Facilitating a Hackathon Ideation Session: Gaining Confidence & Unlocking Creativity

Facilitating a Crazy 8s ideation session for a hackathon at the end of 2024 was an experience let’s say. It pushed me to gain confidence in leading creative collaboration. It required strategic planning to ensure participants felt comfortable exploring bold ideas while keeping the process structured and impactful. What stood out most to me was how differently teams approached ideation. Product owners and managers focused on feasibility, developers explored technical possibilities, and marketing teams prioritized user engagement. When encouraging everyone to think beyond their usual constraints resulted in fresh, unexpected concepts for the U app. Some of the ideas were genius for example creating a show playlist that you could share with your friends which took inspiration from Spotify.

These ideas didn’t just stay on paper, over three days of intense coding, developers brought them to life, transforming sketches into functional prototypes. This experience reinforced the power of structured ideation in driving innovation and collaboration. It also showed me that ideation isn’t just about generating ideas—it’s about creating an environment where people feel safe to experiment and iterate. This was part of UX/UI design, were I’m not often exposed to in my day to day workload but I saw through this hackathon how much it birth great ideas and I can’t wait to do it again!