Lake plunges to hackathons: Lessons from our Seattle offsite
In my experience, the most powerful and meaningful moments in life coalesce when you bring people together to try new, thrilling, and challenging experiences.
Earlier this month, we hosted our second Clarify offsite in Seattle and I was able to find a few of these moments with our growing team.
On our first morning, we all woke up early to do a yoga class together at Lake Washington. It was picturesque, and gave us a moment to pause and hang out in the sun together enjoying nature.
Now, folks who know me know that, as a Southern California native, I’m a fan of everything involving water, including swimming and a cold water plunge. True to fashion after our class, I started to go around the group and evangelize about how good it would feel to take a leap into the lake. To my surprise, everyone came around to the idea one by one and we all ended up jumping in together.
This story doesn’t have anything to do with building software (aside from the fact the folks doing it work for our software company), but it illustrates the magic of presence that comes from challenging each other to do something new and unique.
I love the idea that, when you bring people together, you get to have new experiences that open your eyes to the world and leave you with new skills, interests, and courage ✨
Why we prioritize time in person at Clarify
Offsites have become an integral part of company building in recent years as teams go remote.
For us, our offsite represented an important opportunity to celebrate how far we’ve come, and was the first time we’ve gotten our larger team of 11 together. When you scale a team from 3 to 11 people in just 4 months, anxiety can underpin some of the planning: Will the team glue? What interpersonal conflicts might arise? Will people enjoy one another's company? Will the foundation of values that the founders set resonate with the folks hired and create a unified culture that can grow?
We wanted to use the offsite as an opportunity to answer these questions and forge a strong team culture that would persist after we went home, allowing us to execute on lofty product and engineering goals in H2. Most importantly, an offsite represents an opportunity to help people bond, learn how to work together, and have fun doing it. And, as a company that cares deeply about the experience of building, fostering better relationships was paramount for us.
What we hoped to get out of our offsite
Between us, Patrick and I have been a part of dozens of offsites at companies of all sizes. In fact, at Runway, I planned the first company offsite in Maui. If there is one thing we’ve learned from these experiences it’s that a great company offsite is grounded in clear goals 🎯
For us, these goals came down to three simple things:
- Most important: Experience live, in-person team bonding.
- A chance to review the journey to pilot in H1 (and dissect for improvement)
- An opportunity to align on H2 outcomes and give opportunities for people to contribute opinions and create buy-in.
We wanted to plan an offsite that we would love to be part of. This meant reaching into our memories and extracting important lessons from offsites that didn’t meet a high standard for excellence.
Here’s how we structured the schedule to make sure we were balancing programming for all three of our goals across each day. 👇
Tuesday: Travel day
We started the week off with some casual structure around our travel day to give folks a way to hang and get to know each other before we dove into the work for the week. This looked like meeting up at our Airbnb and ordering food from Snappy Dragon for the team as everyone arrived.
The first night was just about giving folks a low-key way to hangout and get to know each other. I think there’s something really special about the energy that comes from meeting everyone for the first time, and our Tuesday night hang out really reinforced this.
Wednesday: Kickoff and team bonding
The next morning, we kicked things off with the aforementioned yoga on the dock of Lake Washington. As a team we really value the ability to tend to our physical and emotional well-being.
Fun fact: We actually have an internal #strava club to celebrate when folks take care of themselves and share their fitness activities with everyone while we’re remote.
After some morning retro programming, we took a break for a surprise team activity: A scavenger hunt around Seattle. This served as both a fun way to explore the city and an opportunity for the team bond personally in the process. The activity called for them to take a photo together somewhere iconic in Seattle and to get a gift for our investors. They tackled two birds with one stone! 🐦
Following our city explorations, we were able to meet up with our board at the Google offices in Seattle. We’re lucky to be part of Gradient Ventures, who offers an awesome program called Gradient Gather that lets us use the space for lunch. Gradient even sent a full-time member of the operational team to support us during our offsite. Shoutout to Alessandra - you rock! 🫶
After the scavenger hunt, we settled in for an afternoon reviewing H1, our recent board meeting, and looking at the H2 product roadmap. We ended the day by talking about our Hackathon plans and then jetted off to the Airbnb where one of our investors, Somrat Niyogi, did a “hot ones” style interview with Patrick.
