Depending on the type of company, it could have been blocked by the manager or PM. It is easy for them to reject "tech stuff", when your time could be spent add

Depending on the type of company, it could have been blocked by the manager or PM. It is easy for them to reject "tech stuff", when your time could be spent adding a feature from the product owner. A proposal like this could easily have been seen as the developers wanting to test out a technology that was not approved or with a good business case. That business case is usually something that only sales/product can sell. The barrier to listening to developers is higher because they are assumed to not know enough about business. You may have an "agile" environment, but you often need a very good reason to not pick the next item from the backlog, which was not created and maybe not even prioritized by you. In those companies, the hackathon may be the only time developers can present their ideas.