One of the best parts about working for a company with a remote culture is the freedom to work from anywhere in the world. Our employees are encouraged to embrace the digitally nomadic lifestyle as much, or as little as they want, and it’s amazing to see our company world map filling with pins as people dial into Zoom calls from far and wide.

That said, the team can hardly wait for that time of year when MetaLab Summit rolls around.  Summit is our annual, company-wide retreat where every employee travels to the same place and is together for three days. In the days and weeks leading up to Summit, the excitement in the offices and on the Slack channels is palpable.

Summit has become such a huge part of our culture over the years, partly because of the epic karaoke battles that go down, but mostly because of the infectious, positive energy that emerges when we’re all connecting and exchanging ideas in a shared space. With 33% of MetaLab employees working remote and our two HQ’s being separated by a beautiful (but 90-minute long) ferry ride, it’s vital that we all gather once a year to reconnect, realign and let our hair down.

This was the 4th annual MetaLab Summit, and the first year we were completely offsite, so planning it was a big deal! Previously, we’ve relied on having either our Victoria HQ or Vancouver HQ as a gathering place, so planning to be in Whistler without that safety net of being near anyone's home turf raised the planning stakes to a whole new level. 

Not only did we need to find a place for 100+ people to stay every night, but we also needed a place that could host 100+ people during the day for a variety of meetings and activities. Oh, and we had to do all this planning remotely—talk about putting remote culture to the test!

Spoiler alert: We pulled it off. Keep reading for a glimpse into how we did it.

Location, location, location! 

We decided that the world was our oyster for Summit 2018; Hawaii and Mexico topped the list, but timing and logistical realities meant these dream locales would have to wait for another year ;-) 

In May of 2018, the Summit planning party officially kicked off: we zeroed in on Whistler as the location finalist, since the fresh mountain air and spa-time vibes were definitely calling our names! Now that Summit is over, we learned that the energy for the off-site is even better when the entire team is away from home.

Save the Date 

Typically, the timing of Summit has always been determined by hotel availability.  And since we weren’t wedded to any particular month, I really wanted to aim for September to catch the lovely fall weather in British Columbia. (Summit ‘17 in September was a personal favorite…)

Putting together the perfect proposal

Once we landed on the where and the when, it was time to get the budget proposal underway. Starting 3+ months before gave us enough time to plan. We’re talking spreadsheets. Lots and lots of spreadsheets. Luckily, we got the pros at HelmsBriscoe to help us gather proposals from different hotels and event spaces, which saves a ton of time (and at least a dozen headaches).

‍Pro tip: enlist a pro; it takes a village to host a village, so don’t be afraid to outsource some of the tougher to-dos!

A recipe for Summit success

Strike the right balance

Agendas for a 3-day all-hands schedule is a huge undertaking because we want to ensure we’re balancing between having fun and having a chance to mind meld on how to make MetaLab better, together. The key is a little work, a lot of play, and a focus on making sure everyone is enjoying each other’s company as much as possible. 

The more you can bring in the leadership team from the beginning to make it a collaborative effort, the easier it becomes to carry the schedule over the finish line and get official sign-off. I ensured our leadership team started formulating day-by-day agendas at least 2 months before Summit to ensure they thought through all of the angles and items different teams would want and need to cover.

One thing we worked hard to do more of this year was to give everyone more downtime. It’s easy to assume everyone wants to be together at all times, but this year we were conscientious of people’s need for downtime to recharge between events.

Encourage mingling        

Since Summit is one of the only opportunities for everyone to bond within their department and collaborate on cross-functional activities, it’s crucial to reserve time for departmental breakouts, team building exercises, and learning and development conversations. For many, it provides eye-opening insight into how projects are actually run and how people approach their work. After almost 4 years at MetaLab, I finally learned what a detailed project structure actually looks like! Who knew!

Let the creative juices flow

One of the main activities that people look forward to the most is our #MakeItMetaLab competition. This is where we break everyone into cross-functional teams and give them the afternoon to design and present a concept for a dream product they’ve always wanted to build. It’s fun and playful, but challenges people to think outside the box and get to know new faces. Not only were this year’s presentations innovative and well-executed, but they were an inspiring reminder of what an incredibly talented and collaborative group our MetaFamily truly is. All the feels

Bring some outside perspective

In the spirit of keeping things fresh and different, we decided to have a guest speaker at this year’s Summit. Meghan, our Director of Client Services, raised her hand and suggested Irene Au, Design Partner at Khosla Ventures, one of Silicon Valleys top VC firms and someone we work closely with often. Irene agreed to fly up to Whistler, and we were all lucky enough to hear her story and jot down some notes on grace, self-determination, navigating the tech industry, and her love of teaching yoga as well. *prayer hands*

Third times a charm!

