Recently, a good chunk of Delib’s UK-based staff got together in person at a big house near 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 wants 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 was hugely affected by COVID. There is the potential for a few really good and valuable graduate or entry-level roles within Delib and we absolutely want to 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, consultative, and human, but staff experiences made clear that this…isn’t always the standard elsewhere.

We did a lot of useful brainstorming and prioritising of what’s next for the product, for existing staff roles, and for the company overall. There was also plenty of time after the working day for food, games and general hanging out.

We didn’t come away with all of the answers – these are complex questions that will require iterative approaches. However I know I wasn’t the only one who came away from the days with a reminder about why I love working for Delib and a renewed sense of vigour for continuing 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 again.