Running a judges-only debrief right after the event: the fifteen minutes organisers skip

A short debrief among judges, right after results are decided, surfaces process improvements while they're still fresh — and is skipped far more often than it should be.

Written by

Pranjul Rathour

GenAI Engineer at SCULT INDIA, based in Kanpur, India. Builds production RAG systems, fine-tunes open LLMs and ships agentic AI products; has mentored 200+ college developers. Open to GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks.

pranjulrathour41@gmail.com LinkedIn GitHub X Instagram Bluesky Dev.to

At an Integral Startup Foundation hackathon

A short debrief among the judging panel, right after results are finalised, is one of the most useful and most frequently skipped parts of running a hackathon. Everyone's tired and ready to leave, which is exactly why it gets cut — and exactly why the insight is still fresh enough to matter.

What to actually cover in fifteen minutes

Where the rubric felt genuinely ambiguous during real scoring, not just in theory.
Any team or moment that tested the process in an unexpected way (a tie, a conflict of interest, a technical failure during a demo).
One thing that worked well enough to repeat next time, not only what to fix.

Why doing this immediately matters

Waiting a week to gather this feedback loses the specific, concrete detail that makes it useful — by then it's vague impressions instead of exact moments worth fixing.

See what a hackathon judge should include in a post-event report.

— Pranjul Rathour, GenAI Engineer from Kanpur, India. Open to GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks at any campus: pranjulrathour41@gmail.com.