive prototype fast, and this is challenging.
Normally there is the core innovation—the key components
implementing your novel solution + ‘secondary components’ ranging
from data, models, user interfaces, APIs to support your core
components—all need to be integrated into a single functional
prototype for your demos and/or the nal deliverable.
You need to prioritize in order to set the focus on the right items and
thus maximize the value you can deliver in such a short time frame.
Instead of wasting time and energy on ‘secondary components’ (those
needed for your prototype but conventional—needed only to
support/frame your solution) you can hard-code them, mock data and
consume existing API’s wherever possible.
Its OK to make assumptions as long as you are presenting them as part
of your solution; normally it’s OK to fake some parts of the overall
solution as soon as you clarify that and you also present how you would
normally build it.
At the same time, you need a clear product vision (what are you
building and why) and what is the critical path to build it—
dependencies, priorities, checkpoints.
Are you ready to pitch?
A great presentation can make the di erence!
Depending on the hackathon, you might be asked to deliver a video
presentation along with your product design, wireframes, code,
functional prototype; in some cases all of the above + a pitch to a panel

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of experts. It is a great strategy to pick the right guy to start preparing
for this from the very beginning: to properly package and best present
your great concept and work.
To get ready for your pitch, you need to understand your audience and
the target panel; then you need to de ne the right messages and
highlight the right aspects of your product/ solution; keep it simple,
fast and e ective; use key-statistics (could be from the public domain
with references) to support your assumptions; summarize your
competition, the state of the art and highlight how you are di erent;
include commercial and marketing aspects to further support your
proposal; demonstrate passion in building the real product; do
rehearsals in pitching or presenting the concept; be creative, informal;
add humor; ask for user feedback.
The presentation/ pitching readiness is a critical element. This
preparation should start from the very beginning and run as a parallel
thread throughout the hackathon.
As published in startups.co
. . .
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George Krasadakis | Professional Pro le |

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