Team Dogster & Catster SF had a half-day team brainstorming and communication session last Thursday. The session was lead by professional meeting facilitator Newt Bailey. I have to say this was very worthwhile and probably way overdue.

 

Our focus was exploring new feature/product ideas and ways we could continue to get the paw out about Dogster and Catster. This discussion was fun and fast moving. We could have spent days on this topic. It was very rewarding to break out of our routines and have our very creative team reach for the stars. Everyone now has a profound understanding of our community, our services and it’s great osee how enthusiastic we all are about the future possibilities.

We now have a whole wall of our office covered with large-sized Post-It notes chock full of ideas. It is going to be difficult to sift through all of the ideas and prioritize them on the product roadmap, but we collectively determined which we thought the single most important items were and we associated action items to each of them. We will of course need to align the business strategy with the new ideas, but I think everyone walked away with deep insights into our company and where our best path forward lies. Since we formally opened up this process to the team in this session, it will be important to communicate to the team the reasons why something gets prioritized on our product roadmap before something else.

We also took the time to collectively discuss our corporate environment and communication. Newt, very perceptively, picked up on our need to discuss some of these issues. Some of the issues were simple and can be solved easily, such as improving our kitchen. Other were complex like setting up better processes for overall team communication. I cannot articulate how important I feel this part of the session was. Newt has a great demeanor and creates an atmosphere where people can speak their minds without feeling inhibited, intimidated or judged. Hearing the needs of the team and defining steps that we can take that day to improve our work experience and then doing them have already paid off. The atmosphere and excitement in the office the past few days has been noticeably improved and a lot more fun.

I’d like to end this post with two recommendations. First, don’t put off having these kind of sessions with your team and have them for at least a day (we did a half day and it was too short). Second, Newt Bailey is an excellent person for these types of things. Spend an hour talking to him a few days before the session and he will tailor the session to fit the needs and personality of your team. He also does personal coaching as well. You can learn more about him or contact him directly. Tell him Dogster sent ya ;>