HackWars Enterprise Partnership - American Airlines
HackWars was an internal hackathon at American Airlines with over 1,000 participants and high creative energy. While the event consistently produced exciting ideas, few prototypes progressed beyond the weekend. The core challenge was not innovation, but adoption. I identified an opportunity to integrate business leadership earlier in the process to create real pathways from idea to pilot.
My Role
Sr. Product Manager, Customer Airport Automation
Partnering with the Emerging Technology team, I conceived and led an enterprise-wide model to formally integrate business stakeholders into HackWars. Beyond my core role, I designed the structure, secured executive sponsorship, and operationalized a repeatable framework that connected innovation teams with real business problems, decision-makers, and post-event ownership.
Idea Conception
While participating in HackWars 2018, I observed that teams lacked access to business context, constraints, and decision-makers. Ideas were creative, but often disconnected from enterprise priorities. I proposed a model that embedded business leaders directly into the hackathon experience, transforming them from judges at the end to active partners throughout the process.
Business Sponsorship
I built alignment with Emerging Technology leaders and senior business stakeholders to sponsor and guide hackathon teams. This resulted in 12 business units securing Director-level or above leaders to participate as business consultants. These leaders provided real-time feedback, clarified feasibility and value, and committed to next steps beyond the event.
Preliminary Judging
I designed and facilitated structured evaluation sessions focused on viability, impact, and ownership rather than technical novelty alone. This allowed teams to prioritize prototypes with clear business value and identify pilot candidates early, which would make it to the final round of judging and further reduce post-event ambiguity by increasing leadership confidence in outcomes.
Approach
Building on early research and direct participation in HackWars, I focused on shifting the event from a creativity-first model to a business-aligned innovation pipeline. My approach emphasized early alignment, structured evaluation, and leadership engagement while preserving the energy and openness that made HackWars successful.
Outcomes
Expanded enterprise participation
HackWars participation grew to include 12 business units with active leadership involvement, strengthening cross-functional collaboration
Increased viable solutions
Leader-approved prototypes increased from an average of ~2 per year to 15 solutions with defined pathways to pilot
Established an innovation pipeline
HackWars evolved from a stand-alone event into a recognized enterprise innovation mechanism tied to real business priorities.
Reflection
​This initiative demonstrated the impact of design strategy in ambiguous and fast-moving environments. Rather than delivering a single MVP, my contribution was building the infrastructure for clarity by aligning stakeholders, introducing shared evaluation criteria, and creating momentum beyond the event. The result was not just better ideas, but better decisions, stronger engagement and ownership, and a repeatable model for enterprise innovation