Scale your team knowledge and cohesion with Tech Time
By: Edgardo Gutierrez
Tags: Doctolib, Team Building, Teamwork, Organizational Culture

In this article, you’ll learn more about how we use Tech Time, a cross team meeting that involves the teams related to the tech domain, to promote knowledge sharing and cohesion between coworkers.

As a company grows larger and larger two big problems arise:

It’s difficult to keep track of all the new things that people are working on.

2. It’s difficult to keep up with all the new people joining the company.

And so, the need to keep everyone on the same page (and my mental sanity on check) becomes a fundamental priority, which at Doctolib we address with *roll those drums*…

Tech Time

What is Tech Time?

Look at you! Asking the right questions. Tech Time is an event at Doctolib that takes place every 2 weeks and that involves all the teams in the tech domain.

The teams involved are, very obviously, the feature teams, but also the Data Team, Design Team and, last but not least, the Talent Team. And of course this includes our offices in Berlin and Nantes!

The rules are the following:

The meeting lasts 1 hour.

The content must be related to topics Tech in the company context

You have 3 minutes to present your topic and amuse everyone with your sparkling personality.

Anybody can present something abiding by the rules above.

The content

Now we’re getting to the juicy stuff. We have 15 slots for anyone to present any of the following:

Share new features they have worked on recently to keep us all updated on the projects his/her team is working on.

Share their learnings when tackling an interesting problem. Maybe someone else has or will have the same problem in the future and sharing these learnings with everyone will help prevent a meltdown after hours of debugging.

Talk about new processes that affect all the tech. Here is where managers, the design team or the talent team can talk about new processes on recruiting, a new design palette or creations of new teams.

Pretty straight forward right? But there’s more to it than meets the eyes.

The hidden skills behind the presentation

Three minutes to talk? But how am I going to be able to explain the whole history of this new library I’m using if I can’t talk about the influence of Classical Liberalism in our current society?

A three minute limit helps you to keep it short and be concise. Your words will carry more impact and information if your brain knows you’re bound by time (Isn’t that life?).

I am very shy and have stage panic.

Yes. We are all afraid of talking in public but if you want to overcome your fears you need to look them in the eyes first. Tech Time is a safe place filled with love where you can practice this, be yourself and talk about what interests you in a casual manner. You’re not expected to close a million dollar deal. (Yet)

My presentations are not interesting.

Objection! Even the most boring topic can be interesting if you put some energy into it. At Tech Time we fancy the use of videos, memes, costumes, standup comedy or any aid you think will make your presentation memorable.

Sometimes our job doesn’t push us to develop communication skills in front of a big audience, especially in the Tech industry. At Doctolib we encourage the development of these skills by giving a forum where people can practice them by talking to their colleagues in a casual manner with the aids they feel more comfortable with.

The end.

Oh yeah… Just one more thing…

The true meaning behind Tech Time, life, the universe and everything

It’s not 42, sorry. The answer is more deep and emotional. We want you to:

Get to know all the cool people you’re working with and promote cohesion between peers.

Yes. That’s right. Truth be told we can all just send a mail with the things we have been working on and when aliens are scraping our data they will find the logs and write stories about the new design patterns in our organization, but this defeats the bigger purpose. We want you to learn, to develop new skills, to have fun and to get to know your coworkers. In the end, it’s a big cross team building.

That’s why at Tech Time we also:

Take a moment to introduce all the new joiners with their respective teams

Organize games and small chat rooms

Have Zoom background and costume contests

It’s of course very important at an organization level to keep everyone updated about our technical innovations and processes, don’t get me wrong, we still have another meeting with our CTO where we get product and organization updates on a bigger scope, but it’s also important to develop a sense of community and create cohesion and the feeling we’re all working towards the same goal. With Tech Time we not only keep everyone on the same page, but we also bring people together.

So yeah, the next time I’m searching for a feature team, I’ll proudly enter the right room, proudly say hi to everyone, and proudly say:

Hey, Mélanie. I have a bug for you.

If you would like to know more about how to do a great presentation and be confident when speaking to a big audience please look at this amazing content, beautifully crafted by one of our developers, Tim Carry:

If you liked reading that article, don’t hesitate to subscribe to the docto-tech-life newsletter to receive our weekly selection of technical content!