Lisbon dev team summer retreat

An 11-person engineering team from a Lisbon-based scale-up came for a five-day working retreat. The goal was to ship a critical refactor that the distributed team had been blocked on for three sprints. Mornings were heads-down in the workshop space, afternoons paired with our team-jeep-rally / cooking-duel format on day 3 to break the heads-down intensity. The Georgian cooking class on day 2 was a quieter team activity that worked equally well as a bonding moment. The team shipped the refactor on Thursday afternoon, used Friday morning for a retro and pair-programming on follow-up work, and flew out Friday evening. The CTO sent us a one-line email afterwards: "shipped more here than at the office."