In our presentation, we discussed why there’s a need for our product and how it would gain revenue. In addition to this, we also explained the tech plan to train and perfect AI for Summit News.
Our hard work paid off and our team won third place!
Learnings
This was my first hackathon and I was very anxious going into it. Walking away from it now, I realize that this was one of the most thrilling experiences I’ve ever had in my life.
My biggest challenge was convincing my teammates that we needed to research in order for us to create a product with intention and identify the scope of our project. In addition to this, I was able to fully utilize the skills I’ve honed from being a Customer Experience Lead and the skills I acquired from my UX Design program through Bloc to empathize with not just our user persona, but with my teammates as well. This helped me become the ultimate team player by being open to feedback from my teammates and technical coaches but also be able to offer my ideas and constructive critique as well.
Last lesson learned: Hackathons are fun! Despite the time crunch and high-pressure environment, it was such an incredible 54 hours and I can’t wait to participate in more!
If I Had More Time
I’ve had a bit of time post-hackathon (and adrenaline rush) so I was able to improve the onboarding process from when we initially built our prototype which you can view here.
If we did have more time however, I’d love to deep dive into research and spend more time on testing and iterating our product. In addition to this, finding ways to convert free customers to paying ones and mapping out the flow of this would also be a great addition to make the prototype more realistic.