#411 – Growth Retreat Minnesota

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This week we welcomed our Growth team back to the virtual office. Last week the team met up in Minneapolis, Minnesota to dive into the world of customer success and sales with the goal of making Parabol a better value for the companies we serve. Our long-term goals on the Growth team have always been about understanding and meeting customers needs. We aim to facilitate the adoption and onboarding of our software so that teams can do their best work.

The team took some time to walk through the entire journey of our customers and identify ways we could reduce headaches and make the experience better for leaders and teams. The end goal is that they have valuable meetings and team workflows that they don’t have to think about. Setting up the account, administering the product, and getting support should be as frictionless as possible.

The retreat wasn’t all work, no play. These gatherings are valuable to us as a team. We are eager to spend time in person a few times a year, sharing meals, finding enjoyable activities (e.g. bicycling the city, hiking around Minnehaha Falls, lawn bowling), and strengthening our relationships. This time was no different. We were in Minneapolis at the best time of year, during the Minnesota State Fair!

The State Fair warrants a blog post of its own. The team enjoyed riding the rides, playing the games, trying all the foods, and seeing the extraordinary exhibits—butter sculptures, trash tornadoes, seed art?! The fair truly rivals any other you could attend in the U.S. We highly recommend!

Minnesota was a special destination for our CEO, Jordan Husney, as he and family have recently moved back to this, his home state. We’ve talked about holding a retreat during the State Fair for years! Overall we count it a successful retreat as we got to explore how to better serve our customers and spend quality time together as a team.

We’re starting to settle into the fall months. We’ve seen great sign-ups in the last few weeks. We hope to see Monthly Active Users bounce back. Weekly Meetings might have seen a dip due to the U.S. Labor Day holiday.

…we kicked off Shape Up Cycle 4. We’re rolling up our sleeves and getting started with several milestones: our Team Insights feature, migrating fully from RethinkDB to Postgres, enhancing our Mattermost integration, and delivering better Enterprise account management.

…Parabol was made available at DoD’s Impact Level 4. We’re excited to see that more teams can use our software when they’re dealing with sensitive information. We’re working closely with DoD Platform One to onboard more teams with the essential tooling they need.

…shipped some account management enhancements. Now admins can search and sort users in the organization admin view.

…take next steps in our latest UX research efforts. We’re reaching out to our customers to gather feedback on some of our latest and upcoming features. Our goal is to better understand their use cases and invest more in the workflows that they get most value from.

Have feedback? See something that you like or something you think could be better? Please write to us.