Recently, a good chunk of Delib’s UK-based staff got together in person at a manor house in Gloucester for a working trip, internally referred to as ‘away days’. It was the first time Delib’s been able to do this since 2019.

Over a working day and a half in a very large and fancy living room, we bashed our heads together and collaboratively tackled some of the big questions Delib needs to answer over the next year or so. These questions included things like:

  • How do we hire for the needs of a growing business in a challenging jobs market?
  • What’s on our roadmap for the next 18 months?
  • What lessons can we take (or leave) from other SaaS (Software as a Service) companies?

Lots of great staff presentations – and many, many post-it notes later – some of the overarching solutions, suggestions and themes included:

  • Ops (operations): ops are the cogs that keep the overall Delib machine moving forward. Currently ops are distributed across different staff, but we’re at a size and momentum now that we want to hire for these roles. So if you’re a really good cog, keep an eye on the jobs page.
  • Hiring the next generation of Delib staff: the graduate hiring market got completely tanked by COVID. There is the potential for a few really good and valuable graduate or entry-level roles within Delib and we absolutely should move forward with those.
  • Lessons from others: we heard from staff who’ve been buying software about what works and what doesn’t. We’ve always maintained that our sales strategy is, in a nutshell, be helpful, nice and not rude, but staff experiences made clear that that…isn’t always the standard.

There was also a lot of useful brainstorming and prioritising of what’s next for the product, existing staff roles, and the company overall.

We didn’t come away with all of the answers, as these are complex questions that will require iterative approaches to answer. However I know I wasn’t the only one who came away from the away days with a renewed sense of vigour about working for Delib and continuing on with our collective mission of making democracy better for everyone. Meeting up with colleagues in person is something we’ve not been able to do very much over the last couple of years (for obvious reasons) so it was really great to be able to work collaboratively in a room with lots of us.

Oh, and I probably wasn’t the only one with a sore head afterwards, either.