When in Rome
We organised our first R&D meet-up in Rome in June this year, with the main aim of our offsite to improve two things: our engineering culture and how product and engineering (our R&D org) collaborate
How Pento does meet-ups
They are encouraged but not mandatory, while we’d like everyone to be at these off-sites, we know that life brings with it the most unexpected circumstances and we respect that not everyone can make it during those days.
People can extend their trips, the actual meet-up was for those 3 days, however several people came early or extended their trip to explore Rome.
We can bring guests, this is my personal favourite as I brought my family with me (my husband and 1-year-old son). Pento is a parent-friendly employer and always helps in any way to provide a more flexible environment for its employees.
Here is a quick overview of what we did during the offsite.
Day 1
🛬 Arrival (if you hadn’t come in the days before)
🍻 Welcome drink and a quick snack in the hotel, allowing everyone to get acquainted (some of us hadn’t met in person before), before starting off with the days sessions.
🚀 We kicked off with a session from our CEO and co-founder Jonas about how product & engineering drive our mission and spoke about Pento’s short, medium and long term strategy.
⭐️ Our CFO Sabrina, then gave a quick walkthrough on how she used to run payroll at a previous company, helping members of the R&D team (especially our engineers) build greater empathy for our customers, whilst highlighting how Pento is solving many major pain points finance and payroll teams are facing with legacy Payroll solutions. Then Sabrina gave a presentation on what great R&D looks like showcasing our new Pento principles and a first run through of Pento’s new and improved career progression framework (more to follow soon).
🗣 We then split the R&D team into three discussion groups, each one focusing on a specific area. These included:
- What does a great R&D team look like?
- Pain points of R&D that our new principles will help solve
- Where are there opportunities to embed the principles into R&D working practices day to day?
🥂 Later in the evening we had the opportunity to mingle with some drinks and dinner at the hotel. It was a good chance for everyone to get to know each other!
Day 2
Day two was split into two tracks, Engineering and Product:
Engineering
☀️ I kicked off the day by opening the voting for the Engineering awards (we gave an award per Pento principle to engineers, voted for by their peers later in the day).
🗣 Groups were formed to talk about engineering pain points, where the tech leads did not take part (with the aim to remove bias from the engineers). After that, we shared with them a first draft of what we think the engineer’s remit is (regardless of seniority) and the Definition of Done to see if these docs help solve any pain points they mentioned earlier, this time around the tech leads also took part in these discussions. We were delighted to say that we had some very interesting outcomes from these discussions.
⭐️ Engineering awards for the engineers in the team who best represented our Pento Principles
Champion the customer — Joao Dias
Lead with respect and candour — Daniel Antos
Own your impact — Oscar Clemente
Communicate intentionally — Kristof Aranyos
Drive excellence at speed — Rafal Kostrzewski
Product
🫖 We kicked off the day by first collectively agreeing to count how many cups of tea Paige was going to drink that day! Then, deep-diving into how we think about the ‘Product’ org at Pento, our shared understanding is Product at Pento is the collection of areas focused on creating value for our customers.
🔎 We then started to think about our Vision and how we can start breaking down the Vision into themes for us to explore using the Product Vision Canvas! Followed by an afternoon of breaking down the areas we would like to explore, and open discussions on our processes.
🍝 In the evening we had a pasta-making activity, we were split into 2 teams at random and competed against each other on who made the best pasta. We then ate the pasta we made (not necessarily the one you were making) and enjoyed some drinks together. The funny thing is the winning team got a bottle of sparkling wine each, and because many of us were traveling with hand luggage only, we could not bring the gift back home. That wasn’t too much of a problem, as we drank the majority and the rest traveled safely with Gabi (😅) who was going home by train.
Day 3
🥇A talk from our Head of Product Dan on Customer outcomes and a walk through of examples of products/companies that made a walk through of examples. Our focus is very much on using these as lessons in ensuring our focus is in the right place for the future.
💭 Each of our product squads then got some time to just hang out and Each of our product squads. While some squads did not have the whole team, it was still fruitful to get this time in that you wouldn’t get in your day-to-day.
🛫 After a jam-packed two nights everyone started to make their way home, or continued to stay in Rome with some well earned personal time off.
Key Takeaways from the team
“Meeting people in person was absolutely great for relationships”
“Easy to get stuck in the detail and forget about the big picture. Realised for a while that we should be doing some things differently, but by coming together and realising that everyone feels the same way about doing things differently makes it feel more achievable and ensures it is the focus.”
“We can do everything, but do we want to do?”
“Focusing on the excellence part on not only the speed part”
“Better understanding of why doing payroll (without using Pento) sucks”
“We all think the same about the existing problems. Together this leads to possible solutions for them”
Interested to know more about Pento?
Head over to Pento Home where you can learn a bit more about us and what we do.
