This month at Sparkbox, our production team hosted an internal “Pitch Day,” a fun team building activity designed to kickstart this year’s internal efforts for learning together.
Every week our Production team, the group at Sparkbox that includes everyone who writes code as part of their job description, meets in a department meeting we call “Build Lab.” This is dedicated time for our team to hang out together and play a game, do small group code reviews, or learn together. Like many developers, our team tends to learn best with hands-on practice, and the project format provides consistent exercises that touch every part of the project planning lifecycle. We’ve been wanting to do an extended team project together for quite some time, especially since we work on different projects and don’t often get to work with everyone on the team, so 2025 is going to be the year!
But what are we going to build?
Every developer on our team, including leadership, was tasked with creating a pitch deck for a project idea. The idea could be anything they wanted, but the presentations were severely limited–just 6 slides and 2 minutes–to test our team’s ability to deliver a clear, concise technical presentation (and to not overwhelm them with the effort of putting together a large presentation). We invited Sparkbox’s other leadership, as well as our entire Experience Design team as well to not only attend, but also vote for the idea we will build.
As a manager of both technology and humans, I care about how we can best turn every task into a learning opportunity for professional growth. These pitches were an excellent exercise for our team, even outside of the concept of the side project. Public speaking within constraints helps our team learn to give better demos and explain technical topics to stakeholders. And when we do activities like this together where everyone is involved, it encourages a sense of trust and camaraderie among peers who will likely be in project-work conflict at some point. When we learn together, we learn how to communicate better, and we become better teammates and consultants overall.
YouTube embeds track user data for advertising purposes. You can watch the video on YouTube if you prefer not to grant consent for YouTube embeds.
The Project
The project itself will also provide additional leadership opportunities in a controlled environment. We will be assigning a technical leadership role to someone on our team who hasn’t had that specific experience yet. The “winner” of the team project pitches is going to act as a product owner, gaining experience in making decisions that affect an entire team, including feature prioritization, designs, and more. And for the rest of the team, building an application from idea generation to production will allow for us to norm around our processes together.
The idea we have chosen to build together is a carbon visualizer tool presented by Mandy Kendall. Mandy published an article on web sustainability already this month, and it’s so cool that we’re going to be able to lean on her expertise for our Build Lab project.
Pitch Day turned out to be a motivating, joy-filled hour of the incredible people I get to work with. I’ve edited together a short recap video for all those interested in sharing in that joy. We are excited to share more of our learning journey throughout the year.
