The story of our latest Hackathon: Content Formatting Vs VectorIA (The Ideation Assistant)

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Hackathons move you through all emotions possible: love, pain, fulfillment, and everything in between. They are simply great!  They allow our mostly remote teams to choose challenging projects to work on from scratch or to build on our existing apps. We initially planned for a yearly hackathon, but after the overwhelming success of our first two, we thought, "Heck, let's make it a quarterly tradition!".

About this latest Hackathon

With this latest Hackathon, we simply wanted to jump on the AI bandwagon to be honest (not just for the sake of it, of course). The challenge was simple: Find ways to incorporate AI into a brand new app or an existing one. So, during the initial discussions, the overwhelming majority settled for two main projects: Content Formatting and Ideation. And since we are a democracy, we created two teams based on the votes. Two dynamic teams faced off: Team VectorIA led by our CPO Melek, and Team Content Formatting led by our CTO Skander. 

The venue: From remote to in-person

This Hackathon was planned to last two weeks. We kicked off everything remotely for the first one. The reason? Well, we learned from other hackathons. We decided to give everyone time to get prepared, understand the market, pain points, and generally, do their own thing, then proceed with insightful brainstorming sessions. That’s mostly the first week.

Second week, we were all at the office. And this is when things got serious. Mostly both teams had an idea on what their app would look like and started with initial sketches, then design, and development.

How each team approached the Hackathon

Team Content Formatting:

Skander and his team conducted a thorough study of existing content formatting capabilities in Confluence as well as apps to understand the gaps and opportunities. Additionally, the team conducted interviews with our existing customer base to learn more about their challenges, and especially the content formatting repetitive tasks they feel AI can enhance, or take over completely. 

 

The aim has been to add an AI layer to our app Content Formatting Toolkit for Confluence that was not only innovative but also perfectly aligned with specific use cases and the needs of our target audience.

Team VectorIA:

Melek’s team (my team) took a similar approach, diving deep into market research to identify how AI could enhance the ideation process as a whole. There are two targets here, of course, the idea creator and evaluator. The focus has been placed on creating a solution that would act as an assistant when creating, grooming and evaluating ideas.

 

The apps

Both teams came up with promising apps. While we don't want to reveal too much just yet, we can say that these apps hold great promise and align perfectly with our existing apps and vision. 

Team Content Formatting brought up an innovative way to save content creators time and guide them to create Confluence pages in a quick and timely manner. VectorIA, on the other hand, embodies the work ideation assistant to the T. It helps users create, organize, and evaluate ideas.

And the winner is...

Team Content Formatting emerged victorious! (No surprise here as Skander always wins even in team building events 😂). The app scored high in simplicity and responsiveness to customer needs. VectorIA, on the other hand, was the more ambitious and complex project that we believe will yield great results.

What we learned

This hackathon was a learning experience for all of us. We discovered new ways to integrate AI into our apps, tested our limits (and Forge’s limits 😀), and strengthened our collaboration skills. Most importantly, we were reminded of the power of teamwork and friendship (you know the meme).

Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to enhance our apps and push the boundaries of what’s possible at Vectors! The apps are still at the MVP stage, if you would like to test them for yourself just let us know in the comments section below. We really value your feedback.