Trello Together 2021: VR Edition (TTVR21)
On April 30th, 2021, I created an event for the Trello team entirely in Virtual Reality. I called it Trello Together 2021: VR Edition a.k.a TTVR21. For this installment of the “Best of the Best,” series I will dive into this experience to give you all the fresh deets from one of my favorite events. I hope by sharing this information with you, I can spread the VR love. Creating yet another way for you to connect, collaborate and play with your teams.
First, a little backstory…
Trello was and is an extremely tight-knit product. Across all teams, oceans, time zones and even through an acquisition, we have continued to sustain this bond. That has everything to do with the thoughtful investment made towards team-building and unity. From our taco statues sent to celebrate a Tacoversary (Trello work anniversary), to frequent full staff events and monthly Town Halls, we know that you get out of your relationships what you put into them - and we put in everything we got!
One HUGE component of this practice is our annual event Trello Together (TT). A time once a year that our entire staff travels to a remote location for 3 meticulously planned days. The difference from other retreats was that Trello Together was never about work. It was all about forming bonds, building connections, and getting to really know one another. It was truly magical and something the team looked forward to each and every year.
Trello Together 2017
Trello Together 2018
Trello Together 2019
I was the main event planner for this time honored tradition, and 2020 would have been our 5th year. Then Covid changed the world. It quickly became apparent how much our staff was struggling to stay connected in the absence of this event. We had to do something.
In December of 2020 my manager, Brian Schmidt and I were having our 1:1. I teasingly mentioned the VR Hangout on his calendar. He and other members of the Trello Leadership team - Michael Pryor, Barry Clark, Justin Gallagher, and Liam Grieg - had cut out some time to hang in VR every Friday afternoon. I expressed how much I wanted an Oculus Quest 2 headset for Christmas so I could join them. I then made what I thought was a cheeky comment about equipping the entire Trello staff with headsets so we could all get together. What I thought was a casual joke, was actually an idea they had already been considering. A week later, they looped me in on their plan, asked me to spearhead it and TTVR21 was born.
Okay, so why VR?
Ummm because it’s super freaking cool! Seriously though, it had been over a year and ½ since our last Trello Together, and at that time we were about a year into the pandemic. No one had seen anyone in a really long time. We needed something special and unique, and definitely a far cry from video conferencing. The Zoom fatigue was REAL!
The Trello Leadership team was all about VR. As I mentioned earlier they had a VR hangout every Friday. When we started talking about this, and our longing for Trello Together, the idea hit me like a lightning bolt…We had to somehow do Trello Together in VR! It was the only tech at the time that would come close to replicating that TT feeling.
So now I have the foundational idea - how the hell do I actually build this thing?!
How the planning began…
I decided to start with what I knew, how to plan an actual Trello Together. TTVR had to replicate the four core components of Trello Together:
An awesome venue: A major star in any Trello Together is the venue. Previous ones included:
A swanky resort in Puerto Rico (This was the first TT and before my time. Shout-out to my mentor, Liz Hall. TT is her brainchild, I just inherited the keys to the castle.)
The Four Seasons in Scottsdale, AZ (Fun fact: That’s where we learned we were getting acquired by Atlassian.)
The Ritz Carlton in New Orleans, LA
The Ritz Carlton in Lake Oconee, GA (This was the fav I think)
Kickass Team Building Activities: Trello Together always had a menu of different activities on the two full days we were there. Things like archery, painting, scavenger hunts, trivia shows, go-karts etc. We’ve really run the gamut! However, competitive experiences were always heavily favored.
The SWAG: It wouldn’t be my event if there wasn’t top-notch swag. I looooove me some thoughtful and useful swag! No tired mugs here. 😆
“Trello-y Togetherness”: I know that’s a very ambiguous phrase, but I'll explain later.
