Glean's Hackathon Week: 5 Key Takeaways

Today is the final day of Hackathon Week at Glean. I’m proud of the hard work and innovation our team has shown over the past few days. Hackathons are an important tradition at Glean. But they’re also an investment, and over time, we’ve learned a few things that make them most impactful: 1. Don’t limit them to engineers. Designers, PMs, data scientists, and GTM teammates all take part. The most innovative projects cut across functions. 2. Don’t just chase moonshots. Big, bold ideas matter. But every company, including ours, has parts of work that have too much friction: manual handoffs, clunky workflows, outdated processes. That’s why we've created a Hackathon award for the project that best tackles the grungy parts of everyday work. 3. Build for the long term. Hackathons are about moving fast. But if you only reward speed, you’ll probably get shortcuts. That’s why we have a “Codecraft” award to recognize durable, elegant code. 4. No hacking on your OKRs. It's easy to fall back on what’s familiar: your goals, your roadmap, your comfort zone. We set a simple rule: anyone who hacks on their OKRs is disqualified. We want projects to push the status quo instead of protecting it. 5. Don’t overindex on ROI. One of my favorite questions this week came from a Gleanie who asked me: “If the benefit exceeds the cost, can we do more hackathons?” My answer was yes, even if it doesn’t. Most projects won’t ship, and that’s OK. The value comes from the few that do, and from the muscle we build by trying, learning, and pushing what’s possible to help our customers solve their biggest challenges.