30 days+ at Zappi...in photos

I've gotten a lot of questions about my transition into Zappi and what it's been like - so I thought the best way to capture the essence of the people, technology, and work was to do it with photos. It's been intense and fun. We've gotten a lot of things done in a short period of time.

Day -5 Bulgaria

Before I started in the Boston office I was invited to a company offsite and hackathon in the Bulgarian countryside. Five days of fun and building tools with ten cross functional teams coming up with ten products that are either commercially viable or will have a net internal benefit to the org. The projects are pitched and voted on and the project that won was an internal tool focused on improving the processes of our client excellence teams. Even though there were some really excellent projects including Google Smart Tag integration and a facial recognition software package, the teams voted for a project to improve the outcome of the work for our current and future clients and dramatically improve the life of our customer service teams.

Day 8 Fort Point

We went to look at possible new office space for the Boston office. Sometime soon we will out grow our WeWork space. We are almost at 30 in Boston so it's starting to not make sense at our current numbers. But, there are so many advantages to WeWork and there is a reason why they, like us, are growing so quickly.

There's an option for us to do something like what IBM has done which is to carve out some larger dedicated space. It's hard to think of leaving our Fort Point location though. There's something about being close to the water.

Day 12 London

My first trip to our Camden office. A large number of my team, nine including design, content and product marketing are in the UK. The UK office has about 100 people and we're planning to hire an additional 30. Again, related to the Boston office - where are we going to put everyone? This picture is of a product demo of work we are doing for Pepsi. They are really pushing the boundaries of creative and innovation testing. We are there as partners to help them each step of the way.

Day 14 London

The London office I discover also has a great set up for beer and wine. There is a Zappi band...but these are not the speakers.

Day 20 Fort Point

Client visit. Luckily we were proud to have an LG monitor in the conference room.

Day 22 Fort Point and Chicago

All the offices are dog friendly. In Boston there are two dogs: Rudy and Leo. In Chicago there's Sunny.

Day 23 Chicago

In Chicago we also ran an innovation event, Free Your Mind, with some of our clients and thought leaders in the insights space. It was paneled by Kristen Griffith from Clorox; Michelle Gansle from Wrigley; Kristi Zuhlke from Knowledge Hound; and Ryan Barry from Zappi. It was a a candid discussion about how to rethink innovation in market research to drive actual business results. Afterwards, we had mind reader Mark Toland join us. He somehow last year predicted the winner of the men's NCAA basketball tournament. It was pretty cool to see him in action. I tried hard to analyze how he pulled off his tricks, which really takes the magic out of magic.

Day 38 Fort Point and Global

Presenting to the company on the revised marketing strategy 30 days in. Five strategic priorities for Q4 2017 and 2018 seems excessive, but there is a lot of work to do. I really like that one of our core values is Getting Sh*t Done. I just added ^ Marketing!

Day 40 Fort Point

Arm wrestling competition! That's all I have to say about it. I had my money on Cam but Jason won.

Beyond arm wrestling....there is a decent amount of fun. Which is one of the things that drew me to Zappi. I really try not to lose at Madden: being the old guy, people are surprised that I can play at all.

Tomorrow and beyond:

Growing the team. Driving change in the insights industry. Working to help double the business again in 2018!