Once I had this framework I got to work sourcing the VR solutions. Brian, brilliantly created a brainstorming slack room. He found quite a few Trellists he knew were also VR enthusiasts and without telling them what we were planning, started to crowdsource some potential fits for these categories. One day someone suggested looking into FRAME. FRAME was a new VR environment creation tool, under the Virtual World Platform, Virbela. The second I saw their website and their tagline - “Come Together and Feel Together Online.” I knew… this was the team that was going to create my virtual venue.
The Virtual Venue
In February of 2021 I reached out to Gabe Baker - Principal Product Manager and lead Engineer for FRAME. On our first convo he brought me into a Frame via desktop, showed me around, was incredibly patient while I got my bearings and asked way too many questions. That meeting inspired the decision to create the Atlassian New York City Office as our TTVR virtual venue.
Sidebar - Trello was born in NYC. Before the Atlassian acquisition we had a really great office on Wall Street. After the acquisition, Atlassian decided they wanted a NY presence, so they built an even more incredible Atlassian office in Union Square. At the beginning it was only Trellists inhabiting its walls, so we really made it our office, a Trello homebase. We moved in December of 2019. On March 3rd, 2020, Atlassian closed the doors of the office due to the covid pandemic. We didn’t know it then but we wouldn’t return until September of 2021.
I chose to recreate the NYC office because it was truly Trello’s home. A home the majority of Trello had never seen or been in. Honestly, it just felt right…and it was, it really was.
Now that we had decided what the environment was going to be we needed the footage to create it. Since Atlassian offices were closed to everyone but the Workplace Experience staff, I leaned on my friend and former PIC on Trello Together, Atlassian NY Workplace experience manager, Rebecca Siler. I requested that she take about a million photos of the place. (what one of the FRAME designers had requested) She innovated and suggested taking a video of the space instead. She did a full walk-through and explanation of the office. We gave all our footage to the lead designer for our custom environment, Martin Petersson, and we were off to the races!
(Sidenote: This footage was later used to create a promo piece for a Meta Case Study on VR in the Workplace. Check out the side by side footage, as well as, the final promo video in my Social Story.)
With the environment in production Gabe and I moved on to design the user experience. What I learned from Gabe was we could have 250 people in the same Frame BUT they wouldn’t be able to see or interact with each other. Not really capturing the point of Trello Together, right?
The solution was to create 9 different links stocked with the same custom environment; organize our guests into groups of 30 (the magic number for interacting in most VR environments, at the time.); and assign a link to those 9 different groups in a calendar invite. To mingle between groups we developed the idea for a “Wall of Portals.” Virtual doors that you could simply click to bring you to another link with a different group of people. It was Epic! And gave me real Beetlejuice vibes-which was an added bonus for a cinephile like me.
Gabe and I met once or twice a week, talking about design, giving me tours of their most recent work and teaching me the ropes of FRAME. When it was time to “decorate” Gabe allowed me to lead the way. He knew making the space intentional, personal and thoughtful was paramount to me, so he trained me to be a FRAME expert. I ended up doing most of the asset placement myself. (Shoutout to the fabulous Rani Shah, Sr. Brand Manager for Trello. She was an absolutely integral part of brainstorming the “decoration,” for the environment.)
Every few weeks I would schedule a “sneak peak” of the environment for the rest of the Project OC team, that’s what my planning committee was called. It was so helpful to get different POVs and opinions about what was working and what wasn’t.
Virtual Venue ✅
Before I proceeded to “Kickass Team-Building Activities,” I had to figure out how the hell I was going to acquire 250 Oculus Quest 2 headsets.
The Headsets
Keep in mind all this planning was happening in secret. No one knew what we were up to and I planned to keep it that way. There are so few good surprises in life, after all.
But, I won’t lie, I was more than a little nervous about the insanely large responsibility of sourcing, branding, packaging and shipping 250 headsets around the world. Thankfully, I found swag magicians in Paul Navabpour and Fifi Washington - the Vice President and Sr. Accountant Coordinator for Nadel Inc. (Do yourself a favor, hire them…like, right now!)
I explained with trepidation what I needed to achieve. Without hesitation Paul said, “Yup, I got you.” He proceeded to source 250 headsets using 6 different vendors…in record time I might add.
