At a hackathon, many mixed teams will test your products and solutions. When working with your solutions, they might discover some bugs, difficulties and room for improvements. A hackathon is the best environment to get external feedback from people using your solutions in-depth and for the first time.

How to get the most out of it

• Agree with all Hack Coaches of your Hack Track on a guideline how to document & report product feedback ahead of the event
• At the BCX, listen carefully so you can write down all product feedback and cluster it
• Have at least one documentation person on-site at BCX, talking actively to the people using your product
• Offer a dedicated chat/forum to receive feedback on your product and create bug tickets from these

How to measure it

• Number of bug tickets generated in your system based on attendee feedback

Attendees working with your solution will come up with some new ideas. This might be features they are missing to facilitate the use case or to combine it with other soft-/hardware artefacts. It might be a single feature-wish, but could also derive a new development line for your product roadmap. 

How to get the most out of it

• Use the BCX as a deadline to get some drive on new features and product development. BCX is best to get these features tested by the external market at an early stage.
• When connecting new hardware and software to your existing product/solution, create long-lasting APIs that you can use for future customer projects.
• At the BCX, have at least one documentation person on-site at BCX, talking actively to the people using your product and noting down all product development ideas
• Offer a dedicated chat/forum to receive product development potential and cluster them info tickets in your system
• After the BCX, talk with the product owner to discuss which topics should be integrated into the roadmap at what time

How to measure it

• Number of new-feature request tickets
• Number of newly connected devices/software
• Number of Open Source projects integrated

As in every IoT use case, at BCX you will need to integrate your products with other hardware and software partners. The hackathon is a perfect platform for a hands-on approach to see whether solutions can be integrated quickly and fit well on a technical level. Also, it’s a very lean approach to identify the USPs of each product and define win-wins on both sides. This allows you to form new partnerships and reinforce existing ones.

How to get the most out of it

• Think about your ideal set-up ahead of time (Which devices do you need? Which solutions would be beneficial for your stack?) and define your wishlist of partners to also support the BCX with their products
• Get in touch with your wishlist partners, we are happy to support in the process with dedicated slides and info
• Take your time to integrate some wishlist partner APIs, devices, solutions, etc. before the hackathon – so participants can focus on their use case, rather than on getting everything connected
• At the event, offer decent documentation to the participants, showing them which integrations work well or which partners‘ products they could potentially connect

How to measure it

• Number of partners participating in your Hack Track
• Number of PoCs realized within Hack Track
• Number of BCX participants from hunting list companies

To get meaningful prototypes, you need to work with real use cases and thus ask your customers for their pain points and daily challenges. Some participants want to come up with own ideas and have a deeper ideation phase, others prefer to work on dedicated use cases, that you and your Hack Coaches propose. The BCX will work as proof for your customers for an agile, lean, connected & connecting company. Existing customers will also see new potential to realize further use cases and projects with you, and you can meet many new customers in the form of participants‘ employers and hackathon partners at the event.

How to get the most out of it

• Invite your customers to your Hack Track and ask for their input ahead of time
• Pain points – create a “wall of pains”: Participants will focus on solving real problems by ideating around your input
• Gains – create a “wall of gains”: Participants will focus on dedicated use cases, you and your customers are proposing
• Invite developers/technical employees of your customers as participants

How to measure it

• Number of hackathon participants from hunting list companies
• Number of customer use cases, that have been worked on
• Number of upsell, further projects, new customers stemming from BCX

A hackathon can be a great option to generate new use cases and facilitate ideation for your product in combination with other products and cross-domain. In the creative atmosphere and with all the resources on-site, people can think outside the box and develop unthinkable connections between products. Plus, attendee groups should be diverse in order to have a maximum ideation (teams should consist of developers, product designer, UX designer, product owners, marketing, sales, etc.).

How to get the most out of it

• Do not fasten your suggested use cases to tight
• Have an overview of all partners on-site and visualize the teams how they could integrate other products and solutions (e.g. on a device layer, on the service layer) to support cross-domain ideation
• Keep track of new use cases and new feature requests via a dedicated documentation person on-site

How to measure it

• Number of new use cases
• Number of new-feature request tickets

Traditionally a hackathon is an employer branding event to attract new talents and to position your company as employer of choice. You show that you are open to innovation, agile, and fun to work for. Hackathon participants can be students, young professionals, and experienced developers or non-developers. Communication channels are very diverse and include social media, developer mailings as well as direct invitation to universities and well-known contacts. Besides, working jointly on something with fun and committed leads to a high community spirit with your existing employees.

How to get the most out of it

• Have someone from HR onsite at the BCX for potential first talks
• Print your open positions and hang them in your partner zone including your benefits and position regarding innovation
• Do you want to invite potential employees to the hackathon? Do you want to promote the hackathon at a specific institute or university? We can give you invite codes and coordinate the invitation
• Do you have a dedicated group of potential employees that you want to invite to the BCX as Hack Coaches? 
• Organise weekly calls with the core org team within your company and a preparation day on-site with all your Hack Coaches to drive engagement and motivate
• Briefing call with all Hack Coaches of all partners of your Hack Track before BCX
• Share the BCX stories in your intranet with all your employees, including personal statements

How to measure it

• • Number of happy employee faces
  • Number of applications tracing back to BCX
  • Number of contracted persons after the hackathon
  • Number of Hack Coaches participating more than once

Developers can be a good driver to sell your product and are part of the purchasing department at a potential customer. Hence, it is beneficial that developers are aware of your product and hopefully like it. Furthermore though, you are doing cool stuff at BCX. Talk about it and let people outside the BCX set-up know, what you have achieved. 

How to get the most out of it

• Ask the developers within your company to promote the hackathon in their social media groups, GitHub, distribution lists, and more. Their promotion is key to success.
• Evaluate whether the GitHub upload of resolved codes based on the hackathon is legally ok (if its open source software – no problem, if its an MVP product of yours – that’s probably not what you want).
• The BCX team and Bosch career are promoting all hackathon activities on social media. Do the same and share content of the other partners.
• Approach relevant online media, blogs, etc to write an article for their technical reader community about what has been achieved with your products at BCX or participant reviews

How to measure it

• Number of hackathon participants using your product
• Amount of code uploaded on GitHub during the event
• Number of questions answered in Stackoverflow
• Number of press clippings
• Number of Social media mentions/ posts

At the hackathon, your products and solutions come to live. This is a perfect set-up to create some content, such as videos, reviews and photos for further marketing activities. Also, the entire ecosystem and your customers are on-site. Use them for customer references and to capture the spirit both for internal and external communication.

 How to get the most out of it

• Have a photographer on-site to capture the spirit in general and have dedicated photo shoots for devices, sensor-kits, etc. for further promotion online.
• Ask customers and partners to talk about the BCX and your product in a short video
• Get some quotes written down and ask for an official release
• After the event, write some blog articles, reference cases, etc both for external marketing and internal employee engagement.
• Think about other content pieces you need ahead of time and prepare scripts (e.g. tutorials on your product, webcasts, …)

How to measure it

• Number of generated demos/stock photos/etc.
• Amount of usage of BCX-produced content