The fun was the point. The value was a byproduct.

I ran an internal project that was a huge success. Then I took that success and almost ruined it.

For some context: the internal AI hackathon was a project we had wanted to trial for a long time, but people got busy and calendars were full. It eventually got handed to me as something to own, and we found the right time to run it.

Phase one: one day, one problem, no pressure

Phase one was simple. One day of company time. Use AI heavily to solve something in your work or personal life that bugs you, then present your findings and show us what you built at the end of the week in a company showcase.

It landed way better than even I could have hoped for. Everyone had fun, and everyone learned an insane amount. In a company like ours, at this moment in AI, watching the whole team level up while genuinely enjoying themselves was something special, and it was really cool to see. The fun was always the point. The learning was a bonus, and we got a lot of it.

We even got a product out of it. Someone on the team was tired of paying too much for a tool that capped how many boards we could run, so their hackathon project was just… rebuilding it. That became WarRoom. It worked. We use it every day now, and we have greatly expanded on it since.

And that is where I made my mistake.

I had fixated on the wrong part of the whole thing. Instead of seeing the value it brought the team, I tried to see the potential value it could bring the company. And that is exactly where I missed the mark.

Value for the whole team is always going to be value for the company.

I zeroed in on that one person’s product instead of the value the whole phase had created across the team. We could build things with this, I thought. Real things. Things we could ship, maybe even sell. So for phase two I leaned all the way in. I made it business-focused. Solve a company problem. Build for the business. Same format, sharper brief.

The buy-in dropped

The buy-in on phase two cratered.

Some of it was timing. People were slammed that week. But if I’m honest, that’s not the real reason. The real reason is I sapped the fun out of it. Even the whole process around it changed to be more serious - a more refined presentation, a more refined goal. I took a fun project that was super relaxed and turned it into more work.

Phase one worked because it was yours, and because it wasn’t serious. You were solving your problem, on your terms, on something you actually cared about. You had the time to be creative and to learn this new stuff in a fun way. Phase two made it the business’s problem, and as soon as it stopped being personal, the energy went with it.

I assumed everyone was wired like me

The deeper mistake underneath that one: I assumed everyone was wired like me. I loved phase two. Solving a work problem in work hours is genuinely fun for me - that’s my personality. So I projected that onto everyone else and built the whole phase around it. But people are different. They have their own values, their own idea of what’s worth their time. Pushing my own thoughts and feelings onto a project the whole team has to buy into was never going to land.

I missed the mark. I really missed the mark.

Missing the mark isn’t the same as failing

But here’s the part I want you to take away: missing the mark isn’t the same as failing.

I had a chat with my boss about it afterwards, took the feedback on the chin, and we go into phase three smarter for it. When you run experiments, you’re going to get some of them wrong. That’s not a bug in the process. That is the process.

What actually came out of it

And even the “wrong” phase gave us something real. You only get one day in a hackathon, so you’re forced to experiment - to lean on AI hard, to find scrappy processes that just work under pressure. We’ve since taken those scrappy processes, refined them, and turned them into proper ways of working across One Eleven. The AI literacy across the team has gone up tenfold. It’s turned from developers and people using AI haphazardly into a company that is churning out some serious, AI-enhanced engineering.

All of it came out of a thing whose only real goal was to have fun.

The fun was the north star

Which is the whole lesson. The fun was the north star. The product, the upskilling, the new processes - every bit of that was a byproduct. The moment I mistook the byproduct for the point, I lost the thing that made it work in the first place.

And here’s the part I keep coming back to. Not everything has to add value to the company. Giving people the space to have fun and improve their own lives at work is worth it on its own. We’re individuals first, and adding value to us matters.

Run small internal stuff like this

If there’s one thing I’d pass on, it’s this: run small internal stuff like this. Give your team one day a month to build something with no strings attached. The value it’s added here has been well worth it, and most of that value showed up in places I never planned for.

Phase three, we go back to what mattered.