Dear Dave,
Offsites: a time of joyful reunions, breathless height comparisons, and, reliably, bone-deep exhaustion.
When we bring our team together for Real Life Zoom, it can be deeply valuable — but it requires a hefty dose of intentionality. The difference between time well spent together and time just… spent together is the effort behind the scenes to design a purposeful experience.
Recently, our Experience, Design and Research team had our offsite in Toronto (remember? you were there!). We split our time carefully between lightning talks, open reflection on burnout and ways of working, social time, and, of course, hacking with AI. We wanted our team to have the opportunity to learn together and ship real product changes.
A few years ago at our last departmental offsite, we ran a design hackathon where the team went deep on solutions to problems they cared about; this was greatly rewarding, though those great ideas didn’t come to life.
This time, our hackathon was literal: the team vibe-coded real, shippable solutions to UX debt — tangible things built together, focused on visual bugs and design system updates rather than blue-sky design work.
This was, frankly, not easy in multiple ways. Getting our codebase up and running took significant time and tedious troubleshooting. The exercise sparked honest but difficult conversations about how quickly our roles are changing. And once things were running, actually getting solutions built properly was a hurdle in itself — designing with AI is fundamentally imprecise, yet we’d taken on precise design work.
It wasn’t perfect. But along the way, something wonderful started happening that could only happen in person. As teammates pushed through the challenges of setting up the production environment on their own devices, they’d shout with glee once things clicked — and the whole room would erupt in applause. When people hit walls, peers jumped up to help. We demoed small wins and cheered each other on. We went on a hero’s journey together, reaching a triumphant climax by overcoming challenges we didn’t think we could, together.
That’s not to say we ended the week on a freeze frame of happy AI adoption. We didn’t. The challenges of the hackathon reflect real, ongoing barriers for our team. And just as important as the hackathon was the time we spent talking honestly about burnout, AI anxiety, and disillusionment — alongside the time we spent simply being together, connecting on a human level.
The difference between a good offsite and a great offsite is purpose. Knowing why we’re all here — why it’s worth the time away from family and life outside work to be together in person. Right now, for design and research teams, that means creating space for AI experimentation together alongside genuine, honest conversation about how our roles are evolving that make us feel less alone and, importantly, more confident in how we move ahead.
All that, of course, and good food.
From organizing my closet full of offsite swag,
Danielle.