How to Design a Challenge That Attracts Top Talent

It's tempting to assume a bigger prize pool automatically means more (and better) submissions. In practice, the strongest predictor of a great challenge isn't the prize — it's whether a skilled person can tell, within thirty seconds of reading the brief, exactly what "winning" looks like.

Scope it tighter than feels comfortable

Vague, sprawling challenges ("reinvent how our customers discover products") attract vague, sprawling submissions. Specific challenges with a real constraint ("design a discovery flow that works for a customer who has never opened our app before, using only our existing catalog data") attract people who can actually execute — because the constraint gives them something concrete to solve.

Judging criteria are part of the brief, not an afterthought

Publish your judging criteria up front, weighted if possible. Serious participants use it to prioritize their effort; it also protects you from disputes later, since everyone agreed on what "good" meant before a single submission came in.

• •State the criteria and their relative weight before the challenge opens
• •Prefer 3-4 clear criteria over a long, vague checklist
• •If judges will score independently, make sure the criteria are specific enough that two judges would score the same submission similarly