Freshworks hackathon sparks 74 new product ideas
Global teams of Freshworks employees focused on innovation, process improvements, and more
In a brightly lit conference hall at Freshworks’ Chennai office, hundreds of employees in engineering, support, and solution engineering hunched over laptops in small groups. Every so often, the room breaks out in cheers from several groups.
These were among the 146 teams that made up some of the 702 employees around the world who participated in Freshworks’ global hackathon February 5—7. They developed working prototypes that could become part of Freshworks’ product roadmaps in 2025 and years to come. Of the 183 ideas proposed, 74 were deemed by the judges worthy of development.
“What stood out to me was how teams approached problems from multiple angles, considering both immediate impact and long-term scalability,” notes Pramoth Rajavel, director of program management at Freshworks and one of the 103 event judges.
Freshworks CTO Murali Swaminathan addresses the participants.
The teams were given five categories of focus: innovate and disrupt, process optimization, developer empowerment, customer centricity, and future-proofing.
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The winning prototypes focused on innovations in CX and EX:
First place
Project: “Actionable Insights Dashboard,” by the Merry Maestros of Metrics Mastery team, enables customers to lower costs, reduce risks, and achieve ROI while driving stickiness and upsell opportunities. Each member of the team won a Macbook Air M3.
Team members: Sherral Day, Stan Tusinski, Bob Hart, and John Hyde.
Second place
Project: “Interactive Visual Assistance” by Team Pikachu, a self-service virtual assistant that empowers customers to onboard, learn, and resolve issues independently, reducing reliance on support agents. Prizes for second place were an Ather 450S electric scooter for every member of the team.
Team members: Sneha Ravindran, Gundla Premsai, Pragadeesh K, Vishal Damgude, and Mohan Venkatakrishnan.
Third place
Project: “Turbo desk” prototype from Team Black Squad, which offers a customizable ticket list view based on personal preferences that boosts agent productivity and experience. Each member of the team won a $1,000 voucher.
Team members: Swaminathan Chandrasekaran, Arun Saravanan, Bharatram Santhanakrishnan, Vaishnav Thirumoorthy, and Arivoli Tamilarasan.
Members of ‘Team Black Squad’ collect their prize from Freshworks CTO Murali Swaminathan.
What’s next? The ten teams that made it to the final round of the hackathon will have a chance to present their prototypes this year to Freshworks Chief Technology Officer Murali Swaminathan and Chief Product Officer Srinivasan Raghavan, who will further evaluate the ideas and recommend them for integration into Freshworks’ products.
