Smiirl in Lisbonne – FLY Reboot 2017

The Method : FLY THE NEST

Before anything else, we can't write an article about a FLY REBOOT without mentioning our good friends from Fly The Nest. We're now very familiar with their project management tools, especially the Masterplan, because we've been using it for more than a year. If you want to learn a bit more about their method and the project FLY the Nest, you can click there, over there, and up there. 

DAY 1 : Rainy Tuesday & Life @ Smiirl

Getting our heads out of the office was for us the occasion to say Sayonara to our crappy French weather. Failure. Landing in Lisbon had certainly some similarities with a trip to London, or Dublin, or Edinburgh. Rainy & grayish. Still, we gained some degrees compared to the weather in France, and the first day's bad weather was not sufficient to stop our pumped-up team. Towards the Air Bnb for the first workshop of the day : Life @ Smiirl and Team Spirit ! (with a quick detour to a local restaurant, because culture).  

The Life @ Smiirl and Team Spirit workshop is regularly scheduled to allow our team to make good use of a nice & clean team harmony, and to find the best conditions to work in. From the simple fruit basket to the unanimous will to move. This workshop is also the occasion to talk about subjects focused on our working days : Monday morning breakfasts settled to tell GTFO to our beds (which are surprisingly strong on Monday mornings...), how to handle the matter of regular "home office" days, mention of hiring necessities... 

Besides, we made good use of the time we had to take a look back at our "values." Just to quote a few of them, we have "We're proud of crafting nice things" ; "We're available and kind with our environment" & "We're enjoying every single day of work". These values are the one keeping the Smiirl boat together, we're using them in order to know if we're still on the right path or nah, in order to remember what we are and why we're working every day. It is important not to distance ourselves from what we believed in at the very beginning of the project. All of these subjects were treated on Tuesday, in our warm and comfy Air bnb. A day ended by another muy simpatico restaurant (because culture).  

DAY 2 : Village Underground & Working Axis

For the second day of our Reboot seminar, our CTO had prepared a program harder than the 12 Herculean Labors, in a rather atypical place. And there we move our butts to Village Underground Lisboa, a co-working space not far from the 25 de Abril Bridge. We spent our time working inside closed down buses. Rather cool surroundings , in which we focused on our short/middle/long term goals and our future Working Axis. 

Village Underground Lisboa

The first thing to do was to re think our long,mid and short-term objectives. These objectives had, first and foremost, to encompass our whole activity, without dividing it into subcategories. Because of professional confidentiality, we can't tell you more about these goals ;). Once these global goals validated, the second step was to define the working axes that will help us to undertake our long, mid and short-term objectives. We had already defined some of them during a previous FLY workshop, but we felt like it was the time to have a deep look back on 'em, in order for us to define the perfect axis for the perfect objectives. From the e-commerce strategy to our supply chain management, by the end of the day we managed to cover every single axis. A rather fastidious day, ended by a cooking session organized by our dear CMO and our beloved Head Designer. No restaurant tonight, but a nice conclusion to a hard day of work. 

DAY 3 : Axis managers, Masterplan, and Cards. 

Third day, third working environment. After the comfy Air Bnb and the original Village Underground, we spent our third day in a co-working room within Beta-I, an accelerator located in the heart of Lisbon. This Thursday was meant to be the most fastidious day of work, so our CTO had chosen a place more practical than original (coffee + plugs + big white board = success).

The bill of specifications of the day was simple : deciding who was going to carry what cards during the next 6 months, in order to fulfill our short-term objectives. Carrying a card doesn't mean having to realize the objective on our own, it means putting everything in place in order for an X goal is done before a Y deadline. The card carrier has to be the one who validates the end of the objective, but he/she is allowed (even recommended) to ask some help to his/her coworkers in order to do so. Let's take an example. Our CMO has a card concerning the creation of several Facebook Ads. He will need some help from yours truly to create the best content for his ads. End of explanation, you know too much...

Each card has a carrier, you follow ? So each card is distributed in an axis or another (the ones defined on day 2). Aaaand each axis has an axis carrier, e.g. a person who will make sure all the cards included in his axes are done and well done. For instance, yours truly is the carrier of the Branding Axis. Our CMO is the carrier of the E-commerce axis. Etc, etc, etc. But in the long run, the results of each axis depend on the team efforts. Isn't that beautiful? 

After this loooooooooong day of work, every member of the team had their cards and their objectives for the next 6 months. Thursday night was "brain free", but this can't be told in a serious article. 😉 

2017 begins in the best way possible for Smiirl, and we hope you'll be even happier than ever to follow our progression!

I'm out 😉