Breakdancing Without Cardboard: The 5th Annual Design Union Off-site
Team members from Chicago, Palo Alto, Seattle, Baltimore and Dublin came together for three days of problem solving, team building, and fun.
With such a geographically diverse group spread across the world, the off-site is our yearly opportunity to all meet face-to-face, and challenge ourselves to breakdown silos and forge deeper connections that make creating delightful experiences for our customers so much easier and richer.
Welcome
Team members arrived from all the over world to socialize as we watched the sunset over the beautiful Snoqualmie Falls.
Afterwards during an informal ceremony, managers bequeathed their team members with our new Design Union (DU) T-shirts (featured above) while announcing a humorous slogan encapsulating something unique about each team member.
Day 1. The Hard Work (and Fun) Begins
After breakfast, offices presented tongue-in-cheek videos that touched on their unique culture. These humorous vignettes broke the ice and gave everyone a peek into what it’s like to work at Groupon design offices around the world.
Breaking into one-on-one, round robin-style “speed dating” gave everyone a chance to have quick face time with each other and share numerous, rapid-fire personal tidbits to break the ice. After that, the group took a quick hike to the nearby falls for more bonding, and most importantly, selfie stick-time!
In the afternoon, teams broke into one of three problem solving brainstorm groups tackling issues like:
- How we might me raise awareness of the Design Union in the broader design community?
- How might we create principles to aid in our design review process?
- How might we best design a feature/product with designers across locations and teams?
After setting aside our Post-Its and note boards, we flexed our comedic muscles with “Improv for Business”. After clearing out the chairs to the edges of the room, we worked through exercises to recondition our minds to move into action despite hearing “No”, learning to trust each other, intuit and act without a designated leader laying out a clear plan verbally.
The day closed out with dinner followed by a “mic drop-worthy” magic show by Product Designer Jonathan Yuhsien that brought down the house!
Day 2: Sleeves Up
The morning began with a “State of the DU” address from VP of Design, Elissa Darnell, giving the team exciting context for how far we’ve come and where we are going in the weeks and months ahead.
Inspired and recharged, the group broke into two hands-on Learning Workshops:
- User Research: Led by members of our UER team (Anosha Shokrpour, Akanksha Prakash, Joanna Vodopivec), Design team members met with actual Groupon users and interviewed them about various aspects of the app, purchase and redemption. For those new to conducting user interviews, it was a great opportunity to have someone with deep customer interview experience provide feedback on how to carefully probe and steer the process without unduly influencing the participants.
- Intro to HTML/CSS: Team member Mike Aparicio lead participants through a hands-on session where they created a personal site after learning the basics of HTML and CSS (Mike’s slides).
After a dynamic presentation from Ben Grossman-Kahn on Design Thinking (hello “Triz” and “Thinking Hats”), teams headed outside and broke into groups to tackle a Geocaching challenge. Working together using our phones and GPS trackers, we located hidden objects and completed quirky tasks. Despite the threat of rain, teams hiked, crawled, danced and even performed impromptu songs amidst the lush surroundings to complete the missions. (Dignity quickly went out the window in the face of competition.)
Day 3: Wrapping Up
Our final day began with a share out session where teams presented their findings around the three problem scenarios.
Product Designer Raza Durrani delighted the group by providing a preview of the new DU site (launching June 1).
After closing statements and thank you’s from Elissa, feeling charged and inspired, we grabbed our bagged lunches and departed for our respective cities.
Until next year…
Special thanks to Janet Jaramillo and Kristin Scavuzzo for the amazing event planning and the staff at Salish Lodge. And thanks to the entire team for all the great photos and videos!
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