Pocketworks goes to Tuscany

If you're a remote-first company, our Italian summer training event might give you some inspiration for your next meet-up.

This year, seventeen Pocketeers flew out to the beautiful Tuscany, Italy. Here's a little write up, with photos.

We have an few simple rules to our bi-annual training events. the first is to pick a meeting place where one of the team lives. Right now that means England, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Spain or Slovakia. This year we picked Italy, home country for Anna, Matteo and Emanuele. We stayed in a beautiful and rustic Agritourismo with beautiful views over the farmland. 

The second rule is to try and stick to a budget. This amazing four-day event only cost us £560 a head, including the villa, flights, taxis, food and materials. You can book flights well in advance, and as you can see above, you can eat well on a budget (if you have Jenny to help with food prep)!

Since we're together for several days, we try and pack in a lot of team exercises. This time it was a design thinking workshop where we had to tackle a problem in remote working, and go from problem framing to ideation and design in just three hours. 

And then we had to pitch our ideas to a panel of judges. It was a good chance to practice presentation skills and also work with people you don't normally work with.

Working outside was a refreshing change too, something we don't get to do much at the Leeds HQ (well, Avenue HQ has the facilities just not the weather!).

One evening, Rory and Alex ran an amazing murder-mystery game for all seventeen of us. It was intense! They're both board-game enthusiasts so we were in good hands.

Mark celebrated his birthday shortly after we arrived. It was an honour to share that with him, especially since he'd only been with Pocketworks a few months. 

Emanuele joined us too, he's helped with our marketing for years and is practically one of the team. 

After the presentations, Anna, Matej and Josh picked up pizzas, then we had a swim.

It's always great hearing Sam play the guitar and sing.

On the final day, we did a hackathon. One team explored how ChatGPT could be applied to one of the apps we develop. Another team looked at how a Apple Watch app could improve a booking app.

All this was organised by the amazing Anna 🙌🏼 She might be considering starting an events company rather than being a UX researcher, designer and product owner!