This was my third year planning and coordinating Summit at MetaLab, and I’ve learned a lot about what does and doesn’t work over the years. The TL;DR? Planning well ahead made this year’s Summit the one to beat. Am I biased? Maybe a little. But in our post-Summit company-wide survey, 99% of the entire company said they loved the experience and viewed it as in invaluable part of what makes MetaLab such an awesome place to work. 

If I had to summarize what made this year so special, I think it would be the trifecta of:

1. Everyone being offsite in Whistler
2. The entire team being “tools down” for 3 days
3. The stronger balance between work and play

Plus, being in a location as beautiful and varied as Whistler, providing discounts on extracurricular activities, and letting loose at dinners and post-dinner shenanigans make it really, really hard to not have a good time.

It’s been an incredible year at MetaLab and I’m already looking forward to kicking off the planning for Summit 2019—Hawaii here we come… kidding, kind of ;-) But first—get ready, here comes the Oscars speech—I have a few people I need to thank: thank you to my fellow Ops folks, the entire leadership team, all the other MetaLabbers that sprinkle their hilarious magic into these three days, and the fantastic team at the Delta Whistler & Whistler Conference Centre who made planning this from afar so easy. A million Bonusly points, all around!

Phew.

Now let’s do this all over again in T-minus 11 months!

Now that you have a strategy and your differentiators in place, it’s time to draft the entire product experience into a single document. This is a key step in the product lifecycle called product definition. 

One of the key deliverables that comes out of the product definition is the product blueprint. Your product blueprint allows you to visualize the entire product service on one page. This helps manage its complexity, including the actions and touchpoints of all the actors, key features, technical dependencies, and operational requirements.

Behind the scenes, there are several key assets that power this product blueprint: 

This view helps to ensure your team is aligned on the critical pieces of success.

That being said, it’s easy to go overboard with product blueprints, so don’t boil the ocean! Focus on the few critical features and components that will make a big impact for your customers.

Remember to trust in yourself and the research that has been done. Your customers don't always know what the right solution is for their wants and needs. That's why it's your job to consider their needs in the context of your product's potential and develop an appropriate blueprint that can scale in the future.

We saw earlier that you’re going to be spending the majority of your time in the product definition/design, testing, and build phases, which means you need a talented team of skilled makers. 

This may seem obvious, but when building the right team with the right chemistry within your budget, there are a lot of factors to consider. How long will it take for the team to gel? Do you stick with who you have? When should you contract vs. hire?

Too often, we see companies spend big budgets hiring a ton of great developers and designers. They throw them onto a project expecting the product will be delivered fast only to find the team isn’t hitting their milestones. Why? 

Teams typically struggle to get going immediately because of differing working styles, personalities, mindsets, and honestly… sometimes ego. That’s why you shouldn’t focus on individual hires but on the team as a whole.

If you have time, budget, and desire to invest in the future culture of your company, you have to invest time to build the team dynamics. We find that it typically takes 4-5 sprints for a team to find its groove — approximately four months, or more.

If you are an early stage startup, and don’t have a lot of time (six months or less), but still want to get a product out there quickly, we recommend hiring a pre-built team of skilled makers who have launched several products together. 

The key takeaway is to not waste all of your time and money hiring. Building a successful team takes time and cycles of members working together to hit their stride. When necessary, augment with experts to help your team grow, add a skill, or just simply to outsource a function. It ultimately comes down to how you want to allocate your resources.

Don’t reinvent the wheel… and don’t build everything from scratch! Accelerators are existing tools and technologies you can leverage or integrate into your product.

Some of the tools that we use to help accelerate the design process to create and test out designs, concepts, and prototypes with users include Figma, Framer.io, and even Typeform.

