I just wrapped up competing in Reltio’s 2021 Hackathon. This was only the second hackathon I’ve competed in, but it won’t be my last. 22 teams competed across 3 continents to build creative solutions around the Reltio product.

The Ideas

One of the cool things about an internal hackathon is ideas are easy to come by. While working at Reltio I’ve kept a backlog in Trello of ideas I would like to build. Some of which I already had started designing or prototyping. The 3 big ideas I considered were…

1. Continuous integration and documentation for Reltio configurations. Currently we  manually update a git repo and excel doc for each update. The plan was to build a process that listens for configuration updates and keeps git and the excel docs up to date.
2. Migration Manager. Migrations between environments are manual, complicated, and error prone. The idea was to build a tool to automate and track the various pieces.
3. Reltio Developer Tools. Reltio troubleshooting requires lots of REST API calls that forces you to leave your browser for postman. A chrome extension to quickly execute common tasks would speed things up significantly. 

After gathering my crack team, we landed on the Developer Tools chrome extension. We chose this idea because it had the largest potential customer base and would make an impact for my team (Professional Services) regardless of the outcome.

The Execution

Unlike traditional hackathons, where you have a day or two in the same room with your team,  we built our prototype between meetings and on evenings over zoom. We settled on 6 features and a design that was easily extensible for the future.

• Get URI – Grabs the unique ID of your current record
• Get JSON – Grabs the json version of your current record
• Recleanse – Triggers every cleanser relevant to your record. Super useful when troubleshooting cleanser configs
• Reindex – Recreates the elastic search version of the record from the system of record. This is a swiss army knife in Reltio, but particularly useful for triggering an SQS message on demand.
• Clone – Copies the current record
• Clone To – Copies the current record to another tenant/environment

Outcome

22 teams presented over zoom to a panel of judges, who narrowed the field to 6 finalists.

 We were lucky enough to make it to the final round. We were provided with a coach from the product team to help us hone our pitch and given some more time to make some finishing touches. The final pitch happened in person in Atlanta. 

We completed all 6 of our use cases and by our estimates Reltio Developer Tools would save around 41 hours and $5000 per project implementation between development time and customer enablement. Some tasks, like cloning an entity were 25 times faster than before.

Cloning an entity before Reltio DevTools

Cloning an entity with Reltio DevTools

On the day of the final presentation we pitched 5th out of the 6 teams. It was humbling to see the hard work and other incredible projects we were in consideration with. While proud of what we had accomplished, we by no means expected to win. But after the judges traded notes, we were chosen as the winner!

What I Learned

I believe we were chosen as a finalist because we had a true working prototype when other teams were showing mostly wireframes. By the time of the final presentation, we no longer had the most developed tool or shipped code, which I expected to hurt us. As the judges explained their decision, I learned there was much more to consider. Here are a few things that differentiated us.

• Our problem to be solved was clear
• We knew who our customer was
• We field tested our tool with our customer and solicited feedback
• We made firm measurables tied to money and time
• We were aligned with company goals and values. Namely, breakthrough simplicity

None of these differentiators were in our source code. The who and why turned out to be more important than what we built. This isn’t to say we didn’t build a great product, we did, but if I were to compete again I would focus even more energy into our idea choice and pitch rather than the build. 

One of the prizes for winning is getting to be a coach for the next hackathon. I’m looking forward to helping another team apply these learnings next year.