Our team is often asked, “How does Button maintain such a strong culture with employees distributed all over the country?”

Button’s RemotePlus workplace strategy is predicated on balancing distributed work with periodic in-person collaboration. Getting people in a room is fairly easy, but doing it the right way takes hard work and investment. By relentlessly focusing on the most substantial benefits of in-person work–collaboration and focus–we bring our people together with intentionality. Our employees look forward to these gatherings not just as occasions to spend time with coworkers, but as opportunities to meaningfully achieve alignment and advance progress.  

This summer, Buttonians across the country gathered in “Button focus cities” from Seattle to New York to reconnect in-person, collaborate deeply, and enjoy a little food and fun while doing it. Our employees appreciate the effort, and there’s a certain magic in these “hometown” events. Every gathering was built around shared activities that helped drive culture and alignment.

Button’s Got Great Taste

You can’t brainstorm on an empty stomach, and we certainly never went hungry! Starting our tour in Seattle, our data, machine learning, and retail media teams came together to map out second-half goals. The creativity flowed thanks to strong coffee, homemade donuts (shoutout to our very own Mark Webber), and a team offsite at a local vineyard where the ideas flowed just as well as the wine. 

Back at our New York City hub, the tone was equally energetic. Fueled by bagels and Billy Joel, our product, commercial, finance, and product catalog teams launched into the “Game Plan” theme for the week. Over shared meals, Buttonians across different teams tackled roadmap planning, brainstormed improvements, and aligned on what winning in H2 looks like.

In Boston, it wouldn’t have been a proper planning session without Dunkin’ and Dropkick Murphys. Our infrastructure and engineering teams huddled up for technical deep dives, syncing on backend priorities and laying the foundation for scalability and performance. 

Friendly Competition

While our brains were working overtime, our competitive spirits got a workout too. In Seattle, we rounded out our planning sessions with a group outing to a Mariners game, a chance to celebrate a week of momentum and enjoy a quintessential Pacific Northwest summer evening. 

Back in Boston, the team hit the town for a high-energy afternoon of mini golf and racing at the F1 Arcade. After a morning of sessions on infrastructure improvements and cross-functional integration, we were ready for some healthy competition outside the office, working together with (or competing against!) coworkers our team members may not work with on a daily basis. 

Fresh Faces and Views 

Our Button Speaker Series celebrates successful entrepreneurs, who bring fresh energy and inspiration, and offer our team real-world insights on scaling, failing, and building with purpose. To round out the summer, we welcomed several such guest speakers to our New York office. Since we believe culture is strongest when it's lived, we also made space for after-hours fun, team dinners, and those impromptu conversations that are harder to replicate in Slack threads.

In Los Angeles, we welcomed new team members, investing in one of the most critical early experiences at Button: onboarding. We had the pleasure of officially welcoming Stephanie and Azat to the team, and doing it in-person, in their home city. We believe that when new hires meet colleagues face-to-face, experience our culture, and feel part of the team from day one, it sets the tone for long-term engagement and success.

The LA crew spent the morning in collaborative sessions and product immersion, then headed out for a boat cruise around Marina del Rey, a relaxed and scenic setting to continue conversations and connect outside the usual digital grid. 

Button’s Cultural Impact

These events take work–there are the countless logistical details, of course, but, more importantly, the strategic vision to ensure that they are executed with intentionality, so that when attendees are headed home at the end of the week, they have a clear understanding of what was accomplished, and the immeasurable value created in disrupting normal routine and workflow. We have a good thing going– our team routinely rates in-person events as among their favorite parts of working at Button– but we can always improve, and we survey attendees both before (to tailor the event to best fit the specific attendees) and after (to learn what we can do better the next time around).

The return from our investment is incredible– enhanced alignment and clarity, team-building, motivation, and belonging. The atmosphere during a coworking week is dynamic, but the energy following the week is even more remarkable. If it seems like we’re proud of our RemotePlus workplace strategy, we are, and we’re so excited to continue building upon what we’ve learned over the past few years. If you want to hear how your team can adopt a RemotePlus workplace strategy which optimizes for clarity and alignment, reach out to people@usebutton.com. We’d love to chat!