Last week we had the pleasure to host the Xpirit Innovation Day in Germany. X-perts from the Netherlands, Belgium, the USA, and Germany met in Cologne to be innovative and to work on whatever they wanted. No goals – just experimenting and learning for an entire day.
Not everybody could be there – but it was impressive to see this big group of enthusiastic people doing epic things together.
As you probably would expect from Germany, we choose a location that has something to do with cars: the Motorworld. In the evening, after Dinner in the Abacco’s Steakhouse, we split up in Groups and challenged each other at a BattleKart race.
Every Innovation Day gets its own sticker – and the theme for Cologne has – of course – also something to do with racing. In the picture you see Marcel and Roy presenting the new sticker design.
And it is also tradition that every Innovation Day has “one more thing…”. But this time we had actually multiple more things.
Xpirit has a physical culture book in Hilversum that holds all the stories that make up our company culture. Every new employee gets a key for the book and an image and story in it. This does not scale very well with our remote-first culture in Germany and the USA – and I’m always the one complaining about that (well, I think Rene used the word whining). But me whining let to something – we now have a local copy of the culture book. And we would not be Xpirit if we would not add something creative, epic, and nerdy: the book is a IoT device that can connect home to the original version. It is based on the technology of Binky.
The second “one more thing” is that Xpirit now has its own board game. An epic game around out culture. With all these small hints and hidden easter eggs that tell the story of our culture – like customer intimacy cards or pet technologies.
I haven’t had a chance to play it – but I’m taking a version with me to try it out at home.
And last but not least, everyone at Xpirit got a glass of special orange Xpirit honey from our bee keeper Michael in Germany.
The German team was not complete. Some of our members were in maternity leave, sick, or on vacations. But it’s always great if we come together in person. As we are a remote-first business, we have to celebrate these moments.
This Innovation Day was special to me as we hosted it in Germany. That’s why I wanted to share some impressions. Of course there would be more to share – all the epic this people worked on, the videos and interviews we used to share the results, and the long nights at the bar. But that exceeds the scope of this post.
If you are interested and wanna be part of this – we are hiring all over Germany. Just write me or leave a comment so that I can reach out to you.
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