20+ Teams, 40 hacks, one week: Inside Customer.io's 2025 hackathon 

Picture this: every engineer, product manager, and designer at Customer.io suddenly abandons their carefully planned sprints and quarterly roadmaps. For one entire week, 250+ people organize into self-formed teams with a single shared mission—tackle the improvements and creative ideas that have been percolating in the back of their minds.

That's exactly what happened during our 2025 hackathon. Our entire EPD organization hit pause on business as usual to let creativity run wild. No competing priorities. No, 'let's table this for Q2.' Just smart people choosing the problems they'd been itching to solve and the experiments they'd been wanting to try.

The result? Features shipped to production that customers are already using, plus a reminder of what becomes possible when you remove the usual constraints. More importantly, it revealed how we want to work when given complete creative freedom—and the insights are already reshaping our roadmap for Q4 and beyond.

Unsurprisingly, if you give curious people permission to ignore their plans, they'll organize around the work that really matters.

Engineers, product managers, and designers gravitated toward shared frustrations—those customer requests that had been sitting in the "someday" pile, the workflow pain points everyone knew needed fixing, the quality-of-life improvements that make a real difference but never quite make it to the top of a roadmap.

Over 20 teams formed organically around 40+ different hacks. Some were ambitious technical experiments. Others tackled the seemingly small problems that drive users crazy every day. All of them came from listening to what people actually needed.

The "sticky note team" formed because too many people had fielded the same customer complaint: notes that detach from workflow actions when campaigns evolve. It's the kind of friction that doesn't break anything but makes building campaigns more annoying than it needs to be.

A designer who rarely works with backend systems paired up with engineers to tackle workspace access confusion—because they'd seen too many new users get stuck trying to figure out why they couldn't access their account.

The Design Studio team couldn't ignore customer requests for better layer management anymore. When you're building complex email designs, being able to rename layers isn't flashy, but it matters every single time you open a template.

The cross-functional collaboration wasn’t forced or assigned, it happened naturally when people worked to create solutions for issues they really cared about.

Here are some of the standout improvements that came out of hackathon week and are already live:

These solve the workflow chaos that can happen when campaigns evolve. Now when you attach a note to a workflow action, it stays connected even when you reorganize your campaign. No more hunting down orphaned notes or manually repositioning everything.

Halloween workflow stickers brought some seasonal fun to campaign building. Teams could add bats, ghosts, and pumpkins to their workflows for a little surprise and delight. It's the kind of playful touch that shows hackathons don't have to be all serious business—and we're already brainstorming ideas for future holidays.

Re-namable layers give teams better organization for complex email designs.

Layers previously inherited the name of their standard component. Meaning users often would see things like:

Paragraph

Paragraph

Paragraph

Paragraph

....which isn't the most helpful if you're looking to find a specific section of your email. Now, marketers can name the layers as they build. Creating a clear matrix to identify sections of their email.

This feature lets account administrators audit their team members without relying on support. What used to require a support ticket is now self-service—exactly how software should work.

The features that didn't ship aren't forgotten. They're informing our 2026 roadmap, helping us understand what's technically feasible, what delivers the most value, and where we should invest next.

When you give people freedom to work on anything, what do they choose? At Customer.io, they chose customer problems over pet projects, collaboration over competition, and shipping over perfection. The hackathon format removes the barriers that usually get in the way.

The hackathon also shows how we balance customer-driven innovation with strategic planning. Our regular roadmap focuses on big-picture platform improvements and long-term competitive advantages. The hackathon catches the important-but-not-urgent improvements that make the platform better to use every day.

Most importantly, it creates a feedback loop between customer requests and actual development that's faster than traditional planning cycles. When someone on the team hears the same customer request multiple times, they know it might be perfect hackathon material.

Teams that formed during the hackathon often continue collaborating on regular projects. Ideas that didn't ship become reference points for future development discussions. The energy and experimental mindset influence how we approach challenges throughout the year.

These features mentioned above are live now, making Customer.io a little bit better for the teams who use it every day.

We're already planning how to carry this energy into our regular product development. Some of the cross-functional partnerships that emerged will continue. Some of the technical approaches teams discovered will influence bigger projects. Some of the "failed" experiments taught us valuable lessons about what not to pursue.

If you're someone who gets excited about working this way—combining strategic thinking with hands-on problem-solving, collaborating across functions to ship things that matter, building software that real people use to do their best work—this is what it's like to build at Customer.io (http://customer.io/). Not just during hackathon week, but every week.

Check out our open roles, or learn a bit about our platform here.