Smart Engineering virtual offsite June 2020
Smart Engineering Scale Up. The theme for the offsite was Scale Up. On 3 June 2020 Smart held its second-ever Engineering offsite event. The reason I wanted to write up a blog on our most recent offsite is to show how much the company has grown from the last offsite which happened two and a half years ago in November 2017.
It only feels like yesterday when Smart was just a small tech start-up in pensions with only 20 engineers in the London office. Organising such amazing events was a piece of cake as the Engineering Team was much smaller back then. Creating an offsite agenda was also a pretty much straight forward example to create small groups and discuss the topics which engineers like to discuss and do a presentation at the end.
Now when I compare 2017's offsite to 2020's it’s been fantastic — a lot more fun and a lot of excitement all around as now we have a team of over 180 engineers.
Offsite Photo from 2017
Can a virtual offsite be fun during lockdown?
2020 has been challenging so far, but that doesn't mean that you have to stop having fun. Our engineers have been working hard since the start of the year and have delivered so many amazing new features and delivered amazing projects. They all deserved to have fun and we would not let Covid-19 break our spirit. Smart decided to hold this year’s offsite remotely, which meant there was a lot of work that needed to be done to make this event fun and exciting for all of the engineers.
Massive shout out goes to Brad Jayakody our (Head of Engineering), Mehdi Shahinmehr our (Engineering Manager), Kulbir Dhingra (Head of Agile Leads), Nicole Rowe (Senior Agile Lead), Aurelija Stankunaite (Senior Agile Lead) for planning and hosting one of the best remote offsite events ever.
Was there any swag?
You can’t have such a big event without swag. Our lovely organisers worked very hard to make sure that we had t-shirts for everyone and had them delivered to each engineer to their home address no matter where in Europe they were based.
So what was the offsite day like?
As you can see from the photo, we kicked off the day at 09:00 followed by a keynote done by our CTO and Head of Engineering at 09:15.
Group discussions at 10:15, break at 11:15.
Group presentations at 11:30.
Lunch at 12:45
followed by talks at 13:45.
A virtual scavenger hunt (with prizes) at 15:00 and virtual pub and drinks at 16:00.
What topics were covered in the group discussion?
We had 12 amazing topics to cover and engineers had the option to opt-in for the topics they were most interested in. The topics were:
- Most seamless possible integration — both FE and BE
- Knowledge sharing
- Machine learning
- Agile organisation
- Data warehousing and data mining
- Re-using code already developed across products
- Mobile apps
- Testing and automation
- DDD
- Documentation
- Beyond COVID-19
- Engineering culture
The virtual scavenger hunt
One of my favourite parts of the day was spent playing the virtual scavenger hunt. Groups had to work together to collect the most points by completing various tasks. Some tasks were easy such as taking a selfie with a toaster and coming up with the team name.
One of my favourite tasks was getting virtual high fives from senior management like our MD, CEO and COS.
Photo highlights
One of my favorite task in the virtual scavenger hunt was spelling out the name “Smart Pension” using household objects, here is creativity at its best.
Conclusion
It was my first ever remote offsite day and I have to say it was one of the most exciting days full of presentations, roadmaps, as well as talks by members of the teams.
I would highly recommend a remote offsite day to all companies, especially during these difficult times. It’s not only fun but it also gives a chance for everyone to get together and get to know each other virtually. Particularly as we’ve had lots of new staff onboarded during lockdown.
It was a fantastic and innovative way to keep company culture alive and in a safe social distanced way.
