In mid-September, Atlasers from across the globe came together for our 2023 company offsite. During the offsite, Abe (CEO) and I hosted a joint session entitled “How We Work at Atlas AI.” The goal of the session was to yield observations and practical next steps on how we work with urgency, accountability, and collaboration at Atlas in a virtual, global context.
Fun fact about Atlas: we have worked remotely longer than we have worked in-person. Imagine building a business across multiple time zones and countries. And while we’ve done a great job of it these last several years, it’s always worth iterating on to ensure we are constantly striving for improvement and to meet business needs; and the offsite was the perfect opportunity to have a company-wide discussion on how we work at Atlas AI today, tomorrow and into the future.
To start, Abe and I opened up the floor to give the team an opportunity to give props on what we do well and to discuss areas where we could improve.
What we did well
The team overwhelmingly noted our ability to collaborate (virtually & cross-functionally), the company’s promotion of transparency, trust and accountability, and how supportive fellow team members and managers are; all in line with Atlas AI’s values.
Our areas for improvement included:
Being better stewards of our project management tool, sharing learnings with each other, and ways we can continue to ensure relevant stakeholders are looped into pertinent conversations early.
From this initial thought exercise we then split into smaller groups to dive deeper into solutions, namely we asked ourselves:
- What are the solutions we can implement today?
- What are solutions that we can implement at scale?
- What are ways we establish constant improvement and how do we get this information to the right decision-makers and implementers?
We came up with some interesting ideas!
Collaboration: We will be holding smaller offsites to allow teams or cross-functional project groups to work together in-person at moments where being together in a room can boost the quality of creativity, communication and cross-functional productivity.
Clearer standards for how we approach knowledge management: We had a lot of discussions surrounding norms for commercial and technical teams as it relates to storing and sharing information. We will be updating and documenting technical work more frequently so that it’s readily available to all team members, and engaging with internal stakeholders on capabilities and bandwidth earlier in the sales lifecycle, among other ideas.
Rethinking how we use software tools: Along the same lines of information sharing, we wanted to revisit how we used various tools and platforms so that there is more cohesion in tracking work across the company. We agreed there should be a better transition from Pipedrive (CRM) to Asana (Project Management) with potentially a report being pulled from the CRM and then used to write a short project brief before being mapped out in the PM tool. This way, there is more collaboration and a clearer handoff between the commercial and technical team and general documentation on each project for the team to access.
We look forward to testing out these and many more ideas coming out of our offsite!
