Joshua Douglas, SVP of Product & Engineering
My career has been filled with amazing companies, great teams and missions that have a serious impact on society. That said, the last 3 years here at Xtract One have been nothing short of exhilarating. As an AI-powered weapons detection company, innovation is the engine behind everything we do. The technology we build has to stay ahead of the environments it protects, and that requires a team that’s always looking for what’s possible next. That bar was raised again by our team at our first hackathon.
A hackathon is a short, intensive sprint where teams build a working prototype from scratch under a hard deadline, usually somewhere between 24 and 48 hours. There’s no extended design phase and no months of iteration. Just a defined problem space, a deadline, and whatever a small team can build, test, and demonstrate before time runs out. The format originated in software engineering as a way to compress the normal pace of development into something fast enough to surface ideas that would otherwise take months to reach a prototype stage, and it’s since become a fixture at technology companies of every size.
Many hackathons produce energy and a few clever demos that don’t survive past the closing presentation. The reasons are usually the same: ideas built without real customer context, no follow-through plan once the event ends, and judging that rewards technical cleverness over genuine usefulness. We designed this one to avoid all of that.
I wanted to find out whether we could build something different at Xtract One. We did, and the results told me something about this team that I was not expecting to learn from a 48-hour event.
Why We Ran This in the First Place
Our day-to-day roadmap is predicated on customer pain points, partner pain points, and the operational priorities those create. That’s exactly how it should work, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. But it also means our teams rarely get the time for real freedom of expression and creative thought. The engineers and product people we have here understand our customers, our hardware, and the shortcomings in their daily journeys at a level of depth that doesn’t always have a natural place to go on a normal roadmap cycle. There is no ticket for “the thing nobody has asked for yet because nobody knew it was possible.”
I wanted to give our team the opportunity to show up and bring everything they have to the table, and to do it alongside people they don’t normally work with day to day. Our company builds a hardware solution layered with software and machine learning, and most of our engineers spend their time deep inside one of those three disciplines. A hackathon gave us a structured reason to break that down for 48 hours and see what happens when people who don’t normally collaborate are forced to build something together.
Six cross-functional teams of three to five people took on the challenge. Every team had to include a mix of hardware, software, and machine learning expertise, because that mix is what our product actually is, and because building across those disciplines was exactly the kind of teamwork and bonding we wanted this event to produce. Beyond the mechanics of team composition, the goal was cultural. We wanted to see whether our people would compete hard and still show up for each other, because that combination is rare and worth protecting if it exists.
What Made This Different From the Hackathons That Don’t Work
We built this event around the three failure points that explain why most corporate hackathons go nowhere.
The first is the judging structure. Our panel included representatives from marketing, customer success, finance, and sales, alongside product, engineering, and our CEO. A team could not win this competition purely on technical sophistication. They had to make the case that what they built mattered to a real customer, in language that someone outside engineering could understand and believe in. An idea that only impresses other engineers was never going to be enough here.
The second is the demonstration requirement. Every team had to do more than pitch a concept on a slide. They had to build working code, working hardware modifications, and working machine learning improvements, and then demonstrate all of it live during a final presentation that explained why they built it, how it functioned, and why it mattered now rather than later, which separated genuinely useful ideas from clever ones that would never survive contact with a real deployment.
The third, and the one I found most meaningful, was watching how the teams treated each other. This was a competition, and every team wanted to win. But during the event, I watched teams help other teams work through technical shortcomings they were running into, specifically because they wanted the best idea to win the competition, not necessarily their own team’s idea. It’s not something I’ve seen at other hackathons I have run in my career, where teams tended to guard their progress closely and treat every other team as a direct threat. Watching that dynamic play out here told me something real and specific about the culture we have built at this company.
What Actually Came Out of It
The innovation that came out of these 48 hours went further and faster than I expected, especially for a first attempt at running an event like this internally. Several teams tackled multiple complex problems simultaneously, working across Xtract One Gateway, SmartGateway, and Xtract One View, treating all three as platforms they could build directly on top of rather than fixed products they had to work around.
In the process, several teams identified shortcomings in our existing products that nobody on the product side had flagged before this event happened, which is the detail I find most significant out of everything that came out of this weekend. Customer feedback tells you what people already know to ask for, because they can only describe a problem they have consciously identified. It almost never surfaces the thing nobody has noticed yet, because the people experiencing it have no frame of reference for how it could be different. Finding that kind of gap requires someone close enough to the system’s internal workings to see it, and curious enough to go looking for it without being asked.
Out of six teams, we are currently reviewing three separate patent submissions arising directly from what was built during this event. Our legal team has already reviewed several of them in detail, and I’ve real confidence they will move forward successfully. That tells me our innovation shows up not only on paper in strategy decks, but in working reality that holds up under scrutiny.
Where the Ideas Go From Here
The winning team earned a spot directly on our official product roadmap, which means we are now driving innovation into our products that none of us had even conceived of before this event took place. But the winning project was not the only genuinely good idea to come out of this. Every single team produced something worth using in some form, and our product managers are currently working through how to fold that broader innovation into what we are already building, rather than letting strong ideas become demos that everyone remembers fondly for a few weeks and nobody ever follows up on. My expectation is that we will find a home for all six projects in some form over the coming months.
Why This Matters Beyond the Event Itself
Three years ago, innovation at this company felt somewhat stagnant, and that’s not an easy thing to admit but it’s true. Today, every engineer who walks into the building shows up thinking about how to build something genuinely good for the customer in front of them. The culture of innovation that produced these results runs through everything we build. It’s what drove the development and launch of Xtract One Gateway, a purpose-built AI detection system that solves problems conventional technology was designed around rather than for. What this hackathon did was give that culture a structure to operate in, and what came back from 48 hours confirmed that it runs deep across the entire team.
We don’t want to be the company that shows up with a minor new feature in a dashboard and calls it innovation. We want to show up with technology that other companies cannot easily compete against, because we built it with people who understand the underlying problem at a depth that simply doesn’t come from a customer feature request alone. We don’t just think about the simplest thing we could do to check a box. We think seriously about how to change the way people experience safety in the buildings they walk into every day, and I genuinely believe that mindset is what makes this team gritty, and what makes this company a place worth building a career.
I have led a number of engineering and product teams across my career. This is the best one I have ever led, and our products simply would not exist in their current form without the people who make up this team.
I can’t wait to run this again.