The CTO announces another hackathon. Flights booked, hotel sorted, the team pulled from their regular work. This is the fourth hackathon in four months. Each one celebrated as a breakthrough moment.
And the features actually ship. They go to production. They work.
But they don't move the needle. Revenue stays flat. User engagement doesn't change. The "game-changing feature" becomes another line item in the changelog that nobody reads.
The problem isn't delivery. The problem is that hackathons became a ritual for shipping features that should have been validated — or killed — long before anyone booked a flight.
Hackathons create a compelling narrative: urgency, focus, results. The photographs show energy, creativity, late-night breakthroughs.
But look at what's actually happening:
- Features ship without hypothesis: Nobody asked "what metric will this move?" before committing to the build
- Validation is skipped: The hackathon format assumes the idea is already validated — it's just about execution
- Context collapse: Team members are pulled from ongoing work, losing momentum on projects that might matter more
- Sunk cost amplification: After flying people across the country, killing a bad idea becomes politically impossible
This is event-driven delivery theatre.
The hackathon serves external image of activity — "we shipped!" —
while bypassing the process that would tell you whether shipping was the right call.
The real question isn't "can we build this?" — it's "should we build this?" Hackathons answer the first question spectacularly while ignoring the second entirely.
Real product work doesn't need a stage. It needs iteration.
What should happen instead:
- Hypotheses first: Before any code, define what you're testing and what success looks like
- Small bets: Build the minimum version that can validate or invalidate the hypothesis
- Kill fast: If early signals are negative, stop. Don't escalate commitment with events
- Iterate in flow: Teams should be able to test and ship hypotheses in their normal working rhythm
If your organization needs a hackathon to deliver a feature, you have a delivery capability problem, not an innovation problem.
Teams should be able to test hypotheses and ship validated features as part of normal operations. If they can't, the hackathon is a bandaid on a broken engineering culture — and an expensive one.
A hackathon can be valuable — for exploration, team building, or genuine research spikes. But if it's become the default mechanism for shipping "important" features, you're paying for theatre tickets when you need engineering fundamentals.
Diagnostic Questions
If you're evaluating whether hackathons are theatre or strategy, ask:
→ If nobody can articulate the hypothesis or point to changed metrics, you're funding delivery theatre
→ If the answer is about "focus" or "energy," you have a process problem, not a hackathon solution
→ If the answer is "none" — every idea that reached hackathon shipped — you're not doing product discovery, you're doing production theatre
The distinction: Healthy teams iterate through hypotheses continuously. Theatre teams accumulate unvalidated ideas until they need an event to justify shipping them.
The Real Cost
Beyond the flights and hotels, hackathon theatre costs you:
- Opportunity cost: Team time spent on unvalidated features is time not spent on validated ones
- Technical debt: Hackathon code is notoriously hacky — it ships, then someone else maintains it
- False confidence: Leadership sees "shipped features" and assumes product progress is happening
- Cultural damage: Engineers learn that validation doesn't matter — enthusiasm does
The most dangerous outcome isn't a failed feature. It's a shipped feature that creates the illusion of progress while consuming resources that could have gone to actually moving the business forward.
Systemic engineering builds endurance."