The team said it was a humanizing (and entertaining) moment to see our founder and investor eating hot wings, suffering together as they talked about their startup experiences. It ended up being the highlight of the trip for many of us. 🌶️
After the interview, we wrapped the evening with dinner and a long-night of friendly competition over CodeNames.
Thursday: Hackathon
We kicked Thursday morning off with another fun morning workout, this time F45 for a group HIIT class. While it was a bit harder to muster the courage for a high-intensity class at 7 am after a long evening of fun, it left everyone feeling accomplished and motivated to tackle the day ahead.
Once we settled into the office space for the day, we kicked into high gear hacking on our hackathon projects (separate post on the hackathon projects to come soon). This was a defining and well-loved element of our offsite, and everyone crushed out some amazing projects for our customers.
The best part of getting to set aside a solid day of working together, heads down, on the things we loved. Everyone was helpful to one another, and even our co-founding team built their own projects to present at the hackathon.
We wrapped the day with BBQ and games at Patrick’s house, which was a great way to connect a bit more personally with his day-to-day life.
Friday: Wrap day
The last day we took it easy. 😴
In the morning, we reviewed our hackathon projects and had a few of our early pilot customers judge their favorite projects. Afterward, we had lunch at Google and hit the putting green at a local indoor mini-golf course.
To wrap up our week of bonding, retrospection (and introspection), and building together, we took the team on a boat cruise around Lake Union. It was a great way to bookend our team bonding with some more time on the water in nature (there’s a theme here 🌊☀️🌲).
Advice for teams planning offsites
Everyone on the team (and especially the founders) have been to their fair share of company offsites. Many of us have gone through a few cycles of planning them, too.
It can be hard to narrow in on everything you want to as a team in three days. We felt really good about everything we were able to achieve and how we were able to bond, and wanted to share the handy template we used for planning in case you want to steal the format (with our blessing 🙏).
Based on our experiences, we've identified some key points for creating a great offsite:
- Don't over-index on planned content or structured activities. We had both been to offsites where there was so much to do that we left feeling emotionally exhausted and like we hadn't actually grown with our teammates. At the end of the day, the goal should be to give people a setting to spend time together, have conversations, and have fun in person.
- You don't need to spend a ton of money to have a great offsite that is fun. The ZIRP days of 2020 are long behind us, and anyone dropping lavishly on offsites is sending the wrong signals to investors and employees. Set a budget and stick to it. We had some fancy meals, but then also some easy going ones (and stocked the fridge with snacks to avoid expensive trips out).
- Create some space for vulnerability and deep trust building. You can’t force people to learn to work together, you have to create space for trust and too much structured time gets in the way of this by burning people out. We wanted to make sure that people were digging in at least once with one another and learning more deeply about their teammates.
Lessons and learnings: What we loved and what we’ll change for next time
After we all got back to our respective homes, we took a beat to reflect on the three things we loved most about the trip as a team, and the three things that we would adjust for the next offsite.
Key things we felt went well:
- Flexible Agenda: A key requirement for quality time is having a flexible agenda. The more you try to plan and stuff in meetings, content and activities, the less time there is for people to go through the motions of their day together.
- Hackathon: One of the best things about having everyone in the same room is that you can rapidly solve problems, discuss technical issues, and work together. Every good offsite should have a hackathon where you focus on interesting and unique problems for your company or your customers, and you solve them at a rapid clip.
- Shared Adventures (not just work): Between Yoga, F45, mini golf, boating, and dinners, we had a lot of shared adventures. The benefit of having shared experiences should be obvious – you bring people together around core memories and you give folks the space to learn about one another. The outcome is better team collaboration in the future.
Key things we are going to change for next time:
- Choose a location more central to our team members: In the future, we'll consider moving the location to somewhere more central in the continental US, that way the burden of travel is shared equally across team members.
- Choose a location with less distraction: Next time we'll pick somewhere more remote where we can hang out together in a shared space, enjoy nature and have flexible time.
- Further min/max spend and joy: We can adjust our budget and expectations even further to maximize the joy and bonding that the team gets, while minimizing impact to the runway.
If you wanna be part of our next offsite as a customer, then apply to our waitlist below. Or, if you want to join the team and get on the list for our next offsite, head on over to the company page.