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This year, we hosted our third annual company hackathon, an internal event where people step away from their day-to-day work and build something new, experimental, and fun.
Employees from across the company — engineers, product managers, designers, and customer success engineers — formed small teams of two to four people and worked on ideas they came up with themselves. The goal wasn’t to ship production-ready features, but to switch context, explore bold and innovative ideas that are aligned with company's mission, and work on things that don’t usually fit into a normal roadmap.
Our previous two hackathons showed that these events are a great source of new ideas and great tools. Some of them made their way to production and became real Fingerprint products, and some others have become essential internal tools.
Rules? Where we’re going, there are no rules
Okay, there were some rules, but we deliberately kept constraints to a minimum. Teams were free to:
- Choose any technologies/languages/frameworks, even those not currently used in the company
- Use AI, vibe code, and experiment as much as they wanted
- Work on an idea they came up with themselves
We didn’t prepare a list of projects in advance. Instead, we took a bottom-up approach and let teams decide what to build. To add some structure though, we defined two high-level themes that a project had to fall under:
- Innovation — new product ideas or features
- Build for scale — internal tools and quality-of-life improvements that make everyday work easier
We created an internal bank of ideas — a shared document where anyone could propose ideas for others to pick up.
Teams formed organically, without any enforced composition. Once formed, they registered their team name, members, and project idea in a shared document.
By kickoff, we had 14 teams and 34 participants — mostly engineers but also people from product, design, and customer success. It was truly amazing to see people from different parts of the company working collaboratively together!
Making a remote hackathon feel like a hackathon
We’re a fully remote company with no physical offices. That means no big room full of people hacking side by side. To create a sense of shared experience, we started with a live kickoff call. It was simple, but important — a moment to see each other, say hello, and officially start the event together.
We also offered a food and drinks budget, so the company would pay for pizza (or anything else) participants would order during the hackathon.
To keep things fun and informal, we added a “Best Meme” award. Participants shared memes in a Slack channel, and the one with the most emoji reactions won.
We also encouraged teams to post photos and screenshots of their work in progress, giving everyone a peek into how others were hacking. A few participants happened to live in the same city (Berlin) and met up in person to hack together from each other’s homes. That wasn’t possible for everyone, but it was great to see people take advantage of it where they could.
48 hours of building
The hackathon ran for 48 hours. At the end, teams presented their projects during a demo call. Each team had five minutes to show what they built, either through a live demo or a short presentation. Judges evaluated projects independently using scorecards, and scores were averaged to keep things fair.
A day later, we held the award ceremony, which open to the entire company. Teams placing in the top three of each track received prizes, as did the winner of the meme competition. We also ran an audience award, where all employees could vote via a dedicated page for their favorite project. Thanks to Nano Banana, we had a few fun pictures of winning teams in situations hinting at their team’s name.
Final thoughts
Overall, the hackathon did exactly what we hoped:
- It gave people space to experiment
- Encouraged collaboration across roles
- And proved that even fully remote teams can create energy, creativity, and fun
- As a bonus, several ideas are worthy of incorporating into our product that will bring value to our customers! This has been true of our previous hackathons where several ideas have been implemented in production 🎉
We’re already looking forward to the next one!
Excited to join a company that fosters innovation and is a fun, fully remote work environment? We are hiring!
