Team events in turbulent times: the cloudmobility digital summit.
Tags: Summit, Digital Summit, Virtual Meeting, Cloudmobility, Team

What is cloudmobility?

cloudmobility is a special purpose cloud for mobility and transportation — a completely new approach in the industry. The future of the mobility and transportation industry will be driven by technology, data and speed. The cloud is designed to leverage data-powered connected vehicle technology to enable mobility and automotive applications–worldwide.

Our ultimate goal is to provide a complete ecosystem and a business-to-business solution for our customers and partners, to ensure they benefit from the best experience around customer and vehicle data.

This is cloudmobility.

Why cloudmobility?

We solve the business challenges of today by focusing on tomorrow.

What happened at cloudmobility so far?

By the end of 2019, we had successfully managed to launch a full control data cloud software stack and infrastructure. In the first half of 2020, cloudmobility was fortunate to be able to safeguard our high-performing core team through turbulent, global times. We established a customer success team to support our customers’ queries and now count over 20 concrete customer projects in our pipeline with a user base that’s growing by the day. We are extremely proud to have passed a SecOps audit and to be building partnerships with big players in the industry. Moreover, we professionalized a tool-based customer engagement pipeline and laid the foundation to scale. These are just a few examples of what cloudmobility has achieved until Q2 2020. And there is more to come!

Our cloudmobility team

The cloudmobility team is a group of 50 carefully selected technology experts from all over the world, who work as one unified team in a highly efficient development model, operating around the globe. We are proud of what we do; our passion alone sets us apart. People — our team and our customers — are our main priority. We are human, respectful, and welcoming in all interactions, contributing to our inclusive environment. Collaboration is key to achieve our vision, together. cloudmobility is located internationally with hubs in Stuttgart, Lisbon and Singapore. Our agile working methods allow the remote teams to work at full speed and precision, across borders.

Our cloudmobility summits

Our cloudmobility summits are quarterly events providing project members and guests, such as customers and inspirational speakers, with the opportunity to meet physically in Stuttgart. The goal of our summits is to share and reflect an achievements to date, to discuss future opportunities, to band as a team and, especially in these challenging times, to meet, share an open exchange, align, and celebrate together.

Whilst it was not possible for us to meet in person this quarter, instead, we carried out our first digital summit from 1 st until 3rd of July with our headline “#strike 2020”. And — it was a great success! We can certainly say that the physical distance did not take our spirits away during this summit. Our sessions were ranked by the project members on a scale from 1 to 5.

Our average rating was 4.7 — so there is still room for improvement (isn’t there always?!) -but these results make us very proud!

How were we able to achieve this?

We gathered some useful insight after running our first remote session. Learnings included:

Creating meaningful, interconnected sessions

All sessions need to be connected content­wise with a clear narrative telling one consistent story

Ensure the sessions include insights, that teams normally don’t have access to an a daily basis. For example in our case: the entire team met our first customer VDC and was able to interview him to extract useful insight.

lnvite inspirational speakers — they can be internal or external. Someone who is experienced and can present an objective view, that the team is able and interested to learn from.

2. Define different formats for the sessions

Avoid overloading the agenda — it is quite exhausting to sit in front of the PC all day long.

lnclude a variety of formats such as interviews, panels, demos, inspiring talks, working sessions, mutual morning topics -make it as normal as possible.

Take frequent breaks!

Create a positive mood: prepare short, warm up questions for each session for team members. Ensure there is a good balance of strategic learning questions plus ice-breaker ones to ease up and hold the perfect mood.

3. Summit settings

Consider grouping 4–5 team members physically in each location ensuring all COVID-19 regulations are met. This supports team spirit and does not endanger health in current times.

Ensure you use a reliable technology that works.

Share personal insights: pictures, memes, inspirations, impressions of each one. Make it personal and fun to boost engagement and spirits.

4. Show appreciation to the team

Prior to the event, our head of cloudmobility sent a personalized card to all project members, thanking them for their efforts in 1 st HY 2020 and telling them how much we were looking forward to the digital summit.

Send digital gifts: to inspire the team, we prepared a personalized desktop and mobile background for all project members; creating an emotional bridge to each other needs to be thoughtful — not necessarily expensive.

5. Last but not least: party!

Don’t forget to celebrate together. As an example, we had a facilitated ‘fuck-up’ night with the entire team. Afterwards we split into random, moderated breakout sessions to play Pictionary. lt was great fun.

We have a mantra at cloudmobility that we live and work by, supporting us in our daily behaviors. We also used it for our summit:

Whatever you do:

Test → feedback → align → test → feedback → align = Best possible result!