Field Trips!
Our product designers are embedded on product delivery teams. Each team is basically a small product development team that contains all the parts and pieces that design, build and maintain a chunk of Canopy. The skinny is that we don’t work and sit with our design peers on a daily basis — we work and sit with our squads. While this provides gigantic benefits for delivering a great, well-designed product quickly, along with a plethora of other benefits, there is a possibility that we could become isolated from the design team we belong to.
While we have worked out a bunch of methods for coming together as a design team during a regular work week, we wanted to find a way to replicate the friendships you make when you sit next to each other on a daily basis. One method that we have been working out is going on quarterly field trips together as a design team. We have only been doing this tradition for the last two quarters but it has already paid off.
Learning
We do have some requirements for field trips though — it’s not only about getting out the office and having fun and making friends. We want to take field trips that will inform us about design or process or empathy or anything that will make us better designers and contributors to the Canopy culture and vision. The other goal is to learn from a lot of other disciplines and industries and discover how they create and deliver their products and services.
Baer Bronze Fine Art Foundry
Last September, we kicked off our field trip tradition by taking a few hours after lunch to take a tour of Baer Bronze Fine Art Foundry: a 25-year-old bronze casting and fabrication company that converts artists’ sculptures into beautiful bronze statues. Not only was it awesome to see their bronze and wax studio, but we learned a lot about their complicated process of casting a mixed media sculpture from molding to casting to final patina and even discovered what wax and metal chasing was.
It was amazing to see a process from a completely different industry that had plenty of similarities. They experience some of the very same hand off problems and quality problems that we face at Canopy and had some pretty interesting ways they work around them. Another huge benefit in taking the tour was to see how they were able to balance a fast-paced, rigid, very iterative process with a product that requires so much care, accuracy and attention to detail. One of the best things to see was how they occasionally fail, what they learn and how they recover from these occasions. Heaven knows we fail from time to time.
The Giving Tree
As we were brainstorming some ideas for a fourth quarter field trip, we thought it would be appropriate to plan something more service oriented, to give back and maybe build some empathy as a team. One of our local malls has a Sub for Santa Giving Tree support program where you can pick names of children, families or seniors and provide them Christmas gifts that they would otherwise not receive, giving them a little boost of happiness to a hard Christmas season.
We felt like participating in this program as a design team would meet our field trip criteria. Taking a longer lunch break, we traveled down to the Giving Tree and picked a handful of names from the tree and did a little gift planning. While we didn’t get a chance to meet any of the children or seniors that we chose to purchase gifts for, lessons in empathy and understanding were had, and I know personally it changed the way my family approached our own Christmas traditions this year.
Beyond providing a little piece of happiness for those less fortunate than ourselves, while we were at the mall we decided to take advantage of the food court. Some of the team attempted to down some stale Chinese food that had been sitting in a wok for hours while the rest of us realized that Chick-fil-a is not always that great. We even managed to spend a few minutes browsing those wonderful mall exclusive stores. Did you know Hot Topic now has clothing that isn’t all black?
What’s Next?
We still need to decide what to do for the upcoming 2018 first quarter field trip, but we already have some great ideas including a sausage factory tour and an artist who makes their own oil paints from scratch. We’ll see what the future holds and keep you posted on what we do and what we learn from these team getaways.
