Last week, Healthie held our first full-company hackathon! Our team is now close to 200 team members, so we split up into 17 teams (each named after a mythological creature or a cryptid), and spent two days building against our API as 'Healthie Legends'.

Setting the Scene

In preparing for this hackathon, we spoke to team members and industry peers alike about their experiences participating in hackathons. "What would make this a successful event, and what are the common 'gotchas' that turn these experiences into preventable messes?" One answer was, "The hackathons I've participated in that were well-organized were really fun and great to be a part of. The ones I didn't like weren't well-organized." We took that comment to heart :)

The pressure was on!

When it came to ideas that teams could come up with for their hacks, our guiding question was, "What can we build in 24 hours that changes how we work for the rest of the year?" We made the decision to have teams meet up and decide on their idea one week in advance, which kept everyone focused and ready to build, once the hackathon started.

We also intentionally chose to keep teams separated by Growth and R&D, though we certainly debated a full blend; our Growth teams built together as Mythological Creatures, and R&D built together as Cryptids. Some departments intentionally didn't participate given the nature of their work, and that was completely understandable.‍

A Note About the Cryptid Teams: We organized R&D into 14 teams of up to seven people, sorted randomly, intentionally mixing engineers, PMs, and designers who don't usually work together. AND, they ran prompt-only on Day 1; Claude Code only, for good and for bad. This constraint leveled the room immediately, and intentionally broke habit patterns. A side effect of doing this is that it quickly surfaced exactly where our internal tooling still has rough edges, since you can't paper over a bad prompt with a quick manual fix when you're not allowed to touch the keyboard!

3, 2, 1... Let's Hack!

At noon ET on July 8, everyone joined Zoom, and was met with "Eye of the Tiger" blasting through the speakers. We kicked off the hackathon with a quick overview of the agenda, and then broke everyone out into their preassigned breakout rooms for everyone to start hacking! We stayed in the main Zoom room to answer questions, and then after an hour, closed the meeting so that everyone could focus on building. Shortly after kickoff, HQ started receiving team photos in the Slack channel; here are some of our faves!

Healthie's Legendary Demos

Demo day opened with the Mythological Creatures (Growth) teams: Team Phoenix (Customer Success), Team Griffin (Customer Success & Customer Implementation), and Team Sphinx (Rev Ops) presented their demos first, and battled for glory.

Team Phoenix also hid some Chamboi easter eggs throughout their demo! For context: Chamboi is a baby rhino that our Customer Support team adopted last year; he has his own recurring update slot in Growth All-Hands, and he's on our merch!

Team Griffin followed and opened their pitch as a full mock commercial, with a cooking metaphor and all, featuring a cameo from a teammate's 10-year-old: "Team Griffin knows, but I had to bribe my 10-year-old for his cameo."

On the Cryptid side, Team Mothman kicked off the demos, and someone immediately sent into the chat: "'Team Mothman is going to kick us off' is a sentence I didn't expect to hear at Healthie." Mothman's demo doctor was named Giovanni Mothman, after their own team captain, and the waitlist feature was live enough to send a real chat message: "Good news, an earlier Initial Consultation just opened up... You're first in line."

Team Tatzelwurm's widget builder won the Most Ambitious AI Build and was a runner-up Crowd Favorite. Their hack? Describe a piece of clinical UI in plain English, and it generates a spec that renders unchanged in three places: a marketplace gallery, an external website, and inside a Claude connector. Same spec, three surfaces, no rebuild, and because Healthie is API-first, they got a working prototype within 24 hours, no "is this going on the roadmap?" prioritization debate required ;)

Team Chupacabra's demo data used cryptid-themed patient names (Champ Tran, Skunkape Patel, Sasquatch Reilly, Ogopogo Simmons) and the AI briefing it generated read like a real clinical dashboard: abnormal labs to review, appointment requests pending, and a suggested first move for the day. See: "post the public safety notice and secure the fence before end of day."

Team Kraken's Scribe Feedback Loop Analyzer: 629 real feedback items sorted into seven complaint clusters, three fixes already shipped by demo day, and a measurable drop in complaints after each one. The verbatim quotes it surfaced ("shorten the HPI, it's a novel," "make the summary tighter, half the length") are typically the kind of thing a Scribe team usually has to read.

And Team Bunyip's demo ended with an ASCII-art comic strip: a fictional patient named Jordan Kim walking through an appointment panel by panel, prescription, allergy, and insurance card all rendered in plain text art. Check it out here!

Our Judging Panels & Awards

Mount Olympus judged the demos for the Mythological Creatures, and presented the following awards:

The Cryptid Council judged the Cryptid demos and presented the following awards:

We even got a bonus demo of a side project that one of our engineers had built with Claude one weekend, before the hackathon was scheduled. Drumroll, please... a command palette for Healthie, Cmd+K style! Pull it up, search a patient or a client group by name, and jump straight there. "It took a lot longer than it sounds," Kevin admitted. The chat went crazy, someone typed "command-kevin," followed by someone else asking whether it was possible to add a Claude skill named after him :)

Initial Reflections

Team Bigfoot's captain said, "Dev Assist was more capable than previously thought, will be including this in future product work." Team Jersey Devil reflected and said, "We got to see the power of Claude with the bumpers down," no existing code to lean on, and it still shipped a production-quality UI wired to real fields. Team Loch Ness' captain said prompt-only got the code right, but the decisions still needed a human; two of their nastiest bugs never showed up until someone drove the deployed app and read the logs. Team Wendigo had a similar story: the UI came together fast, but the booking logic needed manual nudging to behave.

This is the first of many to come

We're running company-wide hackathons twice a year, going forward. In between, departments have standing encouragement to frequently run department-specific hackathons (one team has already done this, and we're seeing others getting planned imminently). The projects people were proudest of don't have to live in a highlight reel either. We're building space to carry the best ones into our quarterly OKRs, so a winning hackathon project can become a quarterly goal with dedicated time behind it!

Deep-Dive: Healthie Finance Hackathon

Preceding our company hackathon, our Finance team (aka Team Bread!) met up IRL in San Francisco for their own hackathon. Amongst other team-building activities, like capping off the two days with a Giants game, their ideation process started broad: prompts about the day-to-day pain points that ate up their time, before narrowing in on their most meticulous, manual follow-up work, and landing on customer-focused hacks; "after all, cash is king."

They created an AR aging dashboard that turns Stripe's overdue list into one-click follow-up emails, and an invoice proration explainer, because Stripe's default proration math confused customers to the point where they're booking calls with our team just to have it explained line by line.

Soon, a customer will be able to upload their bill and get a plain-English walkthrough from an animated lion named Leo!

As Team Bread said in their reflection post-hackathon, "Anybody can vibe code these days, but the iterations outside of the V1 are what will let us reduce the unglamorous, high-friction work."

Concluding Thoughts on Organizing a Company-Wide Hackathon

Towards the end of the hackathon, a few people started swapping stories about old LAN parties, hauling a desktop tower to a friend's house just to play games on the same network, and that quickly turned into people typing, "Hackathon at the retreat would be awesome" and "Oooh retreat hackathon would be cool" back and forth in the chat. Stay tuned for what happens at our retreat next September - AND what might happen to our infamous OKR system, as someone on our leadership team commented afterwards, "Kill OKRs, hackathon only!" (!!!!)

Congratulations to our 14 Cryptid teams and 3 Mythological Creature teams who all hacked for 24 hours and presented their demos to everyone! A couple of the builds are already headed for our product roadmap: stay tuned for more! ;)

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