Hackathons are where I first realised how much I enjoy product thinking.
E-waste facility locator: where my product thinking started
Hackathons are where I first realised how much I enjoy product thinking. I liked coming up with features, turning an idea into something a team could build, and bringing people together to make it happen. Our e-waste facility locator at Smart India Hackathon 2023 was an early example of that.
The problem
Our challenge was to create an e-waste facility locator. I kept thinking about the gap between having old electronics and knowing where to take them. A useful product had to make that next step clear.
Building as a team
I worked with my three teammates. We started at our college's internal hackathon and went on to the SIH Grand Finale. The work mixed brainstorming and coding, and it let me see my orchestration skills in practice: bringing the team around an idea and moving it towards something we could show.
The grand finale
36 hours at P.R. Pote Patil College, Amravati, December 19-20, 2023. We finished as Runner-Up at our nodal centre.
What I took from it
It wasn't only writing code. I enjoyed thinking of features and working with a team to bring them to life. It was an early sign that product work suited me, and that coordinating people and ideas was a strength I wanted to keep developing.