During subsequent conversations I also described how I intended the surprise to play out for the team. He and Fifi assisted in bringing my vision for the “opening experience,” to life. They printed 260 custom, branded boxes and invitations to “Trello Together 2021: VR Edition.” [insert pic]
When we were finally ready to ship I sent the complete mailing address list to Paul and Fifi, and they created all the shipping labels. We were ready to go.
Considering the important and expensive contents of these packages, I felt it was necessary to message each recipient with their tracking number. However, I didn’t want to spoil the surprise, so I just told them a secret package was on its way, and not to open it because we would all be doing so together on an “Opening Party” zoom call.
People were soooooo excited! Gifs and memes started popping up in all the channels. Mostly from the movie Seven, ya know… “What’s in the Box?!” 😆 It was already a hit and nothing had even happened yet.
Shipping went off nearly flawlessly! Out of 250 globally distributed boxes - we had 3…yes, 3, misdeliveries. And since every package was insured, we received them back. 🤯
(Thank you Paul, Fifi and the Nadel team, for all of it!)
On March 31st, 2021 the whole team joined the highly anticipated “Opening Party.”
THIS part, above any others, was my favorite part. Things suddenly felt kinda normal again. I still get a little teary-eyed recalling the feeling.
Virtual Venue ✅
Headsets ✅
On to kickass team-building activities…
The Kick-ass Teambuilding Activities
As I mentioned, Trello Together was all about the activities, with competitive ones always being the most popular. We also had a tradition of playing poker on the final night. I was dead set on incorporating that. However, I wanted to be mindful of the length of this event. It’s my experience that you can be in the headset for about 90mins before you need a break. We also needed apps that were user friendly. We had a lot of newbies to VR and I didn’t want to over-complicate it for them. So I went on the hunt to find VR games that could fill these requirements and handle some serious traffic. I used the following solutions.
A scavenger hunt in the FRAME environment: The FRAME environment was magnificent, but we needed something interactive in the space. I decided to create small pngs of our mascot and hide them in the environment. When you entered the space, there were instructions for a Taco scavenger hunt.
Walkabout Mini Golf: The main activity was a bracket-style tournament in a VR app called Walkabout Mini Golf. I anticipated that at least ½ of my attendees would want to participate, making my estimate about 125 people. I created a bracket that I managed with a Trello Board. [insert link to Trello board png] 150 people signed up and I split them into teams of 4. Once we got down to the four finalists, we live streamed the “finals” for our teams to watch on Zoom. Ben Porter, Head of Partnerships for Meta, volunteered to record it and we had our COO, Brian Schmidt and Sr. Marketing Manager, Jess Kennedy, do the live commentary on Zoom. It added an extra element of fun, competition and Trello-y Togetherness.
This couldn’t have gone smoother! It’s definitely my favorite memory. It had incredible, long-lasting benefits for our team culture and connection efforts. For example, following TTVR21, a VR Mini Golf slack room was created. It was always busy with our global staff randomly popping in and asking for a pick-up game. Almost 3 years later it’s still an active channel. Expert Tip: If you are VR gamer and have never heard Walkabout Mini Golf, you need to put your headset on right now, like stop reading or listening to this, and go download it immediately. They just debuted a new course based on the movie The Labyrinth and it’s wildly good!
VR PokerStars: As I mentioned, I was dead set on incorporating the poker element into TTVR. However, this was already going to be a long event, and I was conscious of not burning people out and ruining their experience. (Less is more, especially in VR. 😉) I took a very casual and unstructured approach, and added it in as an option at the end.
Venue ✅
Headsets out ✅
Kickass Activities ✅
On to develop some seriously sick SWAG.
The SWAG
If there is one thing to know about me I’m super-picky, especially when it comes to SWAG. You will NEVER receive swag from me that you won’t use or cherish. In my opinion it’s an art, and I take my craft VERY seriously.
