Two-day hackathon to innovate in Cisco collaboration space.

Cisco Collaboration group organized for a hackathon for working in collab spaces to drive innovation in their existing products.

I came across this poster in my building and I got very excited to go to this event. I was particularly interested in this event as it was open for designers too and I had never attended a hackathon before.

I soon asked my fellow colleagues to participate in this event.

We had a week’s time to prepare for our idea.

We found a small group who was interested and everyone pitched their ideas on how we can innovate in our products or using our products.

Our week from there was very intense as we were juggling between our work and dedicate time towards our idea. We dedicated 2 hrs for next 3 days to plan for our solution. We clearly planned out each and everyone’s role with timelines so that we can make the solution and present it on time.

We arrived at the event selected our table and soon we got to know that were the only team that had only designers. We were a little nervous as each one of had no experience in hackathons but we had faith in our solution so we braced ourselves and started working on the design.

It was quite a fun and refreshing experience as we were working on something else for a change and we were collaborating and designing at a very fast pace and most importantly we were enjoying the challenge. We loved the time crunch and the whole vibe in the room where everybody is competing and the energy is the room was very motivating.

We had our responsibilities defined so we went back home at end of day and continued working on our solution. On day 2 we had some teams come to our team and look at our work and they agreed they also faced this problem and loved our solution.

They were surprised to see that we did our research, competitive analysis, wireframing, and finally prototyped our solution in such little time and how we think and arrive at a problem.

We also went to look over other teams and saw how developers see problems and how they solve it. It was interesting to see how much they are able to make it a reality in so little time.

One major difference we saw was that we were focussed on making the experience seamless and delightful while they focused on how to integrate so many diff technologies to arrive at their solution.

We presented our designs to the judges and our efforts were highly appreciated and we were told to point out the current problems in our product offerings to the teams concerned.

The problem and the solution

How we can help Webex Teams users schedule a meeting efficiently without taking them to other scheduling applications like Outlook.

We can help them schedule meetings efficiently using AI and ML without taking them to any other application.