Offsite - T3 2020 - Zoom

Offsite - T3 2020

Zoom, Interweb

We held our second remote offsite. They are good, but never as great as hanging in person. It’s been nine months since we have seen each other, which is definitely too long. Because we were on Zoom for this offsite we keep them short to 2.5 days

DAY 1

The first day is just a half-day session. It's a chance to reconnect, reflect on the trimester, and warm up for the next two days.

Team Session #1

Working with our direct teams, we spent a few hours talking about our latest results. Going back our goals we spent time reflecting on...

What was your favorite work of the trimester?
What was your biggest personal struggle this trimester?
What did you appreciate about specific people on your team?
Score your goals with notes on “why” you did or didn’t hit each goal.

Each team kept their own notes before we regrouped as a team to review goals and super props.

DAY 2

Being our second remote offsite we tried some morning programming with a 7am workout group and an 8am breakfast with customer service. These are similar to how we spend our off-sites when in person.

Team Session #3

Breaking into our T3 teams we went through process, discussing what we can improve personally and collectively. Process always starts with self and figuring how you get he most out of your days. From self you can then look at the repeatable processes within the team and how we can make them better. We spent the session going through

Personally, list out where you are spending your time.
Where are you spending too much time and not enough time? Why?
Within your list, which areas do you love and which areas are a struggle?
Build or update your team’s Journey. You can build one per area of team focus or one for everything your team does.

Each team took notes and posted a doc to the offsite folder here.

Team Session #4

We spent an hour learning how to forecast revenue. In particular how to take past monthly data and bring it forward to forecast revenue. We provided a template and then let each team come up with their own way to forecast.

The assignment was...

Forecast new customers, repeat customers, and revenue by month.
Use math (in the doc) for how these months calculate. Can’t just hand enter numbers.
List any assumptions you made with the numbers.
Make at least one chart to explain your forecast.
Have a monthly process to review results, understand variances, and how you’ll make it more accurate in future months.

The template and answers are here. From the session we learned how to edit a forecast.

Start by checking the annual totals for the key metrics (revenue, customers, and traffic). Do the annual growth rates logically makes sense based on the assumptions they made?
Check the monthly quantities year over year to see how they are forecasting the business for a similar period a year later. Is there any consistency to these month over month changes?
Benchmark your past data to get a sense for how their ratios in relation to revenue. By checking these key metrics it gives you a sense if the relation between the metric and revenue changed a lot year over year.
Use graph to see trajectories. Lines help you to visualize growth rates for any of your key metrics and are a simple way to validate...does this seem believable?

Forecasting is all about confidence, therefore you use a variety of tools to check someone's forecasting assumptions.

Team Session #5/6

After lunch we did our first learning workshops. Everyone could pick between six different subjects to improve their skills. This is something we want to continue during company meetings so training can happen on a regular basis. The topics we covered were...

Group 1 (Alec) - google analytics and how to track a campaign.
Group 2 (Brett) - looker and how to create some basic metrics.
Group 3 (Andrew) - how facebook, google, and apple ads work.
Group 4 (Erica) - getting a refresh on customer service.
Group 5 (Erik / Audrey) - learning how we develop a product
Group 6 (Niles) - how we edit a video.

Team Session #7

The last session of the day was a long term brainstorm about what we as individuals and as a group, need at Moment to still be here 10 years from now. It was a free format brainstorm to help all of us better understand what is expected long term to keep Moment a place everyone wants to stay.

The questions the group thought about...

Why would you still be here in 10 years?
What do you think we need at Moment for the group to be here in 10 years?
What has to be true about the market for us to be here in 10 years?

Answers are here from all the teams, but a few takeaways...

On a personal level people want a group of people who inspire them and work that gives them purpose. Most of the answers were about personal progression and keeping the work interesting. Flexibility and the opportunity to control your own schedule also came up a lot.
On a group note most of the answers were around security with more robust compensation, stock option liquidity, and maintaining transparency.
On a market note we need creativity, photo/video, and customer interest to continue. We have no idea how people will be creating in the future but the move towards entertainment versus creativity came up a few times. Each direction will require different tools.

Once we got back together we looked at two additional questions as a group...

1. Which traits should we keep?

being very transparent. it builds trust.
how comfortable the group is together.
staying nimble.
empowering customers and creatives.
attitude of fixing problems vs dwelling on them.
being positive.
pushing for growth.

2. Which traits do we need to improve?

rushing everything.
being more sustainable.
purpose > $
longevity, moving past launch and forget.

Dinner With Erica

We ended the even with home ramen cooking with Erica. Normally she's our lead chef for all of our meals.

DAY 3

The last day of the offsite is always around planning. Teams break apart and dive into setting their goals and planning out their work for the trimester. We then bring all the teams together to roll the goals up into one company wide schedule.

Team Session #8

Before splitting into teams we went through our rolling 12 months plan. Discussing our North Star Plan for Moment to become the marketplace for creatives, followed by our 12 month plan. We still run the company in 12 month intervals, adding a new trimester to the end every time we conclude one.

Our North Star Plan is our guiding light for becoming the largest marketplace for creatives.
Our 12 month plan takes the next 12 month chunk out of our North Star Plans and breaks down where we need to be a year from now.
Aggregating demand is our #1 priority. With demand we can build supply and more successful Moment Offerings.
We need to evolve from a "transaction" to a "reoccurring" business over the next 12 months.
As we build demand we also need way more pros and brands building on top of us. With a larger catalog we can get more links, which drive more traffic, which grows our business.

Team Session #9

The teams split apart and got to work. These are long days but each team has to get through the following…

Finalize team’s initiatives.
Create measurable goals with ideas to hit the goals.
Updating monday schedules.
Update your team journeys.
Define your team’s initial Looker dashboard in a google doc.

Once all the teams are done we bring all of the team leads together and go through the schedule item by item. This helps us to align dates, while making sure all of the sub teams understand what is expected with each public launch.
Until next time.