#421 AI Banana Phone

This week, we improvised a game using generative AI we called, “Banana Phone,” during our company social hour.

Finding ways to connect with each other beyond the work we do together is vital for any team. It’s substantially more difficult when your team is remote and distributed around the globe. We’re always on the lookout for casual online games or undertaking a play-based design activity. During our social hour this month we tried a newer Slack-based trivia platform that didn’t quite do it for us.

I was craving something more creative, so I suggested to the group that—improv rules—somebody come up with an animal. Raccoon was said first and I gave the team the prompt, “using any GenAI image tool, create an image of a Raccoon doing something and share it with the team.”

We voted on the image we liked best. This little buddy was the winner:

I instructed the group to try and regenerate this exact image only by coming up with the prompt that created it.

Doing this activity prompted my colleague Kendra to suggest, “what if we played this like a game of telephone?” I came up with the first image and sent it to the first player.

Their task was to write a prompt that would generate an image as similar to the original as possible, but no matter what the result, accept their first attempt and pass it to the next player.

We had fun, we laughed, we got to express creativity and it sparked ideas we can incorporate into the product. It also demonstrated to us that we’re fully capable of inventing our own fun.

The metrics were good this week. While we’re noting a small drop in MAU, we made gains in web traffic, registration, and the number of weekly meetings ran.

…drafted our content strategy and calendar for 2025. Still plenty of work to do in order to shape this up a bit more but we’re acknowledging the potential affects Generative AI and the evolution of search engines may have on our top of content funnel.

…held a retrospective discussing how to improve our user success strategy. Today we have difficulty reaching users who might be struggling (or not!) to adopt Parabol. We’re looking to evolve our practices that will make our outreach attempts more successful.

…deployed and tested an exciting new version of our integration with the Mattermost collaboration platform. Soon it will be possible to start Parabol activities and add Reflections using chat data. We’re excited for how this new functionality might be used!

…met with many new potential distributors and channel partners for Parabol in the Public Sector. There has been a lot of interest and adoption among folks in the U.S. Public Sector this year. This increase in demand is drawing folks to us who’d like to represent what we have to offer to potential user groups who are sometimes difficult to reach.

…demo development Cycle 5 progress internally. We’re midway through our final product development cycle of the year. Next week we’ll be demonstrating our progress and getting feedback from one another.