Spoiler alert: We had an all-around fantastic retreat 😊
Two weeks ago, the Stockholm and Bucharest office spent a couple of great days together in Sintra outside Lisbon, to work together, reconnect, and get some key development tickets kickstarted. It appears from the photos that we mostly ate, drank and laughed, but truth be told, when we get together, mostly we get a lot of stuff done including a bunch of ping pong games 😉.
Since we are a distributed team working form different locations (4 from Sweden, 6 from Bucharest and 1 from Vienna), we usually all only get to work togheter as two-dimensional people over Skype and Slack calls.
Our main goal for when we get together each year is to create shared memories. This means spending quality face time with each other, cooking, eating, doing yoga (Radu & Radu) and getting key discussions and decisions made. Basically, the idea is to recharge our emotional batteries for the months ahead and ahve a clear plan on how to proceed with our projects, when we each go back to our seperate offices.
We also use the retreats to talk strategy as a team and have company-wide conversations if needed, but that’s only a small part of the retreat, as it eats into the having fun time!
This years retreat was our second retreat together. The last one was in New York during the spring of 2016, which included some crazy nights including a visit to one of Håkan Hellströms local gigs.
The Location
We always try to avoid hotel accommodations; nothing against them, but we prefer to spend our retreats in a more comfy and relaxed space where we feel at home.
This year the choice was easy as we could combine a visit to the NYPS pricing conference with our own retreat. Hence the selected to rent a large villa in lovely Sintra just outside Lisbon.
First team checking in…
…and checking out the view
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