Lisbon team meetup
Last week, the BeyondWords team, less one or two, gathered in sunny Lisbon for our annual team meetup.
Flying in from all corners of Europe (and some from further afar) we enjoyed what has become an essential part of life at BeyondWords.
Our meetups are designed in a way to share ideas and foster connection and collaboration amongst our team—making the most out of the precious time we have all-together.
This year was a great balance of roadmap planning, team building, a little sightseeing, and lots of productivity breaks for pastéis de nata!
Below we’ve highlighted a few themes from the meetup.
Our exceptional team
Over the past few years, we’ve developed into a lean product-focused and customer-obsessed team. Through a number of pivots, we’ve fine-tuned our strategy, creating and delivering best-in-class AI voice products for news publishers.
From product development to support, every team member - linguists, engineers, founders - are focused on helping our customers succeed.
Our customer-first approach has been key to our growth, and our time in Lisbon reinforced that the passion and commitment of our team will continue to drive BeyondWords forward.
Fun fact: Alongside our customer-obsession, we’re also enthusiastic about burritos…next week will mark our 100th trip to Chipotle since we returned to the office!
Operational focus
As we moved from remote to hybrid working - adding an office in central London - Lisbon also gave us an opportunity to strengthen our operational model.
As a company, we’ve matured around 3 departments - Growth, Engineering and Ops - with cross-functional teams within each department.
We think of ourselves as an arrow, with customer-led product development at the tip.
Simplifying the org chart into this structure provides us with clarity over responsibilities, improved accountability and ownership, better communication and team cohesion.
And not to miss the crucial element to any long term strategy…having fun!
On this meetup, we took on the famous hills of Lisbon (on electric bikes!) while receiving a fun and informative introduction to Portuguese history from our guide, Avi, and we sampled delicious local food at the TimeOut market.
New customer partnerships
Lastly, we celebrated new customer partnerships with Thomson Reuters, Nation Media, Stavanger Aftenblad, Die Presse, Kleine Zeitung, Charities Aid Foundation and many more.
We’re also excited to have recently helped News Australia successfully train and launch a number of custom AI voices, based on their journalists, across their titles.
As a team we hope to continue to grow and collaborate more effectively, to be creative, open minded, bold, and, in doing-so, delight our customers.
If you’re interested in working with us, in our team, as a partner or as a customer, feel free to book a meeting or reach out to us at [email protected].