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Engagement Event management

Behind the scenes of a successful company event - Intro

Behind the scenes of a successful company event - Intro

A few words about the event itself

A couple of weeks ago I was in Barcelona together with around 400 colleagues for Altitude23, our first Product and Tech Camp, that I helped organise together with a handful of colleagues, and that went on for four days.

Goals

There are a lot of new people in the Product and Technology functions at my company, and the teams are heavily distributed across Europe and India. We wanted to provide them with the opportunity to:

  • get to know each other better
  • expand personal networks
  • bond and build trust
  • share knowledge
  • align around the vision and strategy for next year

to reinforce the foundations on which to build better collaboration in the day by day.

In-person set-up

We decided for an in-person event because in-person interactions can achieve the vast majority of those goals at a deeper level and faster than virtual ones.
Additionally, we live streamed the parts of the event that made sense to stream, so as to make contents accessible also to the colleagues who could not join us in person.

High level agenda

The high level agenda we designed to meet our goals for the event was:

High level agenda of Altitude23

  • Our leaders in Product and Technology delivered the first plenary session about vision and strategy.
  • Team activities were decided by our Directors, and every team did something different, even outside the venue of the event.
  • The breakout sessions in the Open Space were delivered by the attendees themselves. Here is an introduction about the Open Space technology, for those who have never heard about it.

It was a success in terms of active participation and engagement! What are the reasons?

A lot of work and love went into preparing the Camp, and it showed: the attendees provided great feedback (“I am enjoying every minute” is one that I’ll never forget), and the execs who thought that the time was right to run such an event for that audience were happy.
It was an enriching and rewarding experience also for me personally.

Now that emotions have (more or less 😅) subsided, I want to reflect on what I think the ingredients for such a positive experience have been. There is for sure room for improvement, but here I want to focus on why it was a success in terms of active participation and engagement.

In a nutshell, and unsurprisingly for some of you:

  • autonomy, mastery, purpose
  • co-creating an experience with the people it is intended for
  • and some good tools.

Let’s unpack!