Media
Second Place at the 2026 Hollard Hackathon
At CyberPro Consulting, we are proud to celebrate the achievements of our consultants who continue to embrace innovation, emerging technologies, and new ways of solving real-world business challenges.
Congratulations to Matimu Chauke, Chris Boshoff and the rest of the team on securing Second Place at the recent Hollard Hackathon!
The Hackathon challenged participants to use AI and emerging technologies to address practical business problems and explore how organisations can operate more efficiently. Matimu’s team focused on a challenge called Dynamic and Configurable Products, with a clear goal: finding a faster and more flexible way for an organisation to bring new products to market.
Rethinking How Products Are Built
Traditionally, launching a new product can involve multiple planning and implementation sprints, detailed business requirements, development, testing, and several rounds of validation.
While these steps are important, much of the work involved in creating a new product can be similar to what has already been done for existing products. Rebuilding the same customer journeys and functionality repeatedly can result in duplicated effort, longer delivery timelines, and increased implementation costs.
The team saw an opportunity to rethink this approach.
Instead of rebuilding an entire product journey from the ground up every time a new product is introduced, their solution focused on reuse, configurability, and speed.
From Development-Driven to Configuration-Driven
The team’s solution centred around creating a dynamic and configurable product framework.
The concept was to separate product-specific rules and configurations from the underlying customer journey. Where multiple products share common journey steps, those existing components can be reused rather than being developed and tested again from scratch.
When introducing a new product, the business could configure the relevant journey, rules, validations, and product-specific behaviours instead of starting an entirely new development cycle.
In simple terms: “Instead of rebuilding a product journey every time, the idea was to make the journey reusable and the product itself configurable.”
This approach has the potential to shift product implementation from being largely development-driven to becoming significantly more configuration-driven.
The Role of AI Agents
AI was an important part of the team’s approach.
Rather than focusing on AI as a standalone tool, the team explored how AI Agents could support practical business and product implementation processes.
AI Agents could assist with interpreting business requirements, identifying existing journey components that could be reused, and helping configure the product-specific rules and behaviours required for a new product.
This creates an opportunity to combine human expertise with AI-assisted processes while continuing to leverage components that have already been implemented and tested.
Designed for Speed to Market
One of the key potential benefits of the solution is the ability to reduce the time required to launch new products.
A configurable approach could reduce duplicated development and testing effort while allowing teams to reuse proven components from existing product journeys.
This could also reduce effort across business analysis, development, and testing, as teams would not necessarily need to redesign and rebuild every stage of the journey for each new product.
Ultimately, the approach could help an organisation:
- Launch new products faster.
- Respond more quickly to market and business opportunities.
- Reduce implementation effort and costs.
- Reuse existing, proven technology and components.
- Improve consistency across product journeys.
- Make better use of existing technology investments.
Innovation Doesn't Always Mean Starting From Scratch
For Matimu, one of the biggest lessons from the Hackathon was that innovation does not always mean building something completely new.
Sometimes, the greatest opportunity comes from understanding what already works, identifying what can be reused, and using technology to make the parts that need to change more flexible.
The experience also gave him a deeper understanding of how AI Agents can be applied to practical business processes, moving beyond the more familiar conversational and chatbot-style applications of AI.
As Matimu explains: “Innovation is not always about building something completely new. Sometimes it is about recognising what already works, making it reusable and changing only what needs to be different.”
Securing second place at the Hollard Hackathon is an outstanding achievement and reflects the team’s ability to combine business thinking, technology, and innovation to address a genuine business challenge.
At CyberPro Consulting, we are proud to have consultants like Matimu and Chris representing us and demonstrating how emerging technologies can be used to rethink traditional approaches and create smarter, more adaptable solutions.
Services
Do you have any questions or queries?