All Hands Meetings at DataFox

My Favorite Meeting of the Month

One Thursday a month, during lunch, our whole company attends an All Hands Meeting in our SF office. This is my favorite meeting of the month, because we use it to celebrate wins, openly discuss important topics, answer questions and recognize each other’s achievements.

Here’s how we approach All Hands Meetings at DataFox:

Why Once a Month?

In addition to our monthly All Hands Meeting, we hold a 30 minute weekly Customer Feedback Meeting. We use the Customer Feedback Meeting to review key customer delights and pains from the past week, while also addressing a few announcements and reviewing our product KPIs (key performance indicators).

This allows us to use our Monthly All Hands for ad hoc topics and deep-dives that warrant more than 30 minutes.

Typical Agenda

1. Fantastic Fox Award (5 mins)
2. Announcements (5 mins)
3. Deep-dive topics (20–30 mins)
4. Demos (15 mins)
5. Q&A / AMA (10 mins)

Fantastic Fox

Our version of “Employee of the Month” — the Fantastic Fox is awarded to the teammate who most emulated our values and went above and beyond the call of duty that month.

Fun side-benefit: the winner gets to choose a baked good homemade by one of our teammates, Lisa.

Announcements

We often have a few announcements to share with the company: new hires, upcoming events, etc.

Deep-dive topics

These next two sections form the meat of our All Hands meetings. We strive for extreme transparency at DataFox, because it’s empowering to our teammates and helps us all make better decisions, faster.

Our choice of deep-dive topics depends on what’s going on at the company in that month, and what things our teammates have shown a curiosity to learn more about.

Here are a few examples of deep-dives we’ve done recently or are planning to do soon:

• Presentation of our board deck: we do this after each quarterly board meeting. We share the whole board deck, so everyone knows exactly when achievements, challenges and priorities are being discussed at the board level.
• Discussion of things we’re doing to promote an inclusive and diverse team and work environment.
• Review of our business’ financial profile, including cash flow projections and key revenue drivers.
• Updated product roadmap: which features made the cut, which ones didn’t, and what we expect to launch in the next few months.
• Bring in a customer for an in-person deep-dive into their day-to-day, problems they face, and how DataFox helps.
• Mini-workshop on how to provide good peer feedback (short answer: frequently and in-context).
• Overview of a key partnership, e.g. how it’s getting built out and how it will be promoted.

Our team always asks inquisitive questions about the topics we present; engineers ask questions about our sales targets, customer success reps ask questions about our roadmap, etc, and because it’s a company-wide discussion, we all learn from the conversation.

Demos

Demos are another ritual I expect we’ll keep for a long time: in this section volunteers from our product team demo features they completed recently or are working on. Our team loves hearing about the considerations that went into building a feature, and the demo is always met with raucous applause.

The way teammates from our product team (engineers, data analysts, designers and product managers) are able to explain how our customers will interact with a new feature always reminds me just how much empathy and understanding they have for our customers and their needs.

One team one dream!

Q&A / AMA (Ask Me Anything)

In the last section of All Hands, I share questions posed by members of the team, submitted anonymously before the meeting. I love seeing the depth and thoughtfulness of those questions.

For some questions, I’m best-placed to answer, but often other teammates jump in to provide their much better-informed perspective. This was a tip offered to me by Tony Rodoni while he was running a large sales organization at Salesforce. He said Q&A becomes exponentially more valuable when you make it more of a discussion, involve the team in helping to answer questions, rather than trying to answer everything yourself.

How Does Your Company Run All Hands?

What topics do you like for All Hands Meetings? Please share your thoughts!

If DataFox sounds like the kind of team you want to join, check out our open roles and reach out!