Vishwajeet Vatharkar

Conducting a meaningful collaboration week

Dec 15, 2022

At AgroStar, the team I lead has been working primarily remotely in different parts of India. A few weeks back, team members told me they wanted to visit our office for a collaboration week. Although we had done this as an organization in the past, we had yet to do this as a team (smaller group).

From that moment, I started thinking about how can I organize this in the most meaningful way. To understand that, I needed to figure out what's missing when people are working remotely and how to use this time together in person as a group to bridge that.

I figured out - that we miss personal bonding with each other, as most of the team members work in different product groups, and little interactions apart from work-related meetings. We also sometimes need to catch up on the larger organizational context, with all the work happening BEFORE engineers start building something - from Product, Program Mgmt, Operations, and business. Along with this, younger team members, who are new to the industry, tend to feel some hesitation while reaching out to the senior engineering leaders in the group.

So I organized some planned activities for the entire team in person!

1. "Lifeline Session" - This is a session where each team member shares their life journey till now, with all of the ups and downs. This is done in a private group, emphasising listening, not judging. Every individual has grown into the person they are because of what has happened in their life! As expected, this turned out to be one of the most intimate sessions and has made us feel very closely connected.
2. "Values Connect" Exercise - We are presented with an exhausting set of values (~40), and each team member picks Three values which are the most important to them. Doing this activity makes us understand each other and priorities better, bridging the empathy gaps.
3. Connect with Engineering Leadership - We had an open and casual connect all the EMs/Leads in the company, with my team, across different groups and functions. We discussed a lot about their experiences, what is going well, or not, and how we as a group, can grow further. We also conducted a separate CTO connect with Sunil Jain, with emphasis on discussing the achievements & impacts of what, being one of the most recently formed and the youngest team is doing in the org!
4. Team Retrospective - H2 - This is where I present where we are as a group, what we have achieved, and our general direction. We also revisit our group's vision & mission and where we are while achieving that. We have a room, "AgroStarBucks", I ensure to conduct this meeting in the SAME room every time!
5. Connect with Product, Program, and UX Teams - Every team member was able to individually connect with the product and program partners from their products; we also held general catchups, where we had open discussions about how we ideate and prioritize requirements with business-facing functions, giving us the larger context, along with challenges faced by them.

We also had team dinners, brainstorming, catchups, and executive leadership connect with the entire engineering team.

I conducted One-to-Ones, with every team member, in person; most of which got extended to more than 2 hours due to the natural flow of conversations happening in person! (in remote one-to-ones, we might not talk for more than 30 minutes!)

As a cherry on top, I could bring and share "the best cake I ever had"! that is "The Ritz-Carlton Cake" with my team!

Along with all this, although we said we would be okay to delay our core deliveries a bit, we didn't see any major impact on that either!

At the end of the week, we feel much more connected and closer to each other, the organization, and our mission!

Notes & Inspirations -

"Values Connect" is something I got inspired from Sarah Drasner's book "Engineering Management for The Rest of Us"

"Life Line" is an activity that was conducted many years back when I was working with Vuclip from my then-mentor Ashish Gawali (which I found to be very meaningful)

Super thanks for the inspiration!