Time to build

Finster had grown from 20 to nearly 50 people since the last offsite we ran for them.

Their team is spread across the US, UK and India, and they don't often get together in the same place. Many new members of the team hadn't met those outside of their home office. Their 2026 offsite was a chance to fix that. It was also a chance to get real work done in important areas where leadership wanted to move quickly. To support that, we picked location in Surrey and built a 3-day event centered around a company hackathon, with plenty of fun too.

Most of the time went to the hackathon itself. People split into teams, picked real business problems, and spent the offsite building and deploying a solution. The final morning was given over to live demos. Having everyone physically together made a huge difference. There was no waiting on time zones and no long Slack threads, just people at a whiteboard thinking through things together.

Between these build sessions we ran a bespoke spy-themed challenge called the Enigma project. With safe-cracking, code-breaking, and a blindfolded minefield, it kept the problem-solving juices flowing, but also gave everyone something to laugh about.

The evenings were kept relaxed and fun, with drinks, dinner, and enough downtime for the team to hang out and get to know each other on more of a personal level.

By the time the offsite wrapped up, Finster had new solutions to deploy, more shared context and stronger relationships to navigate the period ahead. That mix of real output and deeper connection left the CEO saying "we need to do this more often".