Inside our staff engineering summit: Building our Virtual First staff engineering community

From day one, Dropbox has always had one primary North Star: collaboration. The idea of working better together has not only driven all of our product and platform releases and improvements over the years, it has also shaped the way our teams work to build those products. Simply put, no good idea can come to fruition alone.

This is why we gather together (now virtually) throughout the year for organization or company-wide events that allow us to share our ideas with each other and then work together to make them a reality. Most recently, this took shape as our first Virtual First staff engineering summit — a four day event in which participants put their heads together to identify and solve some of the obstacles along the path toward Dropbox’s future. In an opening keynote, Staff Software Engineer Royce Ausburn outlined the goals of the summit in further detail.

“I’m really excited to have us all spend some time together, work some things out, and kick off our Virtual First staff engineering community. For this to be a successful summit, we will have come together, talked about some problems, and proposed some actions.”

These key topics weren’t just chosen at random; they were identified prior to the summit with a survey that all staff engineers voted on. Participants were then split into four groups to work through their assigned topic together. For each topic, there was a well-defined process that included five phases: open-ended discussion, problem definition, hypothesizing the causes, brainstorming what we could do, and finally proposing something (which could include building a new feature, removing a feature, involving another team, simply starting another proposal, and anything in between.)

Here’s a glance at how the week’s schedule proceeded:

• Day 1: Opening session, first problem discussion session, defining the problem state session, and panel discussion with tech council
• Day 2: Q&A with Dropbox CEO Drew and President Timothy, hypothesis session, brainstorm session, and panel discussion with Kellan, Ruchi, and Stephen
• Day 3: Two sessions in which to propose action items, social event, and presentation prep
• Day 4: Morning coffee chat followed by presentions of the work of each of the groups

Want to learn more about exactly what these groups dug up during their sessions? Keep an eye on our blog over the next couple of weeks for additional posts with the inside scoop from the summit.