From ideas to reality: BetterCloud’s inaugural Hackathon!

Imagine the bustling streets of Mexico City, the vibrant energy of the people, and the rich aroma of street food wafting through the air. Now, picture this lively scene extending into the office of BetterCloud, where excitement and anticipation filled the air as we prepared for something truly remarkable.

Last month we had the opportunity to do something remarkable at BetterCloud. We hosted our first hackathon in our brand new office in beautiful Mexico City, MX!

But this was no ordinary Hackathon. This was a customer-centric, innovation-filled, and exciting opportunity to host and show our love to two of BetterCloud’s very own customers: JAMF and Merge! There we sat down to listen, gather and welcome their ideas, feedback and challenges as they continue to leverage our product in their organizations and industry.

Streamlining ideas and execution

Our goal for this hackathon was clear: to simplify mundane tasks, automate processes, and enhance ease of use. We called this effort BetterBot, a concept designed to improve customers’ efficiency by shortening the feedback loop and execution time up a realm where they are already spending a great deal of time in: Slack.

Fostering customer relationships through innovation

Over the course of 2 exhilarating days, our team of engineers, product managers, and designers collaborated closely with our customers. We coded, brainstormed, listened, coded some more. The result? We delivered on exactly what we gathered for: Solving for customer needs! 

Here are a few interesting learnings from the event: 

• Our customers are not just our customers, they are legitimately rooting for us to succeed. And if we succeed; they succeed! It’s a Win-Win! 
• Customer driven development is one of the most effective ways to get it closest to right the first time around. 
• Being vulnerable to our customers around our challenges is not a sign of weakness; it’s an opportunity to learn and develop long lasting meaningful and impactful relationships. 
• Our customers are as excited about leveraging our solutions as we are about providing them ways to improve the quality of their every day challenges. 

This hackathon was a testament to the power of open feedback channels. It helped us navigate through technical challenges, understand our customers’ needs, and tailor market solutions at scale.

With over 2500 lines of code written in about 36 hours, we not only solved real industry challenges, but more importantly developed deeper relationships with our customers by listening to their problems first hand and including them on how we can best serve their needs. 

This was the first customer centric Hackathon at BetterCloud, and it surely won’t be the last. This event marks the beginning of a new era of customer-driven development at BetterCloud and we look forward to many more hackathons to come that bring us closer to our customers and drive mutual success.