Exco Retreat 3, San Diego

Last week our Exco team gathered for a leadership retreat in San Diego.

Spending the time to get together in person is important to refresh a team’s bonds. In the past year, we’ve gathered in Sedona and New Orleans. This time, we chose San Diego. This trip gave some of us a chance to meet our newest leadership team member in person, Marcus Wermuth, who leads our Parabol’s Product Circle.

In addition to eating plenty of good food and taking a pasta-making class, this trip focused on exploring how we can work together more effectively as a team and refreshing our accountabilities to one another. We engaged in a process from the Table Group’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team to give each other feedback on the perceived behaviors that contribute to the strength and weakness of our teamwork. We also invested time in recasting what accountabilities we have to each other as members of the leadership team.

After experiencing an outbreak at our Growth Circle retreat in Madrid we spent more time establishing our COVID protocols before this retreat. This included asking members who had any recent exposure to wear a mask indoors. We were glad we did. One of our member’s tested positive the next morning and had to enter quarantine, proving COVID is still a factor when we get together. Luckily our protocols seemed to have contained transmission and only this single member was affected.

An output of our week together was a refreshed set of expectations of each other as leaders at Parabol. We defined a role called Exco Member:

Role Purpose

To work together to uncover our strategy, culture, and ways of working that lead to meaningful outcomes for our users, members, and investors

Accountabilities

By setting these expectations of each other, our hope is we’ll improve the way we show up for each other and give each of us a starting guide when asked to give each other feedback.

We apparently have passed our recent top-of-funnel zenith. That was exciting! Product registration and usage picked up a bit more momentum this week as “back-to-school” season for productivity tools continues.

…began moving our Product team operations to ZenHub. We decided to give ZenHub a try (vs. another system app like Linear) as it will allow us not to need to migrate our open-source Issues from GitHub while allow our product squads better organizational tools.

…wrapped up our first Batting Practice for a Head of Public Sector candidate.

…tightened our infrastructure monitoring alerts to produce fewer false positives.

…produced a great deal of research as product squads dig into their new missions.

…kick off the 2nd Product development sprint of the trimester.