We started our All Hands Meeting with department activities designed to get teammates connecting, creating, and competing.

Each department had something different planned. Our Customer Success team tapped into its creative side with a fused-glass project, while Operations gathered at the Golden Game Guild. Product put its teamwork to the test at Beat the Bomb, and Sales and Marketing headed to Pindustry for some friendly competition around arcade games and bowling.

The activities may have looked different, but they gave each team time to enjoy being together. When most of our interactions happen virtually, sharing experiences outside of regular meetings helps build the relationships that make collaboration easier when we all return home.

With some team bonding under our belts, our focus the next day shifted toward where we’ve been, what we’ve learned, and where we’re going next.

We began by reconnecting around Golden Software’s purpose and priorities before our CEO, leadership team, and project leads guided us through the State of the Company. Together, we reflected on accomplishments and lessons learned, explored opportunities to improve, and discussed the priorities that will shape the work ahead.

Conversations like these help us zoom out from our individual to-do lists to see how our work fits together. It also ensures we coordinate our efforts around shared objectives and, ultimately, deliver more meaningful value to our customers.

Of course, if we’re going to spend time discussing how to better serve our customers, it’s best to get insights from the customers themselves.

During our All Hands Meeting, we welcomed two Surfer and Grapher users whose work takes them into very different corners of the geosciences: Zach Sharon, Senior Corrosion Engineer at Infinity Corrosion Group, and Deborah “Debbie” Morales, a geologist, educator, and Ph.D. candidate in the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Department of Geoscience.

Zach has spent more than a decade working in cathodic protection, with projects involving water utilities, pipelines, and transit systems across the Mountain West. Debbie’s research uses geochemical datasets, including stable isotope, rare earth element, and trace element analyses to investigate changes in ocean oxygenation across Earth’s history. 

Zach and Debbie led their own customer workflow sessions, and their different backgrounds helped our team learn how users rely on our products in real-world projects, the challenges and goals that shape their workflows, and the people behind the data we often talk about in meetings. Zach and Debbie also left time for a Q&A and joined our team for lunch, giving us the opportunity to dig deeper and ask questions directly.

These in-depth conversations matter to everyone at Golden Software. What we learn from customers informs how we develop products, provide support, and communicate with the people who use our software. Customer-centricity isn’t limited to one department, and hearing directly from our Surfer and Grapher users empowers all of us to better understand the work we’re here to support.

After the customer workflow sessions, an improv expert led us through an interactive team communication workshop focused on strengthening connections and working together more effectively. With many of us on the team being introverts, we were initially nervous about the workshop—but as we went along, we shared plenty of laughs and made great memories.

Our Customer Success Team Lead, Katie Yoder, also put our communication skills to the test with a building-bridges team challenge. Everyone split into their department teams with one deceptively simple assignment: use a set of small LEGOs to build the longest bridge possible.

Naturally, the competition was on. Each team worked together to make its bridge as long as possible, but eventually, the individual teams joined forces and connected their bridges to create one that was much longer. It was a fun way to put communication and teamwork into practice. It was also a fitting reminder that sometimes the best results come when everyone stops building separately and starts connecting what they’ve created.

During our All Hands Meeting, we took time to look beyond our current work and ask: What else can we explore together? Our Product Team Lead, Patricia Pichardo, led a session for us to generate ideas, identify the ones we want to pursue, and discover how much overlap exists among different teams’ interests. It gave everyone across departments a voice in brainstorming goals while revealing common ground in what we want to accomplish.

We also had a fun opportunity to expand our technical knowledge. Dr. John Sakulich, Professor and Environmental Science Program Director at Regis University, joined us for a skill share focused on map-making principles. We explored what goes into creating effective maps, examined examples of what works—and what doesn’t—and discussed common mistakes that can weaken a visualization. For a company that helps scientists and engineers visualize and communicate technical data, strengthening our own understanding of effective map-making was incredibly helpful.

Of course, some of the best moments at our All Hands Meeting were more informal. Between sessions, there were breakfasts and lunches, conversations that continued after workshops ended, and plenty of opportunities to catch up. We also gathered for a private catered team dinner to enjoy time together outside the day’s activities. These less-structured moments gave us a chance to deepen our relationships, relax, and catch up about work and life in general.