Running a "Team building" Offsite

The majority of the iOS engineering team at ImmobilienScout24 is relatively new. Since last year it has grown from 2 to 7 engineers (more to come) and despite the fact that all of them are committing to the same code base and working with the same technology, they are part of different teams across the organization. Such strategy has great benefits but it also brings a few challenges we have to deal with every now and then.

During a retrospective meeting one of the engineers raised the concern that he barely knew the other new engineers. In fact some of them were seldom interacting due to the fact that they were assign to different squads. As a manager one of my responsibilities is to ensure teamwork and, in that moment, it immediately popped into my head the idea of having an iOS-specialists Offsite.

The plan was to be entirely disconnected from our day-to-day environment— no computers, KPI's, stand-ups, code reviews etc. Instead it should be about the people and there was one single goal: strengthen our relationships.

1. M&M's Icebreaker

The first activity was a short icebreaker so that each one of us could open up ourselves, get to know more about of each other and warm up for the upcoming activities.

Having the team sitting in a shape of a circle, I opened a pack of M&M and gave to the person next to me. I asked him/her to take one M&M and, depending on the chocolate's color, that person had to answer a question related to a certain…