For development, we use many different tools and platforms on our projects to help accelerate the product development lifecycle and build products that can scale to meet customer demand.  Several of the most popular and impactful integrations and platforms used by our teams include:

AI is everywhere these days for a reason. It’s powering brand new ways to get work done and being incorporated into almost every tool we already use to make workflows easier. From content creation to scheduling, we are seeing tools popping up for everything. Here are a few that can help accelerate product development:

There are important considerations to keep in mind when using any AI tool in a responsible way. Sensitivity of data uploaded into any of these systems and the originality of the content is a big one.

Policies and regulation with AI are still being figured out, so it’s wise to exercise caution when setting guidelines for your product teams. Leverage these tools as inspiration or starting points for copy, as pieces of a larger composite for images, or to get as specific as possible with prompts in order to generate something unique.

Product development succeeds when teams develop a culture of continuous learning. This is fueled by rigorous testing, analytics, and strategic iteration during key phases of the product lifecycle.

In the discovery phase, we immerse ourselves in understanding our potential early adopters' needs and motivations (see #validators). Alongside this, we work with clients to think through solid analytics strategies. This step instills a data-centric culture from the start, setting the stage for ongoing learning and adaptation. 

By aligning qualitative user insights with a framework for quantitative data capture, we ensure the product strategy we craft will continually evolve to meet user needs.

As we pivot to the alpha and beta stages, the emphasis turns to iterative improvement. We engage early adopters in testing programs. Their first-hand experiences provides invaluable feedback to detect bugs and potential enhancements. 

This feedback, bolstered by real-time analytics data, drives our evidence-based refinement process, prepping the product to be market-fit.

By investing in this cycle of continuous learning — persistent testing, data-informed analytics, and strategic iteration — we embrace a user-centric ethos in product development. This equips our clients to not just navigate, but also thrive.

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When Ravi Mehta (former CPO at Tinder/Product Director at Facebook) was working on the first iteration of his personalized coaching product, he validated it quickly with a paid offering he pieced together with a number of low-code tools.

Leveraging learnings from a community of early adopters, he partnered with MetaLab to help enhance, refine, and evolve the product into the Outpace app.

Outpace launched earlier this year. It provides guided programs for personalized career development designed to level up with the support of a one-on-one AI coach.

We are in a post-WeWork/Theranos era of founders promising growth without showing any profit. You need to ask yourself "What do we need to show investors?" Users are great, but how is this actually going to make money?

You have to show real numbers and an actionable monetization strategy. This means outlining your marketing and growth strategies — and the mechanisms that will bring in not only revenue but profit.

Revenue strategies can vary greatly, but the following are a few of the most common buckets of digital product monetization mechanisms:

There are many ways to monetize a product, and this is by no means an exhaustive list. The right way is the one that will resonate with your audience, so feel free to experiment and be flexible when choosing a strategy.

We’ve been supporting Modular with the release of their new AI platform and product offerings. Early in our engagement, they asked us to design a marketing site to help them grow and segment their sales pipeline. This allowed them better understand, and target, existing and potential users. We took those early learnings to ensure the product landed with their audience and supported their revenue targets.

The product lifecycle doesn’t end with a launch, it goes far beyond. Once you begin to get a better understanding of your customers and their purchase behaviours, it’s vital to adapt, being flexible with pricing, monetization strategies, and identifying unexpected revenue drivers. 

For example, you may see that your primary offering for your SaaS tool is slowly gaining traction, but over and over customers are requesting access to an API for a specific data flow. You may be sitting on a large additional untapped revenue stream and there could be more. Meet your customers where they are!

It helps to consult the people who’ve been there before. There are a million people on LinkedIn who are trying to sell you a service or product that you may not need. There are critical steps that could cost you if you miss them. There are shortcuts you may not even know exist. Trusted advisors can help you navigate this and more. There is just no substitute for experience.

Find seasoned product leaders, designers, or engineers who have launched products in the past and will be familiar with the nitty-gritty details. They will have the perspective to help you find the forest through the trees. You want people on your side who can make sure you are spending your time, efforts, and money on the right things.

These are the Product Survival Kit items that we recommend to anyone who is creating and launching a product in today's climate. It's a mix of techniques, processes, people, actions and tools that we've seen provide success to many of our clients, colleagues and partners out there. But remember — each product is different, so find the mix that worst best for you. 

It may seem daunting but it is possible to successfully bring your idea or product concept to life today.  This may even be the right moment to go after it. Companies who launch useful and impactful products during economic downturns have a history of surviving and thriving. The next one could be you.