Andrew Whelan explains how hackathons work and why they matter for building community and finding talent. He covers the different roles at hackathons, how sponsors use them to scout developers and designers, and introduces SMART goals: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound.
Chapters
I love hackathons too. Even if you're not a developer, even if you're not a product manager, even if you're not a designer, go to hackathons because most of you will understand the industry. But I will tell you right now, the majority of people I work with who go to hackathons are much more easily adaptable into onboarding processes and to pitch their ideas because they are working with the people The number one thing I have with designers is they interview with an engineer, and the engineer goes, how do you deliver assets?
In Brazil, we have hacker talent also from Charlie University. Used to be only developer, but now we have more designers.
Yep. Is your background in development?
Yeah.
Yeah. So yeah, that's true, because we're seeing a big push for user experience design, like no UI. You all talked about that. So yeah, I agree. Here's my suggestion. Going back one slide, 2 slides. Make your own reality. There's no meetup in your area that makes sense? Start one. The first couple might be you and you. Keep advertising. Go back, build your community. Start a hackathon that you want for developers. Bring in some product managers and then down the road maybe do one with designers. But start to reach out to people, friends who are developers, if you want to do that and build your own as well. And go back and look at boot camps and other places because they will do field-specific hackathons. Because yeah, it's important. But the other thing is if you go to one, and a lot of them here are for all people, but if you go to some and it's designers, as long as it doesn't say designers only, you're going to be in high demand because they're going to be like, we need somebody to build this once we figure it out. Having never been to one, what's the role of a product manager at a hackathon considering it's usually a very short-term thing? Well, usually what they do is they work on the business model. They do competitive comparative analysis to make a decision so that we know that based on when the— because they're mostly trained in user experience as well. So they're making sure that the solution is viable before they hand it off to the developer. The other thing they're doing is they're putting together the roadmap. So they say for if it's a 48-hour hackathon, they're putting together the roadmap of this is what we're doing now. This is when we come back together. This is when we do this. So there and then often not always but often they do a big part of the presentation because they're doing the stakeholder presentation.
Say that one more time.
Yeah.
Then you go home.
That's exactly right. We've run a couple that are 24 hours, you stay the whole time, but we've run some that are 48 hours where you go home and work and then come back. So yeah, it's taken off of this idea of filmmakers who do a 24-hour short film. You give them an idea, they go out with a team and film it and come back and then they present. It's the same thing for product, right? Come up with product that's a smart solution. I know that many of the people who come through and do stuff like this The sponsors of the hackathons are looking for that genius. Because they're not going to go, oh, your idea in 48 hours is worth us dumping money into, but they're going to go, what else you got going on? Because that's how you get the intro. So that's the value in doing things like this. It's about getting involved. I want to do stuff, but you got to do stuff in order to get there. We talked— everybody, does everyone know what SMART goals are?
Yeah.
You guys all know what SMART goals are, right?
No?
All right. I'll teach you SMART goals really quick. Okay. So here is a goal. What do you guys think of that goal? It's not really strong, right? It's too general. If you start to approach everything you do with the, I'm just doing this, You missed something that you can quantify it with. So here's another one. What do you think about this? It's better, but it's still not very specific. Why are you so opinionated? No, that's great. Okay. Perfect. You're right. Medium goal. Because we're missing some of the details. What about this one? Are you happy now? All right. So here's what I'm talking about. This is a SMART goal. It's a strong goal. And we're going to talk about what it is from the acronym standpoint. Oh, I might have removed them. Hold please. It's specific, right?
Yes.
Right? We have a SMART goal. It's specific and it's measurable. I know what I'm going to get out of it. It's attainable. Right?
Yeah.
These are things that we want to talk about. And obviously you said too that it has to be a time frame with which we're going to do it. Everything that you do, you should give yourselves a time to. These are some tips and we're going to do it in a— we're going to stand up in just a second and do something before we move to the next section. What was the R, Mr. Mark?
Realistic.
What is the R? So it's specific, measurable, attainable, realistic. Realistic, thank you. So realistic means if I give myself that goal, I am willing to take those steps to do that job. Any questions on networking yet?
Okay.
Anybody here Completely afraid of networking? For networking? Yeah. All right, hold on. You can give it to us after we do this exercise. Everyone stand up.
