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Sipping and Strategizing: the first product team retreat

Morgan Smith's Layout avatar

Flywheel’s product design team has been in full force the past few weeks! Mandy Kubicek, our product manager, gathered up her team of Flywheelers and headed to Sozo Coffee, where the five of them spent some time sitting on comfy couches and talking strategy. The product design team, which used to be a collaborative effort between our three founders, is one of our fastest-growing departments – adding all five current members this year.

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During the day-and-a-half retreat, our product designers put their heads together and came up with a process to define problems and clarify workflow. Once a problem is defined, the process allows the team to gauge the impact and functionality of solving it. Items that are not deemed high priority are archived, and our designers are then able to tackle the issues that are most important to our mission – helping designers do what they love!

Product-Team-Retreat

“It is so important to have a process around design, because it allows you to focus your energy efficiently and create things that really impact your customers,” said Nick Chickinelli, one of our designers. Establishing a workflow also allowed the team to clearly define their own roles on the team. Having clear-cut roles and flow allows the team to streamline their process, creating high quality work in less time.

The product team is already looking forward to the future, planning not only how to implement their new workflow, but also beginning the process of writing core team values!

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Flywheel’s commitment to great design drives much of what we do. We are so proud of the way our product design team came together to improve their processes and keep striving to provide exceptional tools for our customers!