The Istanbul trip was an experiment to see what a face-to-face meeting could do for our core product team.  Traveling home, I have to ask myself: Was it successful, and what did we learn?

One thing I learned is that if you only have three days, you spend entirely too much time in a basement working, and not enough time siteseeing and goofing around.  Independent of productivity, it feels good to hang out and get to know co-workers.

This meeting confirmed some things:

Its easier to reach consensus with face to face meetings, and it's easier to manage.  I was struggling for months to get a plan for a new and more scalable server cluster.  It was important to me, and I kept bringing it up, but it never made it to the top of the list with our technical team.  On our first day, in less than an hour, we resolved this standoff and came up with a great new block diagram that will make the system more scalable and maintainable.  I think most management issues can be communicated remotely if you know how to do it, but there is no question that it is easier to just have a meeting, and more people know how to do that.

People like showing their ideas in person.  Our team gets most of its ideas out online into chat and storyboards and tickets, but they aren't presented with the same enthusiasm.

If you meet toward the end of a product release cycle, you will spend time working on tasks you already have, rather than planning a bright new future.

Traveling is a big drag on short-term productivity.  The immediate metrics for how much product we built this week will take a big hit because we were traveling, rather than just working.  That's why I recommend avoiding all travel if you have a short schedule.  If there is a payoff, it takes a while to realize.

We decided that it would be a good idea to meet again when we are starting something new - a new product, a new product strategy, or a batch of new features.  In this case, we aren't losing productivity, because we haven't started anyway, and we will get a big benefit from sharing ideas and reaching consensus on the plan.