Getting (More) Stuff Done Days at N26

When I first joined N26, I wrote about how we have Getting Stuff Done Days (GSDD), 2 days every 6 weeks where people in Product & Tech down tools.

During GSDD people choose where they spend their time versus working on a team priority. For a lot of people in tech, this often meant experimenting with libraries, tools or techniques, sharing lessons learned, teaching and sharing with each other. More importantly, GSDD are two days where people do not have any meetings, and they can focus on what they need to do to get stuff done.

Although this started in Product & Tech, other teams have now adopted this practice, giving them strong focus time to get stuff done. This practice has been well adopted across Design teams, Marketing teams and People Team. In this article, I want to celebrate some of the examples of what people accomplished during their GSSD.

Our design team constantly explores emerging technologies and how can they be amplified by design to bring customers experiences that not only delight but also prove useful. One of our design team members, Maja, used her GSDD to experiment with Augmented Reality (AR) and understand how its application might bring our card product closer to users.

It’s easy in rapid growth to forget about topics that matter beyond the current company goals. A group from our people team looked at encouraging practices to create a more sustainable office, to propose more green initiatives and with the support from our Employee Group for Environmental practice, plan out what we could do for World Cleanup Day.

Our Global Future Talent Program Manager Jeff Lovejoy was tasked to tackle the war on tech talent. One idea he had was a N26 Talent Accelerator Program, with the tagline: “Building the best YOU”. The program focuses on developing internal talent and finding people passionate about technology who may not have the practical experience needed. The only way to deliver an award winning program would be to listen to our own people. Working closely with tech recruiter, Babet Van Oorschot, Jeff used his GSDD to pull people from different departments within the People Team to brainstorm what a program could look like. Using this as a kickstart to bring people together, Jeff then knew who and how to approach other people in the business to move this project forward.

A Website Task Force (people from the Web, Product Comms, SEO & Design teams) used a GSDD to find areas on the N26 domain to improve the crawling efficiency of search engines. Team members had always wanted to improve this but never found the time. The members of the Task Force first identified different areas to tackle (e.g. incoming and outgoing links, images, HTML tags, localization issues, etc). They then prioritized these and assigned leaders to work on each area. After one intense day, the improvements significantly increased the Website Health Score. A bonus outcome was an agreed standard to ensure future success as the website continues to evolve.

Great leaders amplify the effectiveness of others. This is why it’s been really great to see the adoption of our Getting Stuff Done Days (GSDD) spread beyond Product & Tech. It’s clear that GSDD provides a good focus, a reminder to continually improve and to create space for everyone to take action to improve their own workspace.

If you’d like to join N26 and have the opportunity to Get Stuff Done as well as take part in our GSDD, take a look at our open roles here.