A week in the life of our global Rokt’stars
By: Mai Kojima, Marketing Coordinator (New York)
At Rokt, we value the education of all of our Rokt’stars – from the Ed Sheerans to the Mick Jaggers, to ensure that we are all well-equipped to support the trajectory of our fast-growing company. At each end of quarter, we gather colleagues and global new hires for a week-long Rokt End of Quarter event. Our Q3 EOQ was hosted at our NYC HQ (can you say you’re a startup if you don’t abbreviate everything?) where we were joined by our latest band of new hires, our UK colleagues across the pond as well as our product and engineering leads across a much bigger pond – Sydney, AU. It was a week filled with not enough desks, not enough conference rooms (did we mention, we’re growing?) and lots and lots of coffee.
What we lacked in space, we sure made up for in knowledge sharing. EOQ kicked off with a welcome from our Executive team (ExCo in startup lingo) who provided a quarterly lookback on the company including our phenomenal YOY growth. These retrospectives allow us to understand how our efforts during the quarter make an impact on the overall business. As we are all stakeholders in the company, the ExCo team is incredibly transparent in our progress (and our pitfalls) to provide an accurate view of the company we are all heavily invested in.
We continued our sessions with a debrief by our CEO, Bruce Buchanan, on the state of e-commerce and our vision to transform the space. It’s vital for the full Rokt team to understand the e-commerce industry – how it operates, its intricacies and trends. The more we understand, the better we are able to adapt and stay customer-obsessed in our business, roadmaps, and interactions with the market.
Speaking of staying customer-obsessed, one of the highlights of the week was a customer panel which included tons of insightful takeaways. The Q+A provided keen perspectives into how Rokt has been performing and where our customers are headed next.
Our knowledge-sharing week was rounded out with a session from our product and engineering teams. Since the recent growth of these two teams, we have kicked product rollouts into high gear. This session provided those of us not in Sydney with an in-person, detailed presentation about our highest impact products. With email and video chats being our main method of communication between our offices, the chance for Northern Hemisphere team members to ask questions and provide feedback IRL was most certainly taken full advantage of.
The Rokt End of Quarter event culminated with a team activity at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The chance to tour one of the world’s largest collections of art with colleagues from around the globe was not lost on us. With 24 languages spoken across our seven offices, the Met was a most fitting locale to bring our team together.
Rokt prides itself on attracting individuals who have a lot to offer and want to learn even more. Our end of quarter session provides us all with the opportunity to localize our team training, brainstorming, discussions and of course the chance to catch up. But it’s not until our final EOQ of the year when the entire company journeys over to Australia for a global, end of quarter event. For a few of us, we finally meet the colleagues we have spent countless evenings video chatting with while for many of our seasoned Rokt’stars, it’s more like a family reunion.