We are a distributed team across Tbilisi and Dubai, so there was never going to be one office with balloons taped to the ceiling. Instead, seven years got celebrated the way most of our workdays already happen — on a call, across time zones, and somehow still louder than expected. Here is what actually went down.
The format: games, not an agenda
We made a deliberate decision not to structure the anniversary call around a retrospective deck or a metrics review. Seven years of those exist already. This one was structured around games, which turned out to be the right call.
The format was loose: a full-team video call, a mix of people from both offices in the same frame, and three blocks of activity with no formal agenda between them.
What we actually played
The first block was company trivia — questions about the project history, the early years, the decisions that look obvious in retrospect and were genuinely uncertain at the time. The format was simple: a question, everyone answers, the person who gets it right gets to ask the follow-up question.
Some questions were easy. Some were not. The one about which client project arrived with the strangest technical requirement — a Salesforce org that needed to track inventory for a museum, including items that had not been catalogued yet — produced a genuine debate about whether "null but billable" is a real data state. (The answer is yes, apparently, if the contract says so.)
The second block was an online quiz platform — faster, more competitive, not limited to people who had been around long enough to know the company history. This levelled the playing field significantly and produced the discovery that our most competitive team member on a quiz platform is not the person anyone would have predicted.
The third block was show-and-tell. Each person picked one thing from the past year — a project, a technical problem, a moment — and described it in two minutes. No slides. No preparation required. The two-minute constraint was the part that made it work: enough time to say something specific, not enough time to turn it into a presentation.
The part that is hard to describe to people who have not worked distributed
A distributed team that has been working together for years accumulates shared context in a specific, gradual way. There are no hallway conversations. There are no off-the-cuff lunches. The shared context that builds in a co-located office — the running jokes, the inside references, the "you had to be there" stories — has to be built intentionally in a distributed one.
What struck me about the anniversary call was how much of that context exists without anyone having planned it. Stories about the same project told from different angles by people who worked on it at different times. References to client situations that everyone understood without explanation. A team that has been doing good work together for long enough that the good work has become its own kind of shared language.
That is not something you schedule into a company retrospective. It builds in the work, over time. Seven years is enough time to accumulate a lot of it.
To everyone who has been part of this in any form — client, partner, or team member who moved on to something else — thank you. Seven years of this kind of work is not small. Follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram for more of what it is actually like working with a distributed Salesforce team.
