Every three months, our geographically-distributed team gathers to reflect on our most recent work, and to plan for the future. It felt like a particularly rich session this time around, as we simultaneously celebrated the milestone of making it two years, while looking ahead to team growth, product expansion, and graduating from Alchemist in October. It’s a period of exciting development into a new level of company maturity.
The team feels more synchronized than ever. Our S.P.A. exercises are a well-oiled machine now as we’ve settle into the rhythms that work best for us. We shared facilitation duties among all of our teammates for the first time this session, which allowed us to learn from each other’s expertise and to be guided by everyone’s unique leadership style. It feels good to know that as the team grows, our collective leadership capacity is growing, too.
Not to say it was all work though…as with S.P.A. IV, III, II, and I, we found plenty of time for offsite bonding, too:
And finally, we had a great time wrapping our final evening for S.P.A. at vrbar, Brooklyn’s first virtual reality arcade, where owner Kishore Doddie, helped us experience the latest and greatest on the HTC Vive. It’s a must-see if you’re in DUMBO, Brooklyn!
Metrics
The August slow down appears to be abating as metrics were up slightly this week over the previous period.
During S.P.A. V, we revisited our “golden metric” — the one measure for us to focus on improving. Consensus was reached around our measure of Weekly Active Teams (“WAT”), with a small modification. Previously, we were calculating our WAT by counting the number of teams with at least one active user. However, one person does not make an active team, so we’ve revised the count to only include teams with at least two active users. This pushed the value of this metric down a bit this week, but the revision is clearly more accurate.
This week we…
…revisited our strategy for the final quarter of the year. We reprioritized our product development roadmap to focus on depth of engagement and spreadability: we’re going deep on improving the meeting process and adjusting our business model from trial-based to freemium. This is the road to public beta.
…reprioritized our Epics for product enhancements. Upon defining a strategy for the next few months, we revisited enhancements and organized them into crisp, smaller Epics. The idea is to keep sprints and Epics small and make the minimal improvements necessary to test our strategy with users, gaining feedback to move to next sprints and Epics.
…held lo-fi design sessions around upcoming epics. We use lo-fi design artifacts to flush out ideas to prototype, test with users, then refine with hi-fi visuals before implementing in code:
…participated in Alchemist’s Investor Feedback Summit
Next week we’ll…
…merge sprints toward shipping Bugfix and Funnel Improvements Epic 6.5
…ship a comprehensive update to investors, and open the next funding round
…continue revising our investor deck for Alchemist Demo Day
Have feedback? See something that you like or something you think could be better? Leave a public response here, or write to us.
