RAD Team Rituals & Rhythms
The right team rituals and rhythms can help foster culture, build a strong sense of team, and ultimately drive engagement and performance. By intentionally repeating small behaviours and interactions over time, they become ingrained.
Like all growing and evolving teams, the rituals and rhythms that the Research, Analytics & Data Science team (a.k.a. RAD) employ have evolved and changed over time. Below are our key rituals and rhythms — those that we apply at a regular cadence, help us embody our team values, drive us to action and have shared meaning across RAD.
Weekly Team Meetings and Manager 1:1s
Each week the Research and Data Science teams host separate team meetings. The format, structure and focus of these differ depending on the team but at a high level these meetings provide a forum for connecting as a team, getting to know each other more, sharing relevant context, discussing goals, reflecting on progress and sharing learnings.
Every week managers also meet with their direct reports 1:1 to discuss work in progress, challenges, opportunities and career growth. The nature of these sessions change depending on the circumstances, and how the person in question wants to focus the discussion. Sometimes they take the shape of a general coffee chat where folks chat about non-work stuff. Other times they focus on well-being and engagement. Sometimes they explore career aspirations and career growth. If there are hurdles to work in progress, these sessions can take the form of working sessions focused on specific problems. If there are prioritisation problems, this can be an opportunity to get aligned on priority. Agendas for 1:1s are typically set in advance using a living Google document. The intention is that 1:1s are driven by the RAD individual, not the RAD manager.
RAD Huddles
To encourage context sharing, facilitate brainstorming, and to help folks gather feedback and input on their work, we host RAD Huddles 2 x per week. These are 1-hr long, optional sessions hosted on Google Meet. We use our team slack channel and a slackbot to coordinate.
Folks sign up to host a session by highlighting the topic/theme they’d like to discuss and the type of huddle:
- Brainstorm: Great when you are starting a new project, when you’re early on in a project or when you’re starting to develop an analysis/research plan. Useful when you want fresh eyes, new perspectives, and divergent thinking on a problem.
- Collaborate: Great when you want to work through something with a smaller group of peers. Useful when the problem may require more context and/or when you need deeper collaboration on a problem.
- Present-And-Get-Feedback: When you want general feedback. When you’re looking for something slightly more exhaustive on a piece of work.
We try to focus on smaller groups for these huddles and if there are multiple topics we set up multiple huddles.
RAD Bi-Weekly
A bi-weekly meeting where the full RAD org get together. We share relevant context/updates from across our org, leadership and the wider company. We celebrate great work & great teammates.We share 1-minute insights with one another, i.e. quick, digestible nuggets so that we’re all in the loop of our latest findings. We then go deeper by sharing FYIs, learnings, progress and findings from our latest projects. We rotate ownership of the meeting so a different member of RAD runs the meeting each time and again we use our team slack channel to coordinate and rally the troops.
This meeting has evolved over the past year or so, and will continue to evolve as the org grows, but there is one really important practice within this meeting that’s remained consistent — shout-outs. A dedicated section where we acknowledge excellent work and amazing peers. These shout-outs are anchored on team and company values as well as R&D Principles. So when we call out and celebrate great work and great peers, we try to call out the values they demonstrated or the principles they applied.
End of Quarter Celebration
We have an end of quarter celebration where we acknowledge all the great work across the quarter and reflect on how far we’ve come over the past 3 months. We start by reminding ourselves of our team purpose, mission, vision and values. We spend about 30 mins reviewing all of our great achievements. We acknowledge and celebrate things like:
- New starters, promotions, and interversaries.
- Sharing and evangelising our work both in and out of intercom (e.g. presence at company/org specific all hands, demos at our company wide show & tell, external talks or blog posts)
- Tangible impact we’ve driven across the company from supporting key product launches, delivering strategic insights, advancing our understanding of a space, and driving tangible decisions with evidence.
- Occasions where we’ve “spent less time the next time” through documentation, scaling and automation.
- Things we’ve learned and new methods/techniques we’ve tried.
- Personal and life milestones and events (e.g. new homes, babies, fitness goals, hobbies, birthdays, etc).
The latter half of the meeting is focused on fun. We add to a team Spotify playlist aptly called RADio (arguably the most eclectic playlist in the world). And we host a fun quiz with some pretty epic RAD swag up for grabs. Yes, we have team t-shirts and a team mug for all new joiners :)
RAD Retros
We are big fans of continual reflection and improvement. And so we regularly do team retrospectives (a.k.a. retros) to help us understand what’s going well and what can be improved. Our retros have evolved depending on where we’re striving to build improvements and alignment. Sometimes these are org wide retros. Other times we do these at a team level — a Research team retro or Data Science team retro.
For the past year, they’ve generally taken the following shape. A quarterly 1-hr session where we reflect on progress towards our goals and take stock of what we want to stop, start and keep for the next quarter. We talk about highs and lows. Folks contribute their feedback in terms of what they think the team should start, stop or continue doing. We then discuss, vote and anchor on 1–2 tangible action items for us to improve.
This year, we’re changing things up a little. We’re continuing with these quarterly retros where we reflect on recent goals and recent projects, but this time with a RAD values and R&D Principles lens. Our aim is to intentionally reflect on if and how we’re applying these principles and values to our day to day work, and how we might improve going forward.
Decisions + Donuts
Our team mission is to “Drive effective, evidence-based decisions using Research & Data Science”. And one of our core team values is “We focus on the decision”. To bring our mission to life and to help us apply one of our core team values, we host a quarterly “Decisions + Donuts” session where we discuss and dissect recent decisions we’ve influenced. The session is 1 hour and typically involves 1–2 presenters going deep in a topic related to evidence-based decision making. This can include:
- Sharing literature and frameworks to sharpen our thinking around evidence-based decision making and decision intelligence.
- Reviewing internal case studies of decisions we’ve influenced.
- Reflecting on the value of the evidence we bring to decision making across Intercom and learnings from specific projects.
We elicit potential topics in advance from the team via a simple Google doc and use our team slack channel to coordinate and rally momentum. We mark each session with actual donuts too 🍩.
RAD Planning
All Research, Analytics & Data Science teams face one universal challenge — how to choose the right set of goals and projects out of the huge set of stakeholder asks, company wide priorities and potential projects they could take on! We don’t pretend to have this solved in RAD but do we intentionally focus on getting better at this quarter by quarter, week by week and day by day.
We have a dedicated planning process that we’ve evolved considerably over the years. And a set of rituals and rhythms designed to help us focus on what matters most. This includes
- An always-on intake process where partners and stakeholders from across Intercom can ask for our help
- A central tool and mechanism for viewing and prioritizing goals and projects
- A weekly planning session - each team kicks off the week on Monday morning and aligns on short team goals for the week.
- A mechanism for celebrating when we start and complete projects and goals to share progress and build momentum.
We’ll write a dedicated post on our approach and the evolution of our planning process soon — we’re tried and learned a lot over the years about what works and what doesn’t!
That’s all of our core team rituals and rhythms. We’d love to hear more about your team’s most important rituals and rhythms. How do they help you foster the right culture, drive engagement and performance across your team? Anything you think RAD should try?
A big thanks to all the folks across RAD team for all their input, feedback and help with this post.
In Intercom, the Research, Analytics & Data Science (a.k.a. RAD) function exists to help drive effective, evidence-based decision making using Research and Data Science. We’re hiring data scientists and researchers at various levels across Dublin, London, and remote in the UK and Ireland. If these rituals and rhythms resonate with you and you want to help shape the future of a team like RAD at a fast-growing company that’s on a mission to make internet business personal, we’d love to hear from you.
