What does it take to build a best-in-class platform? A best-in-class team. (Behind the scenes at commonsku’s customer-obsessed HQ retreat).

What does it take to build a best-in-class product for customers?

That’s what Phil Knight asked when he created a little shoe start-up called “Blue Ribbon”, now known as Nike. We forget that Nike was not the behemoth success we know today. It was a scrappy, hungry, fiercely competitive underdog who clawed its way through a heavily competitive landscape to dominate in a way that was creative, energetic, and even … playful.

For commonsku, though we’ve outgrown our scrappy start-up roots, we still ask this question daily:

What does it take to build a best-in-class software solution for clients?

Passion for the customer’s success. Intensity about change. And an iterative energy that never stops.

But above all, a diverse and client-obsessed team.

For two full days, the commonsku team of around 50 folks gathered at a retreat in Toronto to brainstorm our way through multiple client challenges: What’s the best onboarding solution? How can we simplify the process? What new features will create a unique customer experience? How can we help customers with change? What can we build that will ignite growth?

A few weeks leading up to this gathering, in one of our management meetings, Mark Graham (commonsku’s President and Chief Brand Officer) framed our upcoming experience by challenging each of us, “What can we accomplish in person that we can’t do over Zoom?”

And with that, the tone was set to think through a different experience for our team, all geared toward creating a better experience for our customers.

Our structure was two full days that included:

A hackathon: Where the entire company divided into competing groups with representation from each discipline (marketing, development, sales, etc). Each group was presented with the same unique business problem to solve, which resulted in a high-intensity round of amazing ideas and collaboration.

Brainstorming activities like our values and storytelling exercises, helped us focus on the qualities or attributes we possess now, plus the attributes we need to get to the next level and realize our vision.

Success reports by senior management, lessons learned over the past quarter, and a glimpse ahead at goals for the upcoming quarter:

And, since commonsku is a virtual workforce, a healthy amount of work-disguised-as-play was scheduled to inspire team participation and to connect with colleagues.

If we’ve learned anything over the past decade+, it’s that creating a strong bond through community (both with customers and colleagues) leads to bolder ideas because we trust each other to take bigger risks. Community creates more ambitious goals because we rely on each other to build daring solutions, together. Community creates an environment where we build kick-ass solutions for our clients because of our single-minded pursuit to think customer success, first.

And as we’ve experienced through our events like skucon and skucamp, when a community at work can resemble a community at play, we know we’re onto something pretty magical.

In Phil Knight’s memoir Shoe Dog, Phil’s out for a morning run when the revelation of what Nike would someday become, hit him:

Like all my friends, I wanted to be successful … But deep down, I was searching for something else, something more. I had an aching sense that our time is short, shorter than we ever know, short as a morning run, and I wanted mine to be meaningful. And purposeful. And creative. And important. Above all ... different. I wanted to leave a mark on the world. I wanted to win … And then it happened. As my young heart began to thump, as my pink lungs expanded like the wings of a bird, as the trees turned to greenish blurs, I saw it all before me, exactly what I wanted my life to be. Play. That's the word. The secret of happiness … lay somewhere in that moment when the ball is in midair, when both boxers sense the approach of the bell, when the runners near the finish line and the crowd rises as one. There's a kind of exuberant clarity in that pulsing half second before winning and losing are decided. I wanted that, whatever that was, to be my life, my daily life.”

Thanks to our colleague Samantha Bridges for organizing an event where work + play created a harmonious, competitive, and ambitious environment to create even greater solutions for our clients. Stay tuned for outcomes from our annual summer gathering!

And if you want more insight into how to build an off-site event with your team, Mark Graham and Bobby Lehew recorded an episode for the skucast about what we learned through this experience blending work + play.