You could feel the excitement – days, maybe even weeks ahead: Agendas settled, arrangements shared, announcements announced. Flights booked, slides prepared, last minute work completed, slack channels abuzz. Everyone I talked to was **excited**. Excited to spend a week talking exclusively about work – all day, every day? Yep. It’s that good.
In a remote-first company it can sometimes be hard to feel a sense of collective togetherness. Despite our company values of Transparency, Empowerment and Commitment, there are still times when months might pass before you see a colleague from another part of a company, and living those values on a daily basis requires intention and focus. Creating an All Hands gathering that brings people from across the globe together in one place and allows us to bring things back into focus. The all-company offsite allows us to balance our remote-first culture with the kinds of connection that is enabled by being in a room together.
It is a behemoth of a week, full of work and play, presentations and team building, coding and connecting, goal setting, clarifying, streamlining – in short, crafting a shared vision of our future as an organization and getting unified in how we bring that vision to life.
In 2019, we built out many of our teams by hiring a ton of fantastic people. This year, each team gave a short presentation intended to inform the company on both the scope and the members of the team. I learned a ton from Team Presentations, especially about those teams I don’t interface with on a daily basis – it felt empowering to understand how all of the moving pieces fit together.
Next to team presentations, a number of workshops also took place during the week, with topics ranging from the philosophical (values, communication) to the practical (meeting etiquette, remote etiquette). Workshops consistently went over their allocated time! But we collected so much valuable information and experiences, having a team of highly motivated and committed people eager to share their ideas is a quality problem to have.
Delighting our customers is something we aim to do every day – even during All Hands, and so maintaining a global infrastructure and supporting our customers takes precedence even during All Hands week – but as a team, we held it down. Staff from across the company were helping answer customer questions, in fact, we inbox zero’d our support helpdesk during All Hands.
As mentioned above, one of our core values is Transparency. But transparency is an active, ongoing process. Part of that process is to ongoing share and clarify the goals and targets at the heart of our business. The same goes for our product roadmap. As a result, as a team, we understand what kind of success we want to have this year, what products we plan to release, and we are empowered to make decisions as sub-teams and individuals that align with those goals.
Netlify has big plans for the year ahead, and we are excited to leverage this fantastic team to accomplish them, along with adding a substantial amount of people to our team. Next to curiosity, talent, intelligence, drive and commitment to excellence, Netlifolks are notable for the kindness and warmth we bring to our interactions with each other. We trust each other, and we empower each other, and we commit to transparently working with and supporting each other. Building cutting edge products the way we do isn’t easy. Lofty goals aren’t easy. But it is a lot easier when the team is as fantastic as this one.
If this resonates with you, you should consider applying for one of the many positions we will be opening over the coming months, join us next year, and see for yourself!
