Most workshops end with presentations.
The Valencia Hackathon ended with working softwares.
In July, 35 people from across Synerise — Product, Engineering, Customer Success, Sales, Operations and Legal — came together in Valencia with one goal: build.
For one week, they stepped away from their everyday routines. Fewer meetings. Fewer interruptions. More time to focus on solving real problems.
The challenge was simple: take ideas that had been sitting in notebooks, Slack threads and conversations, and turn them into something people could actually use.
By the end of the week, the teams had generated 36 initiatives.
- 16 became working prototypes and live demos.
- 12 are already moving into further development.
- The remaining ideas are being refined for future work.
Building instead of planning
The Hackathon was designed around a few simple principles.
Anyone could bring an idea. Nothing was assigned from the top down.
Teams formed around the problems they genuinely wanted to solve, not around organizational charts.
The goal wasn't to prepare a roadmap or a presentation for Monday.
The goal was to have something working by Friday.
Customer work never stopped. Mornings remained dedicated to urgent client and partner needs, while afternoons belonged entirely to building.
Every team combined different perspectives. Engineers worked alongside legal specialists. Sales partnered with Product. Customer Success collaborated with Operations.
That diversity became one of the biggest accelerators. Instead of waiting weeks for feedback from another department, the right people were already sitting next to each other.
From everyday problems to working solutions
The prototypes covered nearly every area of the business.
Teams automated repetitive legal processes, built tools to identify upsell opportunities faster, created smarter ways to monitor customer health, simplified onboarding, and developed internal applications that can be launched without a traditional development cycle.
Synerise team explored a completely different way of learning by replacing static documentation with interactive product simulations that behave like the real platform.
Every prototype started with a real challenge someone experienced in their daily work.
Every prototype ended as something colleagues could open, test and improve immediately.
More than prototypes
The biggest outcome wasn't just the software. It was the way people worked together.
For five days, specialists from different teams shared the same goals, made decisions together and solved problems in real time. Ideas evolved faster because everyone needed to build the solution was already in the room.
Another interesting pattern quickly emerged: many teams were solving similar challenges.
Instead of creating dozens of isolated tools, we're now bringing those ideas together into a smaller number of scalable initiatives with broader impact.
What comes next
The Hackathon didn't end when everyone flew home.
The projects are now organized into dedicated workstreams that continue development, with Security and Data Privacy teams involved from the beginning to ensure every solution is ready to scale responsibly.
Several of the prototypes already have the potential to become products or capabilities used across the company.
One week can change a lot
The Valencia Hackathon proved that innovation doesn't always require months of planning. Sometimes it simply requires the right people, enough focus, and the freedom to build. One week. Thirty-five people. Sixteen working prototypes.
That's a great place to start! Can't wait till the next year.