Summary

Hackathons are a crucial part of fostering innovation and collaboration at Grafana Labs, a leading open-source software company with ~1,400 employees and a remote, global workforce. Less than four years after its first hackathon, Grafana Labs scaled its program to host four company-wide events per year, each attracting hundreds of participants from across the organization, led by Global Internal Events Manager Juan Ruszem. 

This case study explores how Grafana Labs uses Devpost for Teams (DFT) to centralize hackathon management, ignite cross-departmental collaboration across the globe, and fuel innovation that directly integrates into its products.

“Over a quarter of our hackathon projects have shipped, and there is another 10-15% that have made their way onto the roadmap,” said Juan Ruszem, Grafana Labs.

Table of contents

• Company profile
• Key considerations and goals
• Challenges
• The solution

Company profile

Grafana Labs is founded on the principles of open source, open standards, open ecosystems, and open culture. Its open observability cloud enables organizations to see, understand, and act on all their disparate data, making their software run better. Grafana Labs champions innovation and empowering its employees to explore new ideas and contribute to its evolving product roadmap. 

To achieve this, Grafana Labs initiated its internal hackathon program in August 2021 and is now getting ready to run its 13th company-wide hackathon.

“Our hackathons were born out of a desire to foster innovation within the company,” said Juan Ruszem, Grafana Labs. 

“They present us with the ability to set time aside for our employees to experiment with new ideas and encourage them to think outside the box and the usual constraints of product roadmaps,” he added.

Key considerations and goals

• Keep planning organized and standardized across hackathons
• Foster innovation and allow employees to experiment with new ideas
• Make hackathons accessible to global teams and ignite cross-team collaboration
• Create a great hackathon experience for employees

The challenge: Fragmented tools couldn’t scale with growing participation

Before Devpost for Teams (DFT), Grafana Labs’ internal hackathon management was a fragmented process, and as the program scaled to support multiple hackathons per year for its growing global workforce, it needed a more centralized solution. 

“This led to a lot of lift from the administrative side as well as a lot of juggling from our participants’ perspective,” said Juan. 

Participants faced challenges, like needing to navigate multiple platforms for registration and project submission, which impacted the overall experience. 

Grafana Labs recognized the need for a centralized platform to manage its growing hackathon program and provide a seamless experience for both organizers and participants, which is why the team chose DFT to standardize their process.

The solution: DFT helped scale Grafana Labs’ company-wide hackathon program

Since using Devpost for Teams (DFT), Grafana successfully standardized its hackathon program to help grow it from three to four hackathons annually. Here’s what the team at Grafana highlighted from their first two hackathons using DFT:

• 25% of hackathon projects shipped or are in progress
• Additional 10-15% of hackathon projects were added to roadmap
• Scaled the hackathon program from 3 to 4 company-wide events per year
• Centralized hackathon management
• Streamlined participant experience
• Enabled cross-team collaboration

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#1 Hackathon projects became products

Grafana Labs' hackathon program has a significant and direct impact on its product roadmap.

"From our hackathons run on Devpost, we've had a quarter of our projects ship, and another 10-15% have made their way onto the roadmap," said Juan Ruszem, Grafana Labs.

With Devpost for Teams, Grafana Labs has grown its hackathon program and now runs four hackathons per year. The ongoing hackathon project submissions help fuel the company's product pipeline by generating new ideas and potential features that can be integrated into its offerings. This shows the clear value Grafana Labs gets from its hackathon program, proving it's effective at creating new ideas that directly help the company's products.

Juan shared a tip on how his team structures their hackathons to maximize meaningful submissions:

“We run our hackathons with two themes each time: one is for general hackathon project ideas and the second theme is usually something more defined, like artificial intelligence,” he said. “Having two themes ensures that there is a wide variety of submissions and that participants get an option in how they want to tackle what they work on for the hackathon.”

#2 Centralized and standardized hackathon management

Devpost for Teams (DFT) allows Grafana Labs to centralize all hackathon details, registrations, project submissions, and judging. This standardization was critical for scaling the program, ensuring consistency for repeat participants, and significantly reducing the manual effort previously required from organizers. As a result, launching a hackathon became much quicker and more efficient.

“DFT provided us with an opportunity to create a more cohesive and organized experience,” said Juan Ruszem, Grafana Labs. 

“Having all of the hackathon information in the same place where submissions and preliminary judging occur has significantly reduced not only the amount of work needed to get a hackathon up and running, but also reduced the burden on participants to follow steps across platforms in order to register and submit their projects,” he added.

#3 Enabled cross-team collaboration and got non-participants involved

One of the company's main goals with its hackathons is to ignite cross-team collaboration.

“Hackathons give us an opportunity to increase collaboration across departments so that folks from anywhere across the organization could team up to address interesting challenges,” said Juan Ruszem, Grafana Labs.

This emphasis on collaboration extends beyond just hackathon participants; the centralized Project Gallery on Devpost for Teams (DFT) means that non-participants can view projects, promoting wider awareness and engagement.

“This makes it easier for people not participating to still be able to see what projects are being worked on without having to do much digging,” said Juan. “This also ties into our value of transparency, as all participants can browse other teams’ submissions.”

#4 Streamlined participant experience

Devpost for Teams’ (DFT) unified platform created a more cohesive and organized experience for participants, according to Juan. The previous juggling across multiple tools was eliminated, lessening the burden on participants and allowing them to focus more on project development.

“As an added bonus, DFT’s features like finding a teammate and skill matching added elements that we were previously unable to offer in a streamlined way,” said Juan Ruszem, Grafana Labs. 

These features encourage diverse team formation and cross-departmental collaboration, which is a key goal for Grafana Labs' hackathons. To help achieve this goal, the company also adopted a week-long hackathon format to accommodate cross-timezone collaboration and ensure ample time for project completion, further enhancing the participant experience.

“When planning our hackathons, we work with timelines in mind,” said Juan. “We have to ensure that we allow enough time between launching our hackathon site and the submission deadline in order to allow employees in different time zones to collaborate and also have ample time to get their idea off the ground.”

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Ready to drive business results from your next hackathon?

Grafana Labs' results speak for themselves: 35-40% of hackathon projects ship or make it onto the product roadmap. By using Devpost for Teams, the team transformed hackathons from a logistical headache into a strategic product development pipeline that directly drives business results.

The impact was immediate—streamlined management, better participant experience, and most importantly, real business outcomes that justify every hour invested in hackathons.

Ready to turn your hackathons into a product pipeline? See how Devpost for Teams can deliver the same results for your organization. Book a demo today and start shipping hackathon projects with long-lasting impact.