Last week, Healthie ran our first full-company hackathon! We split over 100 team members into 17 teams (each named after a mythological creature or a cryptid), and spent two days building against the Healthie API.

Setting the Scene

For this hackathon, our guiding question was, "What can we build in two days that changes how we work for the rest of the year?"

We elected to keep teams separated by Growth and R&D, but intentionally created a multi-department structure within those. Some of our departments opted out, and others (more on this in the takeaways) are organizing subsequent department-specific hackathons.

Every team had to write a headline before they touched a keyboard. "What would the news story say if you nailed this? "Teams decided their headline and idea in advance on July 2, a week before the hackathon started, which kept everyone focused once the event started.

Demo day opened with the Mythological Creatures 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 tucked Chamboi easter eggs into their demo! For context: Chamboi is a real baby rhino that our Customer Support team symbolically adopted through their team fun fund; 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."

When the crowd vote didn't go their way afterward, a team member joked, "Team Griffin's children were unfortunately fired as a result of the fan favorite voting."

Cryptid Teams: We randomly organized R&D into 14 "Cryptid" teams of up to seven people, 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: a PM can prompt as well as anyone, so everyone could be an equal, active participant. It also quickly forced people to direct the work instead of falling back on muscle memory and intentionally breaking habit patterns quickly. The side effect of doing this is that it 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.

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, from Team Mothman, 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 this company-wide 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: Department Specific Hackathon (Healthie Finance)

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 own 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 within about ninety seconds, that had 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!

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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