The first step in any SWAG project is graphic design. I rely on a fabulously talented freelance graphic designer named Maggie Lim. I have trusted her with pretty much every Trello design since 2017. I trust her so much, I even hired her to design the Gather with LL brand kit.
Next step is finding a vendor. Someone who vehemently shares my opinions on quality swag is Millie Tadewaldt, Founder of my favorite SWAG vendor, Brilliantmade. Millie connected me with one of my favorite humans, Sr. Creative Partner, Maggie Sackman.
Maggie and I had been working together for a couple years already when I contacted her about collabing on the swag for TTVR21. Together we created the cutest little swag offering ever!
Even though I’m a huge swag enthusiast, I am extremely mindful that not everyone is. That’s why every swag offering I do is completely elective. TTVR21 was no exception. Brilliantmade and I designed the offering and then set-up a storefront. Attendees were then sent an email with a link to access the storefront and redeem 2 items of swag from the options. This process is not only fiscally responsible, but cuts down on waste. Got to take care of Mother Earth, amirite?
Virtual Venue ✅
Headsets ✅
Kickass Team Building Activities ✅
Awesome Swag ✅
Ladies & Gentleman - it was time to shine!
So, how did it go?
On April 30th, 2021 250 Trellists entered the NYC Office Virtual Venue. They used the “Wall of Portals” to mix and mingle in the 9 different environments. They had a scavenger hunt for Taco, while Mini Golf competitors battled it out in the tournament. Then nearly 200 people got onto a zoom call to watch the mini golf finals live stream. Gambling in VRPokerStars brought the experience to a traditional and proper end. TTVR21 was over, and it had been an outrageous success!
I will never be able to fully express how it felt to pull off an event like this. I was damn proud of myself! But because I am who I am, I immediately wanted to know what I missed. I know my fellow event planners out there can relate. I give myself the day to bask in the feeling of victory, then I promptly seek out how I can iterate and improve it for the next time. No event is perfect, there’s always something to learn. Here are some of my lessons and takeaways from this experience. Most of which I ended up employing in TTVR22. (I will have a blog post on that eventually.)
Have a Zoom room open at all times: Guests can pop-in whenever they need to recharge their batteries.... Both, personal and headset. 😉
Have a non-VR event: Have a zoom based virtual event occurring simultaneously to your main VR activity. This makes your event super inclusive. Some people just hate VR, and that’s okay. Have an awesome alternative for them.
One Source of Truth for ALL comms: For this event I used multiple platforms for comms. My thought process was to have as much info as possible. I was wrong! Pick one platform for all comms, like Slack or Notion, and keep it there.
Select a day/time to post: In the one channel you choose, try to select a specific day/time to post your comms updates. Establish a routine for people and they are more likely to anticipate and read it.
Test, Test, Test: Tech-checks, rehearsals, weekly team check-ins are necessary. This applies for any large scale event, not just VR. Things are gonna break and tech will get cranky.
Explore the use of VR more: Team members are extremely interested in using VR for their offsite activities especially remote-first teams. Explore how to use it more and differently every time.
Allow staff to expense items to enrich their experience: For example, the elite battery pack headstrap. It’s an alternative to the stock strap that comes with Oculus. It changes the game completely. Not only does it increase play-time, the weight of the strap balances the weight of the headset, making it more comfortable to wear for a longer period of time.
Expert Tip: If you don’t have the budget for people to expense these, give them as a prize to the winner of your activity.
Achieving “Trello-y Togetherness”
Oh you thought I forgot, right? Nope just saving the best for last.
Now let me define “Trello-y Togetherness” for you. It’s exactly how it sounds - Moments of togetherness at Trello events that make you understand who the Trello team is and why the culture is so magical.
I truly believe every element of TTVR21 gave Trello-y Togetherness vibes. It bonded us as a team again. Re-igniting that connection we were all so desperately craving in a Covid world full of isolation and fear. It brought Trello together again and reminded us why we work here…
It’s the people…It was, is and will always be about the people. ♥️ Trello!
