Hackathon win

So, what do you get when you lock a bunch of developers, product owners, solutions architects, solutions designers, and QAs in a room for 48 hours?

Apparently, you get a 🏆 1st place win at the internal GCash PSD Hackathon!

Incredibly proud of my team, Tech Tribe MaGcians who worked on the theme “Magic Moments”

The premise is simple, you know how tech companies (ours included) love to ship features? And then ... nobody uses them?

GCash has 90M+ users, but we see a staggering drop-off when people try advanced features like GSave or GInvest. They get curious, open it, get confused or intimidated by the commitment, and they're gone.

There's a common tech trend to "growth hack" users into clicking things and "move fast and break things." We decided to do the exact opposite.

Our project, GPlayground, was built on a simple motto:

“Experience before engagement.”

To make this possible we built an AI-powered "Sandbox Creator" that lets our product teams build these tutorials just by uploading designs, plus a full analytics dashboard to track if it's actually working and a whole lot of other features that are too long to mention here.

We were also highly encouraged to use AI tools like Cursor to accelerate development. Honestly, it was eye-opening. Seeing the sheer productivity boost firsthand was insightful and it’s a huge reason we were able to build such a complex project in just 48 hours!

Of course, a win like this is never a solo act. This was a massive team effort.

A huge shoutout to the brilliant devs I had the honor of leading, Rafael Nico Maniquiz, Ralph Daniel Honra, and Aaron Doncillo . You’re all an absolute package for building this so fast.

To sir Jay Velasco who basically sparked the winning idea for us devs to build upon. To sir Richard John Delos Santos and sir Kirby Lacuesta for jumping straight into ideation and helping us design a solution that actually made sense.

Sir Marc Kris Reyes and Ma'am Mary Ellaine Valera were lifesavers, constantly checking our work and telling us (nicely) what to fix to make our product as polished as possible for the demo.

A massive thank you to Loreine Adriana B. and Nathan Yeung. They led the entire charge, spearheaded the ideation from the second the problem was dropped and made sure we developers had a clear path to build on Day 1.

And finally, to our most esteemed mentor Jose Peter Aquino who has been incredibly invested and always ready with the valuable feedback to keep us on track.

Lastly, having won and lost my fair share of Hackathons before, I'll say this: the trophy is nice, but the real prize is the experience.

The pressure, the "oh-crap-we-have-3-hours-left" panic, and building something from nothing ... that's the good stuff.

Until the next one!