What an AI hackathon taught us about being builders, not just writers

When 1Password announced we were having an AI-themed Hackathon, my first thought was that the content design team had to be involved. Over the last few months, our content design team saw massive changes not only in tech but also in our ways of working. It felt like everything was shifting to AI all at once: how we designed, prototyped, built new features, and collaborated across teams. I didn’t want our team watching from the sidelines. Content designers often do great work, but in the margins of larger design projects. This felt like the perfect moment to show how words can shape a great UX experience. And ironically, being the anointed “wordsmiths” of 1Password’s products is just a fraction of what we do. Content designers shape page structure, look at the information architecture, create journey maps, and are systems thinkers at heart. We look at: what users need to know, when they need to know it, how information shows up, and how each action builds towards the best possible outcome for the customer. AI lets us take those skills and supercharge them. Content designers can use AI to prototype the flow of information in real time. When you’re building with AI, you can look beyond a single screen or interaction to see how a user’s entire journey unfolds. That’s exactly the kind of thinking that content designers do best, and the Hackathon was our chance to prove it. The opportunity: Uncovering value in 1Password SaaS Manager Participating was the easy part. We have a small but mighty content design team which include the talented Amar Majali and Grace O’Neil, who I happily “voluntold” into the hackathon. Our design leadership was genuinely excited to see what three content designers could do with AI. The hard part was deciding what area of the product we wanted to improve. We tossed around a few ideas but came across a report that struck our interest: the SaaS Manager Savings tracker. It’s a report that shows reclaimed licenses and calculates cost savings. This report is a goldmine for any B2B admin trying to evaluate the value of their investment in 1Password SaaS Manager. Let’s take, for example, an imaginary B2B admin. We'll call him Jerry. Like most admins, Jerry wears a lot of hats. He’s responsible for optimizing SaaS spend, he prepares for renewals and budget reviews, and he needs to communicate the value of tooling to his executives. The Savings tracker can help him come up with that value, but it’s buried inside the product. Even if he was to find the table, sharing it with his team wouldn’t be an automatic home run, since it’s all numbers with little context. For the three of us content designers, this is where the lightbulb went off. We already had the raw materials from the report. Our challenge was making it easier for Jerry to show how 1Password was saving his company money. If you haven’t guessed it from Jerry’s name, we lovingly called our Hackathon project “Show me the money.” The name was a bit cheeky, but it summed up the design problem nicely: how might we make SaaS Manager’s value impossible to miss and effortless to prove? The team needed to use our UX thinking to answer three core questions: How does Jerry easily discover the value of his savings? (aka “the money”) How can he optimize to save more money? How can he share wins with his team and stakeholders? We quickly realized that answering these questions required us to think about Jerry’s entire journey, and find opportunities to AI most effectively. What we learned For a hackathon team with zero engineers, creating a workable prototype was a tall order. Our team set out to build a vibe-coded prototype hosted on the Knox playground (a playground created by our amazing Design Systems team). This meant getting set up in GitHub and Cursor, setting up our branch so we could collaborate, and entering commands in terminal while praying that it all worked out. As cliché as it sounds, we were building the plane while flying it: learning how to be pseudo developers while still using content design thinking to build out Jerry’s experience. If I’m being completely honest, it was messy and occasionally terrifying. But somewhere in the chaos, the team stopped worrying about whether we were entering the right Git commands and started learning how to build together. Here’s what we learned: Learning 1: Alignment beats chaotic building With great power comes great responsibility, and using the Cursor agent felt dangerously powerful. With the right prompt, we could spin up any component or design we could think of, and the urge to vibe-code everything all at once was very tempting. In theory, this is great when working solo, but as a team it gets chaotic fast. It’s easy to lose sight of who’s changing what and where, while trying to understand the UX rationale behind the decisions they’re making. Our team quickly realized that we needed to sit down and align on “what good looks like” for Jerry’s journey. Using a Figjam board, we hud

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