A week in Vancouver with the Landscape team

Earlier this month Peter and I headed to Vancouver to participate in a week-long Landscape sprint.

The main goals of the sprint were to review the work that had been done in the past 6 months, and plan for the following cycle.

IRL

Landscape is a totally distributed team, so having regular face-to-face time throughout the year is important in order to maintain team spirit and a sense of connection.

It is also important for us, from the design team, to meet in person the people that we have to work with every day, and that ultimately will implement the designs we create.

I thought it was interesting to hear the Landscape team discuss candidly about how the previous cycle went, what went well and what could have been improved, and how every team member’s opinion was heard and taken into consideration for the following cycle.

User interviews

Peter and I took some time aside to interview some of the developers in 1-2-1 sessions, so they could talk us through what they thought could be improved in Landscape, and what worked well. As we talked to them, I wrote down key ideas on post it notes and Peter wrote down more thorough notes on his laptop. At the end of the interviews, we collated the findings into a Trello board, to identify patterns and try to prioritise design improvements for the next cycle.

The city

But the week was not all work!

Every day we went out for lunch (unlike most sprints which provide the usual hotel food). This allowed us to explore a little bit of the city and its great culinary offerings. It was a great way to get to know the Landscape team a little bit better outside of work.

Vancouver also has really great coffee places, and, even though I’m more of a tea person, I made sure to go to a few of them during the week.

I took a few days off after the sprint, so had some time to explore Vancouver with my family. We even saw a TV show being filmed in one of our favourite coffee shops!

This was my first time in Canada, and I really enjoyed it: we had a great sprint and it was good to have some time to explore the city. Maybe I’ll be back some day!