Project Management Tips for Hackathons

# Management tips

• From watching my teacher's story of how he won hackathons, I pulled out a few key points

# The strongest enemy

The slide-deck crowd is the strongest enemy at any Hackathon.

• Once you reach that conclusion, you can pin down what actually makes a project succeed in a competition.

• The key is the Demo you show the judges, and a great deck is one of the biggest things that earns your project extra points.

• Getting hung up on other features and side tasks usually means burning the candle at both ends and doing neither well.

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# So how do you manage a project without breaking a sweat?

Draw the target first, then shoot the arrow. That's how you hit steady and true

1. First, define what success looks like for the project
2. Based on that "success," rank what the project needs to do first
3. Cut the Deadline by 1/3, leaving only 2/3, to ramp up the pressure on yourself and save time for testing so your project has more slack
4. Build the main trunk first, then worry about side branches (Must / Should Have) -->(Extra)
5. At the end, cut features that aren't necessary and might trip you up
6. Polish the Demo more thoroughly to give the project extra points

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# Closing thoughts

• As long as you plan the project step by step and use a few small management tricks, projects can get done faster and more successfully

• You can use this approach for sprinting on regular projects too; working this way actually makes it easier to get into a flow state