Inspiration Engagement Pieces 2019-11-08 00:00

PWACon Recap

Granada

A few weeks ago, the ProWritingAid team gathered in Granada, Spain, to plan for the upcoming year and spend some quality time together. Read on for a sneak peek into the fun!

Contents:
  1. Team Members on Three Continents
  2. Up First: Team Building
  3. Next on the Agenda: How to Improve the ProWritingAid Experience for Our Users
  4. Making the Most of Our Time Together

Team Members on Three Continents

The ProWritingAid team is entirely remote, meaning that we all work from home. There are ProWritingAid team members on three different continents, although that could be untrue at any particular moment: many of our team members travel while they work.

While we connect every day through our project management and communication tools like Trello and Slack, it’s still great to get some face-to-face time on the books every year. In 2018, team members met up in Lisbon, Portugal. This year (2019), the group came together in Granada, Spain.

Our goals for PWACon are simple: spend time getting to know each other and do deep thinking on how to improve the ProWritingAid experience for our users.

Up First: Team Building

Since we all work remotely, the first item on the agenda was team building. Our first session, led by our Head of Client Solutions, Tom Wilde, was a challenge that got us on our feet and working collaboratively.

Tom broke us into three groups and tasked us with building a tower that would support a marshmallow on top out of spaghetti. At the end of the time, the team with the highest tower would win.

Team building

The three teams competed fiercely, but ultimately, team two prevailed. Their tower stood, in all its glory, until it was sadly destroyed during a coffee break.

Next on the Agenda: How to Improve the ProWritingAid Experience for Our Users

Once we were warmed up and ready to collaborate, we were ready for the meat of the conference.

Our main task to think about how to continue ProWritingAid’s growth, while also optimizing what we’ve already created. How do we keep pace with the growth we’ve experienced since the company’s start? How do we accelerate that growth so we can help more and more writers? Most importantly: how do we make ProWritingAid the best possible tool for you, our users?

Here’s a sneak peek at some of the breakthroughs we had.

#1: Improving the ProWritingAid Tool

First and foremost, our team thought about how to improve the ProWritingAid tool. What can we do to make it more useful for our users?

We discussed common requests for features, as well as our own experiences in using the tool. We went through several exercises to prioritize what changes we can make that would have the most potential to improve the daily lives of our users.

#2: Examining Innovations in AI

There are huge leaps happening in artificial intelligence technology every single day. During our time together, we looked at recent breakthroughs in AI and thought about how we can apply those breakthroughs to our technology to make it easier and more effective to use.

#3: Creating More Resources for Our Users

During team breakouts, our support and marketing teams spent time together thinking about how to create more resources to help our users use the tool.

Items we discussed included writing more educational resources, like our Grammar Guide, that you can learn and engage with. We also talked about creating more fun videos, as well as instructional videos and articles to highlight different ProWritingAid features to make sure you’re getting the most out of the tool.

Making the Most of Our Time Together

Team building

Don’t worry: between all the work, we had a lot of fun. Team bonding experiences included…

A tapas tour around Granada, where we visited three different local tapas restaurants and learned the history of the food we were eating…

A scavenger hunt across the city, where we worked in teams to decipher clues and take photos of different Granada landmarks…

Scavenger hunt

Dinner at a traditional Flamenco restaurant, where we ate amazing food and watched an incredibly beautiful performance by a local Flamenco dancer and accompanying musicians…

Flamenco

Plenty of time to hang out, laugh with each other, and sample different local food and drink.

Group dinner

By the end of our trip, the team left with a renewed sense of camaraderie, purpose, and excitement for what’s to come. We can’t wait for PWACon 2020!

Be confident about grammar

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