Lloyds Banking Group, AI product hack day
A day for designers to build something real and publish it.
I organised a hack day where colleagues used AI to take a product idea to a live website, and built the site that took them through it.
The challenge
I wanted the designers in my team to experience building with AI first-hand. Reading about it and doing it are very different things. The day had to work for first-timers and experienced builders alike.
My role
I planned and ran the day, and built the website and the tools behind it with Claude Code.
What changed
About 30 people took part, and everyone left with something they could share, including people who had never used GitHub. One wrote: “I never worked with GitHub before and it felt so easy!”
What the website did
A warm-up before the day
A guided hello-world exercise, so people arrived having already made something. Everyone did it, and about eight also came to one of two setup clinics.
Three ways to take part
Separate routes for a personal laptop, a work laptop or a phone or tablet, so nobody was left out for lack of the right kit.
Themes to start from
A personal website, a planner for parents doing Elf on the Shelf and a mortgage journey for a fictional bank, or people could bring their own idea.
Safety first
Fictional or public sample content only, stated on the home page and again on its own page. The rule was simple: no bank data in any tool.
What I’d change
Connecting Claude to GitHub was the one real problem. Most people had signed up to GitHub with Google or Apple, so they had no password to enter when Claude asked them to sign in, and the sign-in often opened in a browser that didn’t know them.
It was also the top theme in the feedback. Next time, that step moves into the warm-up, with a clear check that it worked, so it’s done before the day starts.