my notes from work offsite🍵

#57 role of AI tools, career ladders & notes for planning future editions.

started this month by spending a week in our preply office in barcelona.

I find work trips like normal work weeks but on steroids - usually jam packed with group sessions and evening socials. all the while keeping up with what we call BAU (business as usual) tasks!!

back home, I hardly go out on a school night so work trips now rattle my old lady systems.🤣

but every time after I recover from the social + work overdose of a work trip, I find them productive (in ways I can’t put numbers next to).

girl dinner max after one of the offsite days.

here’s a little behind-the-scenes of our offsite this time👀

we gather as different groups (product/ squad/ design) through the year and this time it was all folks who form part of design leadership for preply. think design managers, lead designers, principal designer.

we all work remotely, and we planned this week with the intention of spending some time together IRL (even if it’s just working next to each other), and think beyond our BAU tasks.

ngl, i grow into this role as a “leader” every week/moth and am still very much in the middle of figuring out my “leadership” style but that is for future editions.

some topics that we talked about.

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🔮 the evolving role of product designer feat. AI tools

as a leadership team, we will be in denial if we don’t acknowledge & plan for how AI design tools are changing our workflows & productivity quotients.

few articles that capture broad strokes of our discussion.

🔗 early thoughts on vibe coding
🔗 the future favors the curious
🔗 you can just do things - but should you always?

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🪜 career ladders

as an IC, I found career ladders to be documentation no one cared about. very generic & not that helpful in promotion conversations.

as a manager, I am realizing maybe it was because those career ladders did not evolve with the ever so evolving role of product design in tech teams?

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking/ observing mid-weight vs senior vs lead/staff, and so has our head of design.

plans to redo/jam on it, will share where we land.

how we spent most of our week

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💛 a good old retro.

you can’t and shouldn’t escape or underestimate a shared reflection sesh as a team.
we rolled out a lot of changes to uplevel out processes and quality control, and looking back all of them were necessary & got us to a space where we feel ready to tackle more - but don’t wanna sugarcoat that it required a lot of resilience (aka stress handling) for the core group to pull through.

we chatted on how we could support each other better + how can we create ways to acknowledge/recognise each other (as I am coming to know, leadership is a very invisible & often thankless role).

the team.

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📝 notes for our future off-sites.

am also someone who really appreciates creating an experience for people, so been actively taking notes on what works vs not works for these small group working sessions.

✏️ having a structure, but including lots of unstructured time —the best connections always happened in the space between.
✏️ spend time outside screens — we are all architecture nerds, so last time we did a self created architecture walking tour and this time I arranged for us to go visit casa vicens.
✏️ create a follow-up plan — it’s all chat if you don’t have a plan to follow through and roughly when will you meet again.
✏️ share what you did with your team - up & down. it gives people around confidence that few folks are thinking and planning ahead.
✏️ build together. nothing beats the high that comes from building something cool together

casa vicens. one of my fav places in barcelona.

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I was always really curious on what happens in offsites, so hope you found this helpful. was there any part that made your surprised or curious??

fit check feat OMG this week is insane (in a good way!)

talk next week,
chhavi