Background Layer #8
Catching up on our planning meeting in January
It has been a minute, and so we are catching up from January in May…but the images we had from Mexico City were too good not to share.
This is Background Layer #8, and this one has been a collaboration between Ben and Tyler ghostwriting to unstick Ben.
Setting up shop
For a week in January, we escaped to Mexico City for our annual planning retreat. The big patio table on our rooftop became our co-working space. Plants, street noise, and sticky notes surrounded us as we developed our goals for 2025 and discussed how we’d get there.
The strategic stuff
Intention setting
We started our retreat by reviewing where we see XYZ in terms of its phase of life and using that to determine a theme for the year (Early adulthood and “Systems”). We used that as our guide/check throughout the week.
Best practices
You know that feeling when you’ve been doing something intuitively for years, but never actually written down how it works? That was us. We’d been thinking a lot about how to keep things running smoothly, and finally spent time logging all of our learnings.
Zrinka came prepared with an incredibly detailed outline that we used to steer our thinking. She’d thought through everything from our development workflow to file naming conventions.
After many hours on our rooftop and multiple sessions, we ended up with a comprehensive best practices document that lives in Notion. It captures our “knowns” about how we function as a group, aligns us on process improvements, and calls out what still needs developing. It’s a living, breathing document, by no means finished, but it’s already been so helpful in laying the foundation for our growth.
Noms
Big shoutout to Ro Hernández for all the food recommendations that kept us well-fed during our stay! See our compiled Google Map of places.
Once we discovered Maizajo, we could not stay away. It became part of our routine, and it literally ended up in our best practices.
We also really loved the tiny tlacoyo stand right outside Maizajo's door. We saw the staff eating there, and though we may have just finished a large lunch, we may have had some more.
Sights
Things that caught my eye:
Letrástica meetup
Ro also organized a rooftop gathering, as part of Letrástica, at Cine Tonalá for drinks and critiques!
We got to see Jesse reconnect with a former student, Cristobal Hernandez, who showcased a soon-to-be-released typeface.
Connecting with the local community helped us to feel less like tourists and more like peers. Seeing what everyone is doing while talking about shared struggles helps to drive home that we are all in this together, no matter where we live.
Bringing it home
It’s now almost five months since we were in CDMX, but what we talked and planned continues to drive what we are doing now, though, of course, like all plans, we are not on target! Getting together when we spend so much time apart is critical for us to be able to understand each other over Zoom. The food never hurts, of course!
That’s it for this one. I hope you are well and stay well until another one of these hits your inbox.
—Ben