Another All Hands Meeting In the Books: A Glimpse Into Our In-Person Event
During the first week of October, our team gathered in Golden, Colorado for our annual All Hands Meeting. As always, this in-person event was a chance for us to connect face-to-face, strengthen team bonds, and take a step back from the day-to-day to reflect, refresh, and re-align around our shared mission. However, this year’s All Hands Meeting wasn’t just about connection and alignment—it was also about curiosity. With continuous discovery as our central theme, we spent a few days practicing how to maintain a high level of curiosity so we keep delivering value to the people we serve.
What Continuous Discovery Means at Golden Software
Before diving deeper into our All Hands Meeting, we want to answer some important questions. What does continuous discovery mean to us, and why is it so important that we chose it for the event’s theme? At Golden Software, continuous discovery is how we stay connected to what matters most: the challenges and goals of our customers, prospects, and teammates. We don’t believe maintaining this connection is relegated to one specific team or person either. To us, it’s a team-wide effort embedded in every role and decision. We also believe doing continuous discovery successfully requires:
- Asking questions before jumping to conclusions
- Learning consistently so we can achieve better results faster
- Reducing risk and building confidence before we invest time and energy
- Capturing what we learn in a shared space so everyone benefits
By making continuous discovery a key part of every team, we stay customer-centric, evidence-driven, and aligned with reality, not assumptions. Practically, these benefits affect who we serve in the following ways:
- Current and potential customers: Makes sure we’re solving the right problems
- Internal teams: Ensures our decisions are backed by insight, not guesswork
- Our entire company: Avoids wasted effort and creates meaningful value quickly
Because these benefits have such a positive impact, we don’t believe in doing continuous discovery once a quarter or a couple times a year. We think it’s a priority all the time. It should be a part of our weekly rhythm. It should show up in the questions we ask during meetings, the conversations we have internally and with customers, and the way we frame and solve problems.
At its core, we think continuous discovery is about staying curious for just a little longer every day of the week. And at Golden Software, that curiosity drives everything we do, including the activities we did at this year’s All Hands Meeting.
Practicing Continuous Discovery Together
During our in-person event, we did several hands-on activities to practice continuous discovery and get even stronger in this area. Here’s a look at some of the key experiences that brought our theme to life.
1. Discovery Circles With Customers
We invited four of our Grapher and Surfer power users—Zach Dickson, Calvin Miller, John Fontana, and Dustin McNeil—to this year’s All Hands Meeting. Each customer sat at a table while teams rotated through 15-minute conversations, asking questions to learn more about their industries, workflows, projects, challenges, and goals. This fast-paced, high-value activity gave us a rare opportunity to deepen our understanding of the customers we serve and the real-world problems they’re solving with our software.
2. Scavenger Hunt Around Golden
To reconnect with our roots, we split into teams and set off on a scavenger hunt exploring Golden Software’s history, values, and milestones—all woven into the streets and sights of Golden, Colorado. This activity helped us rediscover our company’s origin story and see how our mission is reflected in the city where it all started.
3. A Deep Dive Into Grid Validation
We welcomed Dr. Kris Voss, Associate Professor and Chair of Biology at Regis University, for an insightful learning session titled “Connecting the Dots with Spatial Interpolation.” This session gave us a deeper look into grid validation techniques and interpolation methods, helping us sharpen our technical foundation so we can better support users with data accuracy, visualization, and analysis.
4. DISC Personality Team Challenge
To strengthen team communication, we ran a multi-phase activity centered on DISC personality types. First, we grouped up based on shared DISC profiles to build our ideal All Hands Meeting agendas. Then, we regrouped with people from different DISC types and pitched our ideas—followed by one final round where we had to role-play a different DISC type and champion ideas from that perspective. This activity challenged us to step outside our own preferences and discover how to better collaborate with teammates who think and communicate differently.
Staying Curious, Staying Connected
From direct conversations with our power users to activities that explored our history, sharpened our technical skills, and deepened our communication, every moment of our 2025 All Hands Meeting reinforced why continuous discovery matters and why we should do it regularly. Discovery is a daily habit where we get to practice asking better questions, staying open to new insights, and grounding our decisions in the reality of what our customers and teammates need most. This year’s All Hands Meeting helped us reconnect with that purpose, and it reminded us that staying curious is a key part of how we move forward together. So, here’s to another year of learning, building, and discovering—continuously. Have some insights we should hear? Sign up to speak with our product team! We’d love to discover your suggestions for making Surfer and Grapher even better!
