Looking back on the Trail — 2016
What a year 2016 has been for Trail! 🎉 Over the last 12 months we grew from 8 people to 16, secured investment, rolled out a completely redesigned Trail experience, added a load of value for our users, and went on two fantastic company trips.
Team Growth 💪
We saw in the new year by hiring Nick to head up the commercial team, a team that has since grown to 4 people who’ve helped us understand the industry and brought a huge number of exciting new customers through the pipeline. The tech team doubled in size from 3 to 6, taking on an excellent mix of developers that allowed us to revamp our processes and take our first steps into the world of serverless. Finally, the product team grew to 3, giving us the capacity to research and release some highly desired new features!
Trail Trip Wales 🐲
In April, we took our first team trip of the year to Crickhowell in the Brecon Beacons, with the goal of tackling some tough technical problems and planning some important upcoming features. The developers experimented with CQRS and Event Sourcing while the rest of the team completed their first design sprint, prototyping what ultimately became Conversations, Notifications and the Activity Feed.
It’s great to see the output from the trip being used by customers every day!
New Trail Experience 🚩
In the third quarter of 2016 we launched an overhauled Trail that works great across devices and simplifies the user experience. The previous version did the job and allowed us to quickly build out features but as we onboarded more customers, we realised it needed a bit of a refocus.
Here‘s the Trail we started the year with, compared with the Trail now! As you can see it’s far less cluttered, has a new navigation bar, and features like On Demand Tasks and Filters — all of which allow you to focus on what you need to do now.
Investment 📈
In August this year we announced a £900k raise with Global Founders Capital, Seedcamp and private investors. The money allowed us to grow the team, develop the app further and onboard exciting new customers.
A Team Effort 🏙
We’re a remote company first and foremost, with people based all over the UK (and Italy!). This year however, with a growing number of team members and customers based in the area, we reached a size that deserved a small London base of operations. We now have some space in Techhub London — somewhere to work from a few days a week, and a great place for the whole company to meet every other week for our ‘Office Hours’ catchup. We’ve also attended a number of job fairs and tech meetups in the city, and hope to visit and present at many more next year!
Trail Trip Berlin 🇩🇪
At the end of November we embarked on our biggest team trip yet — Berlin! This time, we wanted to celebrate the team’s hard work and look to the year ahead. Each team tried to answer questions like these;
- How should we grow and organise ourselves?
- What are the goals for next year?
- What roles would help us achieve them?
We got some great answers from everyone, looked at how industry leaders are growing, and we’ll be collating it all to help make the big decisions in 2017.
Key Takeaways 🍜
All of this is great, but what have we learned that we can take forward into next year? Some key takeaways:
- Hire the right people, maintain a strong culture
- Focus on solving customer problems rather than just adding features
- Know when to stop tinkering and move on
- Measure everything, develop a strong feedback loop
- The Sichuan in Old Street 😍
Trail Beats! 🔊
To sign off, we’d like to share some of the music that’s been powering us all this year.
…aaaaand some bonus photos from our Christmas celebrations! 🎄
What’s Next? 📆
2017 will see more growth, a rethink around team structure, and even more customer problems solved.
See you all next year! 👋
