How (and why) we released our new Content Analysis report during our Summer Retreat?

Screeb is a full-remote tech company since day one. In the last 6 months we've onboarded a lot of new people in the team (for a company our size) and they joined the adventure from their home or their preferred coworking space. 

Hiring, onboarding and leading a team remotely is not an easy task. This requires, besides using the right technology, a full-confidence in people and a clear vision to empower individuals to have an impact in their job.

Even if we have daily interactions with the team, I strongly believe that creativity and innovation come faster when people are meeting in real life. So we organise (at-least) yearly all company gathering for everyone to meet and spend time together. This summer, we wanted to gather the team 4 days in a row for summer retreat in Noirmoutier (on the western French coast).

We wanted this event to be a time to connect, better know each other, have fun but also spend time together working on real projects. The ultimate goal is to build stronger bonds, discuss our organisational and technical challenges and find solutions.

Of course, everything started with an internal Screeb survey, shared to better understand what people wanted from this time together but also to know more basic things like what the team wanted for breakfast (that’s one of the thing I prefer in building an early stage company: the job is very diverse, from organizing meals to deal with complex problems ;) ). 

With my cofounders, we wanted to work on two specific topics. First, we wanted to think about how to better work together, after our first year of trying various tools, methods and rituals. Second, we wanted to organize a hackathon on one of the most awaited feature for Screeb to have a common project for a day that would involve every team member.

We decided to work on releasing a first version of a new Content Analysis report. With highly performing survey formats, Screeb can generate hundreds or thousands of feedback for our customers. This is obviously great but it also means that, sometimes, they have to spend a lot of time analyzing the feedback to find recurring topics and spot product improvements opportunities. 

Also, we think that being able to highlight valuable feedback and make them stand out from other responses can have a strong impact on organizations using Screeb. So we pitched the idea to the whole team, insisting on the fact that everyone could have an impact on the project, regardless of their job.

We didn’t want it to be a tech-only hackathon. Product, Sales and Marketing also played a role, so everyone could understand that, behind a feature, it’s a whole company working together and that a small idea done well can have an impact on everyone.

The result? In less than 24 hours (including a break to watch the Portugal-France Euro game ⚽️ and a few hours of sleep 😴 ) we managed to work together as a team and release a brand new report highly valuable for our users. And we worked on a clear go to market strategy, to reach our current users and restart conversations with some prospects that were waiting for this feature. Including the blog post you’re reading!

It’s been quite a challenge but I’m really happy of the result AND the process. For a project like this one, the way we’ve done it is at least as important as the output. And both were great!