Customer stories

Making Manhattan memories with Magic’s engineering crew

Riley Leight · 12/1/2022

Magic is a Web3 innovator that helps developers create virtual wallets for their customers through frictionless, secure software. In September, they hosted a BoomPop Offsite in Manhattan to bring their engineering team together in person.

We spoke with Magic’s Chief of Staff, Lars Anders, to hear more about Magic’s philosophy behind creating culture for remote teams and the role of offsites in their company’s engagement strategy. Here’s what we learned.

Building culture and connection for remote teams

Anders' role as Chief of Staff requires him to oversee a variety of complex human resources, operations, and employee engagement functions—giving him a front row seat to how important connection and culture are to the success of a company. “If you are a fully remote company, you probably can't get away with just never seeing people,” said Anders. “It's hard to have a company culture if people form relationships purely over video chat.”

According to Anders, the distance of remote work creates an inevitable loss of organic moments within a team. “You need to have something on an annual or quarterly basis to get people to engage and remember why they're contributing towards this big, sometimes nebulous thing that is creating software,” he explained. Things like scoping out a new product, mapping out features on a whiteboard, or simply brainstorming can be done virtually—but they lose the spark of natural, in person collaboration.

If teams aren’t meeting in person, strains can begin to seep into a variety of areas that are crucial to a company’s success. Virtual solutions can be a Band-Aid, but often aren’t enough. “We have virtual happy hours like many companies, and I think some of them go really well and some of them are a little lackluster,” he said. “Participation drops off sometimes. Part of that is just fatigue, and I also attribute that to people just not seeing each other in person enough.”

Creating productive and memorable experiences

Magic’s 2-day engineering team all hands in Manhattan was designed foremost to facilitate in-depth strategy building and provide clarity to the team on their direction, goals, and processes. But like most great offsites, it included key opportunities for human connection, like a private dinner at BlackBarn and a play-and-eat ping pong experience at SPIN 23.

“I'm a believer in planning the big stuff, like the priorities for the event, but to try to leave time and space for organic things to happen.” For Anders and the engineering team, one of those organic moments came in the form of a Saturday morning walk along The High Line, an elevated railway-turned-green-space in Manhattan that Madelyn and Nik, his BoomPop planning team, had recommended.

“It’s a very technical group and a group that, you know, has not spent a ton of time together,” he said, “so I expected attendance to be kind of low.” But thankfully, that turned out not to be the case. “I was pleasantly surprised that many people chose to give up some time on a Saturday morning for this walk together, and everybody really enjoyed it. So, the thing I thought we'd get the least participation and least enjoyment from flip-flopped. It was the most memorable thing we did together.”

Unlocking an offsite strategy that scales

“Company culture is something that I will always care about, even if I can't give as much time as I want to,” Anders said. That’s why he decided to seek out a “force multiplier” to make planning thoughtful events for Magic’s teams easier.

Magic has around 50 employees today, and Anders knew that as they continued growing, he would need to find a partner to take certain parts of the process off his plate. Creating experiences can be time-consuming, detail-oriented work that quickly eats into bandwidth. “It just came from a place of me trying to find a way to scale and right now it's not internally, so I looked externally.”

Working with BoomPop allows him to slim down his involvement in planning to just key decisions like frequency, timing, and location, while the minute-to-minute details of itineraries and restaurant reservations can get handled by experts. That means more time to focus on the high level strategy and culture-building that makes Magic thrive.