Is Hackathon concept only good for Ideation?

That's what even I thought when I learned about hackathons for the very first time!

In fact, I can't blame it as most hackathons that one would see are about Ideation and building a quick Proof of concept for it.

I think this stems from the fact that generally Hackathons have been seen more as a Branding & Recruitment exercise and not essentially about actual problem-solving.

Absolutely no harm if a company would like to only look at it from this lens.  However, having done multiple hackathons for ourselves as well as for others, think leveraging Hackathons for Optimizations for an existing product can bring better ROI

Any product (here referring mainly to Web & Mobile apps) is a combination of multiple user journeys and corresponding feature sets. Some common ones being:

1. User Registration
2. User Onboarding
3. Payment flows
4. Referral flows

And obviously the most critical is the core user journey that defines the Product e.g. for Zomato delivery it is about users discovering the menu and placing the order

A product business gets growth when the above-mentioned user journeys are completed and the volume of completion of those journeys grows on Daily/Weekly/Monthly basis.

When something is not moving in the expected lines, the team starts finding the solutions.

One approach is to internally brainstorm and identify solutions. This works best when it's too domain-specific. Unless someone knows in and out of the business, solutions will be superficial.

A second approach is to get a consultant to come and help them with solutions. This is an ideal scenario when it's a complex exercise requiring a lot of dedicated time & effort.

A third approach that could work is a quick 7-10 day hackathon. This is an ideal scenario if:

In the last approach, apart from the usual hackathon benefits (Branding, Finding talent), the biggest benefit is that the output you get (in most cases it will be design files or prototypes on Figma/Adobe XD) could be quickly taken to the implementation state.

Not much internal brainstorming might be needed since it's not a novel idea or feature. As well as the design output will be based on existing guidelines.

We have been fortunate to work with both startups and enterprises that have actually leveraged this concept. 

You can check out some of the problems companies have leveraged to solve using hackathon approach:

In fact, to get more ideas on what type of problems can be appropriate for the hackathon, you can check out the list of all the challenges we have done here