This week, we scheduled—then cancelled—our first post-pandemic all-team retreat.

Like so many global teams, we’re stir crazy to see each other in person once again. The Parabol team has grown to 15 people (with several scheduled to start soon) and the majority of us have never met in person. The last time we got together was in February 2020 in Los Angeles, just before the pandemic struck, and we were just 5 people. The next time we gather, we’re projecting to have nearly quadrupled in size.

We’ve been keeping tabs on everybody’s vaccination status, and almost all of us—including employees due to start—have been vaccinated. Discussing as a team, odds looked good to be able to get together. We picked a week the last week of June and spent some time researching a suitable location in the Americas. Since the date was coming up we wanted to avoid needing to plan catering so we chose to be in a city, with reasonable walkability, with comfortable lodging and a space large enough for 20 people to gather. Charleston, South Carolina was the winner. We booked. 

Then we cancelled.

After sending the details to the team, one of our employees in Europe reminded us the U.S. travel ban of folks in Europe has not been lifted. Rather than settle for partial attendance or risking losing our deposit on our rentals, we decided to unwind our plans and consider other options.

After considering the multitude of places Parabol’s employees live, Mexico seems to be the best option for our next retreat. It’ll take a bit more planning—and with so much uncertainty there is always a chance we could need to scrap our plans altogether. For now, though we’re optimistic we can see each other in “3d” soon.

Do you work on a remote team? Have you discussed getting together? We’d love to hear your plans!

Users and signups are growing and looking healthy, but we saw a slight dip in meetings ran and monthly web sessions. 

The small drop in meetings could be due to the start of some seasonal fluctuations due to summer approaching and Covid restrictions loosening in certain areas, leading to early vacations. 

The drop in sessions is interesting — we discovered that there was an issue with how our Google Analytics tag was interacting with Google Tag Manger and Segment. Long story short, some previous sessions were being double counted, and now that we’ve rectified the error we expect to see drops for the next few weeks as we get out of that window of “bad data”. We hope to see those bounce back up after they stabilize.

…were featured in some great content across the internet. We were acknowledged by the Harvard Business Review for our efforts to make hiring more inclusive in an article called How to Hire Someone You’ve Never Met in Person, our lead designer Terry talked about a day in the life at Parabol for We Work Remotely, and our Head of Growth Aviva was quoted in a piece for Uptick about how to be a good manager. It’s exciting to see people are noticing and appreciating our unique culture! 

…published a new post  The 5 Scrum Ceremonies for Remote Teams Explained and updated our Icebreaker questions post by adding an additional 110 intriguing icebreaker questions to get your team talking.

…published a video interview with our head developer, Matt Krick, where he discusses building in public and what it’s like to work at Parabol as a developer. 

…continued building out our retrospective inspirations feature with the goal of making it easy to access work done in Github, Jira and elsewhere without leaving the Parabol app.

…kicked off a couple exciting batting practices, interviewed great candidates for positions across the org, squashed some bugs, updated our security protocols, and shipped v6.11.0

…finish off sprint 79 and wrap up some user feedback interviews that are helping us think through a potential new feature.

Have feedback? See something that you like or something you think could be better? Leave a public response here, or write to us.