Post by Polansoft

Sometimes the best product ideas don’t start with a win — they start with being overlooked. During one of our partner's internal hackathons, our team built a prototype that didn’t even make it past the finals selection. At the time, it felt like just another idea that wouldn’t go further. “One of the partner's VPs noticed the project while working on a deal with a client who had a closely related problem. It turned out our prototype filled a missing piece for their use case, and thanks to our combined expertise in modern technologies and mainframe systems, we quickly adapted it into a real solution and launched it. What started as a hackathon idea has since grown into a full product — a good reminder that even overlooked ideas can become valuable when they meet the right problem at the right time.” — says Danyl Vandiuk, Software Engineer III. The idea itself came from a very real and familiar pain point: “Pretty much every team working on a z/OS product in our company regularly runs into a frustrating workflow. You submit JCL jobs, and when something goes wrong you're left manually digging through the output trying to find what actually matters. That's where the idea came from: build a clean, visually pleasant and functional GUI that simplifies access to the information you actually need. The backend talks to the mainframe via z/OSMF, parses the relevant data from JCL job output, and presents it to the user in a clear and digestible way, while staying true to the underlying z/OS primitives. With just that idea, we built a product for a hackathon. It resonated internally, got in front of a customer, and it turned out the pain was just as real on their side.” — says Sergei Burtsev, Software Engineer III. This journey is a great reminder: 💡 Not every great idea gets immediate recognition 🚀 Real value appears when the right idea meets the right problem 🤝 Collaboration and timing can turn “just a prototype” into a real product Have you ever seen an idea come back to life like this? #ProductDevelopment #Hackathon #FromIdeaToProduct #SoftwareEngineering #Mainframe #zOS