PALS Workshop: The Value of In-Person Collaboration
By David Corneail
How remote product teams can leverage in-person workshops to quickly rally around a new problem space
Like many organizations, ITHAKA transitioned to a remote-first work culture during the pandemic. Many of our new hires since then have been remote, and while we still hold physical offices in New York and Ann Arbor, teams are generally spread out across the country to varying degrees. And also like many organizations, we’ve adopted a number of digital tools and practices that allow for efficient and effective output by teams based in different locations. But pros and cons emerge with any significant change in work style, and a one-size-fits-all approach is rarely effective.
While our tools and practices for remote collaboration often serve the day-to-day work well, there are times when teams should consider spending larger blocks of time together in person. Working online has generally led to more meetings because we schedule collaboration time that would happen more naturally in person. Crowded calendars can make it difficult to find large blocks of time to undertake more significant learning, planning and/or team-building initiatives that have to happen over the course of one- or two-hour sessions spread across weeks. Furthermore, some of these activities are better suited for in-person sessions, especially when the best outcomes hinge on deep collaboration and discussion. The non-verbal cues and synergy that happen when people get together in a physical room are hard to replicate online.
Our team’s situation
With the new year underway, the Platform Access & Login Services (PALS) team at ITHAKA needed to kickstart discovery and development cycles with #speed, #evidence, #trust, #teamwork, and #belonging (ITHAKA’s values) to quickly align around our 2023 objectives. Rather than attempt this in our normal bi-weekly planning cycles, the team agreed that investing in an in-person workshop was the most effective way to start delivering impact on our mission.
The team decided to get together at ITHAKA’s Ann Arbor office to collaborate and participate in a 2-day workshop (or in-office all-day PALS jamboree). Fortunately, only two team members had to travel and stay in hotels. If your team is spread out and it will be too expensive to meet in person, you might consider blocking a day or two for a remote workshop.
In this case, we blocked our calendars, booked our flights and hotel rooms, and started working on an agenda. The pre-work is crucial for these kinds of team planning sessions. We’ve all seen workshops that feel aimless and end with no clear outcomes. We were committed to using every minute wisely.
We started by agreeing on our outcomes for the time we spent together: aligning on our product objectives, quickly gaining a deep understanding of user workflows and pain points, setting team agreements for how we work together, and bonding by having some fun together. We believed that being in person would provide additional benefits to our usual quarterly and annual planning sessions. We shared a belief that time spent together would be more efficient because we could benefit from sharing the same physical space and facilitate brainstorming exercises that are just not as engaging when done virtually.
What we did
We had an ambitious agenda. It included strategy sessions fueled by design thinking facilitation methods and deep discussions (#trust).
Our discussions were faster and more productive because we were able to collaborate differently. We could walk around the room and use whiteboards to quickly map out ideas much more quickly than in similar remote sessions (#speed).
Throughout the workshop, we knew it was important to be conscious that all voices were heard equally (#belonging).
Our mindset was centered around user empathy, shared experience and organizational objectives (#evidence).
By the end of our two-day workshop, we were able to identify a shared problem space, collaboratively draft problem statements, brainstorm different tactics, identify gaps in knowledge and metrics, and prioritize our upcoming discovery and development efforts (#teamwork).
As with any team exercise, we will have to flesh out and test ideas, but we all left feeling like we had good momentum and clear direction as we tackled these priorities.
If you’d like to plan a similar session to kick off your team next year, we want to help you learn from our experience. Following is an outline of our activities along with some personal takeaways from each team member. We hope this inspires you to think creatively about how best to spend real-world time together so your time spent working remotely is put to best use. We’re already planning for our next session in 2024.
Workshop Agenda:
Day 1:
9–9:30 // Breakfast, catch-up and daily standup
9:30–12 // Workshop part 1 (Empathy building and level setting)
12–1 // Lunch
1–2 // Workshop part 2 (Identifying the problem space)
2–3 // DX retro (We reviewed a survey that was conducted by the engineers for the engineers, and which proved valuable to all of us.)
