Balsamiq

From our retreat: A team that cooks together stays together

One of the hardest things about working with my beloved distributed team (aka balsamici*) is our not being able to see each other in person more often. Just once a year are we together in the same time zone, in the same room.

This summer, like last, we met in Italy. It's extremely valuable time, worth every cent and all the effort. As a small company, we rely on our communal devotion to our mission. With a nurtured sense of shared ownership, our team works in harmony, able to make decisions quickly, resulting in a better product to benefit happy customers.

So, how do we do it? What's our secret sauce that greases the wheels of working together? For us, it seems to be all about the food.

Making delicious meals for 9 folks 3+ times a day is just the kind of hands-on team-building exercise we enjoy.

On our first night, we ate Mexican.

The menu was simple:

Soffritto (every Italian meals starts with this onion sweat)

Tacos

Chicken Enchiladas

Rice and Beans

Tomato Salsa

and Mango Salsa

here's the finished salsas:

And of course wine

As you know, we have a little feature in our Balsamiq Mockups for Desktop where you can check out dinner inspirations. It's been well received, and we've started to get submissions from our community (Thanks @bucketsoft!).

The videos in this blog post are a bit longer (and more laugh-filled) than the usual, but I hope you enjoy this behind-the-scenes view into our little retreat.

* For our collective noun, we made a mash up of balsamiq and amici (friends).

---