It started with a simple idea from James Tyack: “What if we hosted a hackathon at ELC Annual?” The result was a unique experiment where 14 senior engineering leaders stepped away from strategy to build and ship functioning apps in one weekend, unlocking new insights on AI-native workflows, "vibe coding," and the future of engineering. In this episode, we deconstruct the entire hackathon operational playbook, sharing lessons on everything from “best failure awards” and async collaboration structures to structuring ideation periods for maximum business alignment. Beyond the logistics, we explore how getting hands-on helped these leaders overcome imposter syndrome and why "rolling up your sleeves" is now a prerequisite for leading effective engineering teams. Plus, James shares how he plans to evolve the hackathon format at ELC and beyond. If you’ve been curious about leveraging hackathons to drive innovation, expose your team to new tools, or evolve how your org builds, this episode provides the blueprint for successful implementation.
James is an engineering manager with a passion for people, technology, and learning. He's built and led distributed, diverse teams of engineers across locations and timezones for 10 years. James believes strongly in the value of diversity and championing a sense of belonging for everyone, from day 1. He's well versed in growth strategy, chaos engineering, major incident response, and blameless practice, and culture grounded by trust and psychological safety. He leads the Growth Acquisition team at Coursera where he's proud to be part of an organization that's transforming lives through learning. Previously, James enjoyed building and leading the Growth and Integrations engineering teams at PagerDuty.
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SHOW NOTES:
- The results of ELC’s first-ever hackathon: 14 leaders shipping fully functional apps (2:21)
- The “Scrappy” beginning: Extending the invitation and early community engagement (4:50)
- The most surprising insights: Problem solving for “life outside of work” and micromanaging AI agents (5:42)
- Navigating the shifting boundaries between product, engineering, and management roles (8:43)
- James’ personal journey: Building 5 apps in 5 hours to stay relevant and relatable (10:05)
- Deconstructing the Hackathon structure: The “Take-Home Assignment” approach (16:16)
- The Hall of Fame: Creating artifacts to recognize contribution (18:00)
- Iterating on the format: Pivots made for the next hackathon iteration at Coursera (18:47)
- The importance of a 2-week ideation period for alignment (20:59)
- A recap of the playbook: Seeding ideas, easy tooling, and safe deployment (22:15)
- The future of hackathons: Cross-functional participation beyond engineering (26:46)
- Rapid Fire Questions (28:15)
This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:
Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host
Jerry Li - Co-Host
Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/
Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/
Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast 