3–4 // Update our team agreements (what we say, we mean, and will do)
4–5 Work time and end of day wrap up
5–8: Happy hour, bowling, and dinner
Note: anyone could take a mental and physical break if they needed to throughout the day.
Day 2:
9–9:30 // Breakfast, catch-up and standup
9:30–12 // Workshop part 3 (defining problem statements, tactics, effort, opportunity, and impact sizing)
12–1 // Lunch
1–2:30 // Workshop part 4 (drafting delivery and discovery opportunities)
2:30–3:30 // Sprint planning
3:30–5 // Work time and wrap-up
5–7 // Dinner
Outcomes
- Updated annual team agreement
- Baseline understanding of our problem space
- Clear next steps for discovery and development priorities
- Aligned understanding of user pain points and their volume, which helped quantify the impact we believe PALS has
- Documented problem space for ongoing prioritization with #speed
- Highlighted opportunities to gather more #evidence
What we would do differently next time
- Schedule the workshop in coordination with our department planning to maximize travel (we’ve done this in the past).
- We might schedule 3 partial days instead of 2 full days — we were burned at the end.
- We would consider additional buffer time between discussions and activities.
Personal Takeaways
We asked several team members about their biggest takeaway from our workshop. Here’s what they had to say.
Amani Sheikh-Steinberg, User Researcher: “As a User Researcher, my goal is to create empathy and understanding of what JSTOR users experience when using our platform. In general I feel that everyone on our team brings curiosity and consideration to how their work impacts the end user, however this on-site experience seems to have brought this mindset to a new level. By watching previous user interviews together and participating in lively discussions I feel that we all have a shared understanding of why our goals are what they are and a renewed motivation for creating the best experience possible for our users. While reviewing data and feedback from others in the organization is important, there’s nothing like sitting together as a team and watching a video of a new college student attempting to use JSTOR while sharing their inner thoughts about the process. Not only did this experience help us bond as a team and create clear goals for the year to come but these exercises have continued to have a ripple effect as we still refer back to specific quotes, feedback or discussions from our time together in person.”
David Corneail, Senior Product Designer: “This was a reminder of how important it is to build user empathy as a team and have real people and use cases that we can reference together. We started our workshop by rewatching user interviews in a shared physical space, which felt much more impactful than just sharing a screen over WebEx. It was much easier to reflect together, discuss ideas, and troubleshoot what was going on for our users from both a technical and UX perspective — it really helped set the tone for the exercises and discussions that followed.”
Armaan Dandavati, Senior Software Engineer: “What I found most empowering was the opportunity to change our scope of thinking from day to day and week to week to years out. It was really great to talk about where we potentially want our products to be next year, or five years from now, and what we can focus on today to get there. Additionally, it was great to catch up with the whole team. I love working remotely, but having a few in person meetings a year is a really fun way to bond as a team and realign around the work at hand.”
Andrew Fiasco, Quality Software Engineer: “While working remotely is preferred for my day-to-day individual contributions, being able to see body language, make eye contact, and collaborate in person meant that opinions and ideas were better understood. During our sessions, the team felt more in sync, which ultimately led to better brainstorming, collaboration, and more meaningful debates or discussions. In addition, the opportunity to dedicate focused time to understanding our users, mapping our work, and coming up with clear goals can be challenging for a team that is new to learning to work together, and our sessions together help breach this barrier faster. Our team is fairly new to working together and learning more about each other’s personalities and mannerisms in a shared physical space helped understand habits and workflows in the remote world, which we are already seeing the benefits from.”
Ben Galicki, Agile Coach: “As the newest member of the team, I could not have had a better onboarding experience than this retreat. I feel substantially more comfortable with our product and teammates than if we kept our normal cadence of remote meetings. I could tell that the team had been slowed down by the fits and starts of periodic planning meetings where no topic was given enough time to be finished; they needed dedicated time to truly flesh out our problem space and product goals without having to run to the next engagement. Not only did our time sequestered allow us to actually wrap up needed debates, being in person allowed for spontaneous conversation that also often led to new ideas. This team is as aligned and engaged as any agile coach could ask for.”
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