🚀 I won a hackathon building an AI tool. It provided more visibility than 6 months of work.
Stuck in invisible work? See how a 2-day AI hackathon project gave me more visibility than 6 months of backlog tasks, and how you can do the same.
I won a hackathon. Not because I’m a genius. Not because I had a perfect plan. I won because I built something that actually helped people in my team do their job faster.
We all say we want to innovate at work. But 90% of the time, we’re stuck in meetings, shipping backlog tickets, and aligning on documents no one reads. The hackathon gave me a break from all of that. I had a problem, I had an idea, and I had the freedom to build it.
In a few hours, two peers and I built a tool using AI. We used it right after finishing it. It made our lives easier. Then people outside our org heard about it. That had never happened with our normal work.
⭐ In this post, you'll learn
Why internal hackathons create more impact than months of backlog tickets
How they give you visibility across your company
Why building fast with others beats working alone
How to apply AI in practice without needing a perfect plan
Why orgs should hold hackathons often, especially during big tech shifts
⚡ #1 Internal hackathons are visibility machines
Your normal work probably may not get you noticed outside your team. You ship features, you fix bugs, you clean up tech debt. Important work, but invisible. Nobody from another org cares.
But build something useful in a hackathon, and it spreads fast. The tool I built during the hackathon got attention from people I had never talked to. Why? Because it solved a real problem, and it was ready to use even as an MVP.
I didn’t need to convince anyone or pitch it to them. They saw…