How we run a remote hackathon for 100+ people

Babylist Engineering · June 28, 2026

Once a year we shut the whole tech team down for a week and build. Not "20% time," not a long weekend. A real, calendars-cleared, drop-everything week, run entirely over Slack and video. And engineers don't have it to themselves: product, design, data, UXR, and people from all over the company build too. This year about 115 people, all remote, split into 30-plus teams and shipped everything from new registry features to internal dev tools. Here's how we run it.

Clear the calendar — and mean it

The first rule is the one that makes the rest work: during hackathon week, your regular project work and meetings are off. Not "attend if you can." Off. Managers cancel their team meetings. The only exceptions are a real incident or something genuinely business-critical.

This sounds obvious and is the easiest part to get wrong. A hackathon you do around your real job isn't a hackathon. The whole point is uninterrupted focus — the kind you almost never get in a normal sprint — so we protect it on purpose.

Pick a lane

Not everyone wants the same thing out of the week, so we offer three ambitions and let people choose:

Pragmatic and precise. Ship something real in a week. Pick enough ambiguity that you're not sure it'll work, then make it work.
Big, big swing. Prototype the thing that would have taken a quarter a year ago. Failure is allowed.
Get out of the building. Start the week with real users — meetups, 1-on-1s, watching someone build a registry end to end — and come back full of ideas.

We also float a few optional themes to nudge energy toward where the business is headed, but the honest instruction is "pick one, or ignore them all and surprise us." The best projects usually come from someone's own itch.

Teams of two to four. No solos, no committees.

Team size is a hard cap: two to four people. No exceptions, and no going solo. The cap is deliberate. It keeps any one team from swallowing half the org, and it maximizes the number of distinct projects — 30-plus this year. Four people can't hide; everyone builds.

Teams form the week before build week, in the open. We open a shared sheet with two tabs, one to pitch ideas and recruit and one for the actual rosters, and the recruiting happens right in the hackathon Slack channel. It turns into a week-long public pitch session: formatted idea posts, "in search of a designer" callouts, mid-pitch pivots when someone points out your idea is already on the roadmap. By the time build week starts, half the org has already signed up.

Two things we push hard:

Cross-functional is better. The mix isn't decoration. With AI assistance, someone outside their usual role can do real building: one data scientist this year set up a dev environment and shipped major feature work in under 36 hours.
Honor system on the start line. No building before kickoff. We don't police it; we just ask. 🤝

The week itself

Monday is kickoff. Tuesday through Thursday we run one short virtual standup a day, and we keep it loose: an opening emoji poll, updates and jokes lifted from the team channels overnight, a quick quiz. It's a pulse check, not a status meeting.

The real energy lives in Slack. One morning the prompt was just "post a GIF for how your last 48 hours have gone," and twenty GIFs hit the channel at once — "this is fine," "hack the planet," the works. Midweek, when shared staging environments got scarce, the alert to share them turned into an organic shoutout for another team's hackathon project: a tool that spins up staging on demand, which other teams were now leaning on under real pressure. A hackathon project getting dogfooded by the hackathon itself is about the best validation you can ask for.

Friday is an open-mic close focused on what people learned, not polished demos. Then submissions are due end of day.

Judge it async

With 30-plus teams, live demos don't scale. You'd burn a whole day and exhaust everyone. So judging is asynchronous, and it's the part of our format we're proudest of.

Each team submits a four-minute Loom and a short form: what they built, the links, and which track they're entering. The coaching to teams is blunt: assume the judges will never touch your prototype. The video has to carry the whole story. Judges review on their own time, leave timestamped comments, and calibrate together before winners are announced at a following all-hands.

We judge on two tracks, picked to be in tension:

Innovation exploration — a big bet, judged on vision even if it's nowhere near ship-ready.
Ship-ready prototype — something that could go to production soon.

Teams pick the track they're playing. (We learned this year that some projects are genuinely both, so a "hybrid" lane is on the list for next time.) Prizes are real but modest — $500, $300, and $200 per person for the top three — because the point was never the money.

What people built

The range is the fun part. A few from this year:

Scan to Registry — point your phone at a product in any store and it lands on your registry on the spot, with alternatives and pricing surfaced right there.
Vibe & Seek — upload a nursery inspiration photo, or pick a vibe like "woodland" or "celestial," and it finds matching products by visual similarity.
Second Nest — a hyperlocal, peer-to-peer spot for families to pass baby gear on to other families. (The demo had confetti and a couple of kid cameos.)
Staging on Demand — the internal tool from above: one command spins up an isolated, auto-expiring staging environment, with a Snake game to play while it deploys.

Registry features, community ideas, AI experiments, dev tooling. Built by teams that mixed roles and, in a lot of cases, met each other on a spreadsheet the week before.

What happens after

A hackathon that vanishes on Friday teaches people not to bother next year. So "what happens to the good ones" is a first-class part of the plan, not an afterthought: top projects get a real path-to-production review, and we deliberately keep the original builders in the driver's seat instead of handing their work off. Not everything ships. But enough does that the week pays for itself.

Late on the last morning, before the closing ceremony had even wrapped, someone posted: "BEST HACKATHON YET (AND IT'S NOT EVEN OVER)!!!" That, more than any single project, is the outcome we're optimizing for.