What is a Summit?
Balena is a fully remote, distributed team, and has always been so. When most of the world was leaving offices and working out how to do remote meetings in 2020, balena was business as usual. Although we get a lot of benefit from working this way, it’s beyond doubt that every now and then the humans of balena need the chance to catch up, socialise, collaborate, share ideas and align on our plans for the coming year. Throughout the years we’ve met up in Athens, Barcelona and last year in Cancun, Mexico. But for this year’s summit we flew the team from all around the world to the (dormant) volcanic island of Tenerife in the middle of the Atlantic ocean.
Why would you do that?
Almost everyone I have told about summit, outside of balena, has asked me why we take the whole team on holiday once a year. My wife is utterly convinced I spend the whole week laid on a beach sipping cocktails. That’s not true at all. I’ve never been overly fond of cocktails.
Actually, going to a summit is quite hard work. Besides the logistics of flying people around the world, from many timezones and then housing them all together, there is the work we do during the week. And it is work, let me assure you. It’s fun and connecting and social, but we get the team together because some work is only really impactful when done face to face. For a start there are the keynotes:
Keynotes
Even if you can get the whole company, from many timezones, to all attend a video call and watch a presentation together, it still won’t have the same impact as attending the same talk together. And this year the theme of summit was to make balena more noisy. Noisy communicating with each other. Noisy telling the world about what we can do and how we can help. Noisy discussions with our current customers to fully understand how they use balenaCloud and balenaMachine, and what we can better for them. So it stood to reason that we also wanted the keynotes to be noisy. As such we did them in more a TED talk format with pictures and minimal words, with the focus being on the speaker and interactions with the audience.
Keynotes are a great way to dig in deeper to the ideas we have been having and communicating as a team throughout the year. In person we can explore those ideas more fully, connect them together and ground them in the reality of the work we are all doing. This years keynotes covered a recap of the year just passed, a look to our company strategy for the months to come, and a deep dive into network effects, compounding value and the necessity for innovation.
Un-conference sessions
To be truly noisy as a team, you must make sure that anyone has the opportunity to share their context, create discussion and be thought leaders in an aspect of the company. This year the team self-organised an extensive array of unconference sessions on topics such as analytics, security, secure boot, brownfield migration (i.e. moving a fleet of devices to balena programmatically) and the past and future of balenaOS. There was no presentation template, no format to follow and no rules in general.
Let’s play!
At this summit we ran an experiment: creating some tasks for the team to tackle in groups. We ran the sessions as surprise tasks sprung on the team on the Monday, Wednesday and Friday of summit. For each task groups were formed, carefully balancing experience and specialisms, and presented with an envelope. The letters inside put the teams into a roleplay, sometimes in the present day and some times in the future, and asked them to create reports and presentations about a particular scenario. For example, the first task saw the letter purport to be from the company board of directors in December 2025, to tell the group that balena had ceased to trade and the group needed to find the three main reasons for the failure of the business. The groups were instructed to consider customer, technical and organisational failures of the company and create an ignite presentation to communicate them to the rest of the team. Even the team members that couldn’t attend in person, took part, playing the role of board members and holding progress calls with the groups.
Task two then randomised those failures identified amongst the groups and got them to strategize a mitigation strategy. And task three saw the letter come from TED talks, set in 2027 and asked the teams to explain the main thing that led to the global success of balena.
Why? The answer is because, once again, being noisy. What better way to communicate to each other what risks the business faces, what ways to increase our stability and what innovation we may want to pursue, than for all of that to come from the team themselves? By having balanced teams, engineers debated with finance people and analysts and UX people and all of the aspects of the business. Everyone was forced to think outside of their usual groups, areas, mindsets and roles. To think outside of the current month and company context, even. And then come back together and communicate those thoughts with everyone else in the company. It was rather dispiriting to be talking about balena as if it had failed and the reasons that happened. But we are deeply serious about making balena an evermore reliable, stable, sustainable business that our customers continue to build their own business upon. So what better way to do that than all find and share the risks we may face, and then strategize how to avoid them? And the final task was uplifting to hear the groups speak about innovations and balena enabling thousands more customers to solve hard problems in the world.
Nothing is more impactful within a company than having fun with your teammates. Why do endless presentations, when you can make a game and talk because you want to talk? Why not take full advantage of being in a nice place together, ditch the laptops, go outside and have a noisy discussion by the pool? Or in the pool?!? Definitely in the pool!
How do you plan all of that?
Chris, Konstantinos and I planned the keynotes and the group tasks, and the team planned unconference sessions, team bouldering, personal ignite talks and more. But planning the logistics of summit, now that’s something that takes many months and very organised individuals. Luckily a group of people in balena have made themselves the “summit planning team” and take that mammoth task on with gusto. This year they worked with Roberto and his WeOffSite team, which helped massively to identify possible destinations, hotels, flights and transfers. Together that dream team put all of the plans in place so that the rest of us could just show up to our flights, arrive at the hotel and make the most of being with each other, everything else taken care of.
So what is the return on the investment?
Of course it’s a significant expense to fly people around the world and put them up in an all inclusive resort. And you can’t concoct a metric that’s going to tell you how much that is really worth. But take it from me; getting people together, sharing context, eating together, playing together, having noisy discussions outside of the (home) office and away from the laptop, is immeasurably impactful. You gain alignment. You re-enforce your company culture. You strengthen the team which strengthens the organisation, which benefits everyone.
So it’s adiós to Tenerife, but with great memories and a tremendous amount of excitement for the year to come!
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