At our monthly company wide meetings, there’s a thing our HRs never forget – it’s to encourage professionals to come to the office at least on some days. As cool as remote work is (and we’re okay with that as a company), there just are some things that get filtered out through the Zoom screen. Things that make up important context.
About a year ago, we collectively decided to knock it all up a notch and prioritize traveling as part of our routine for at least some specialists – both within and outside projects. Lionwood now consciously invests more into providing more opportunities for project managers and specialists to travel to the client’s premises – and for company reps to attend target industry events like Stockholm Tech Show 2025 or Transform Berlin. After several months, we could already see some of the results and patterns.
The communication factor: details that need to get through
There’s a significant difference between interactions that have an agenda and those that are continuous and immersive. With an agenda, people focus on what they feel needs to be said and only present the “TL;DR” side of things. However, this means that a lot of crucial details get lost. It’s a bit like the Roman dodecahedra paradox: the Romans themselves saw their twelve-facet gizmos as so common and their purpose so self-evident that now, after dozens of generations, there’s no single explanation of what they were used for. An archaeological mystery born out of the feeling of “obviousness”.
And this happens a lot with various projects and businesses. When people talk less formally, those small details about the actual situation, workflows, side comments and perceptions can shed a lot of light on what the client really wants. And that nuance can be the difference between a product that works and one that truly fits.
#1 It becomes easier to find the (actually) custom solution
The notion of “custom solutions” now has something of a double meaning to it. In the broad sense of the word, “custom” is everything that’s not completely out-of-the-box. Even if you’re just building a fairly typical software infrastructure, it’s “custom”. In the narrow sense of the word, though, custom means something that starts with the situation at hand, and then develops specifically to improve it.
In other words, there’s a difference between choosing a “best practice” out of a catalogue and then applying it to the client’s needs – and truly custom solutions. These latter will better fit the picture, and will even cost less, but are only possible with comprehension.
#2 Projects get faster
That’s an even more tangible result – and a logical one, when you think about it. A lot of time during practically any project is devoured by reworks and revisions. And these are, in fact, the exchanges of insights that should have happened earlier on, but didn’t – so they come with a vengeance in this way. Once you get a clearer picture of what’s needed and get everyone on the same page, they’re gone!
In general, what we’ve noticed, with roughly similar projects where in one case, everything’s done remotely, and the other, there are at least several day’s visits, the latter have around 15-25% faster time-to-deployment. When you do the math (especially with nearshore projects somewhere in Europe), it’s much easier to have a couple of specialists travel to the premises for 4-5 days than to have 10-15 people work for what’s essentially another quarter of the project timeline.
This is especially the case with logistics projects. For example, with WMS, there are countless reasons for, say, inaccurate stock level reporting – like workers who skip a few steps in barcode scanning just because they can.
#3 With pragmatic empathy converted to UX, app adoption increases
We’re all used to talking about empathy in personal relationships, to the point when introducing quantifiable business metrics to the concept almost feels like sacrilege. But in reality, the more pragmatic sort of empathy is needed if you want to ensure user adoption for your software.
And what’s the point of even starting to build software that won’t be adopted unless pushed forcefully on the users?
This is where it’s important to actually talk to the immediate users of the app or system in question, at least several of them per user role. When you’re developing, e.g. a fleet management solution and see mechanics skip documentation because their hands are too greasy to navigate the app, you’re more likely to think of implementing voice assisted flows in the app. When you’re riding with the driver to enhance the route management system, and see them avoiding certain streets for safety reasons (while the algorithm is optimized for fuel), you’re more likely to suggest some sort of driver suggestion or override function.
And once the client approves that (which most are eager to do), you can expect adoption rates to go higher.
#4 Every subsequent project gets handled more expertly
What’s cool about working with living people and not just automation systems is that humans have an in-build desire for personal growth. And it turns out, traveling and meeting new people beyond the screen really does foster that. Millennials’ parents telling their kids to turn the TV off and go play outside were right. Renaissance painters like Dürer, who spent years traveling through Italy, were right.
For developers and UXers, on-site visits help shift from abstract requirements (and reliance on impersonal best practices) to real-world understanding. And that also builds industry literacy a lot. There’s a difference between, e.g. a C# developer with FinTech experience and a C# developer with a portfolio of eLearning projects.
Project managers and BAs can now build context faster (without resorting to assumptions!) and are better at communicating, while sales and BDMs develop an ear for the background details and get better at navigating the industry-specific and regional nuances.
And that means, each team member becomes an expert in several fields at once, and ready to exchange that expertise where necessary. The result is, everyone’s a bit of a cross-functional professional, and that helps handle the next project better, even if it doesn’t involve traveling.
Why industry events matter
Visiting the client when necessary is one aspect of corporate travel; the other being industry events. And we’re not just talking about IT conferences, which have always been part of IT culture here in Ukraine. This time, it’s about the events of the target industries, and the mixed IT+several industries conferences.
The trick here, of course, is to choose wisely. If anything, the pandemic has created even more events (in digital formats) that then went offline around 2021. You just can’t be everywhere at the same time, but when you choose the correct events to visit, the output is great.
According to a 2022 Bizzabo report, 78% of B2B marketers say live events generate the most effective leads. The core idea here is not “more leads” but rather “more effective leads” – not just in the sense of starting collaborations, but also in the sense of starting more meaningful collaborations, really. It’s one thing to be contracted online for a trivial task because you can do it faster, and quite another to undertake an ultra-custom Sistine chapel-level project with unique requirements.
And that’s what makes companies like ours valuable and afloat under any circumstances: the ability to undertake something that requires deep understanding and cooperation. Our reps even experienced almost instant referrals once this one thing was understood: that we were ready to start working on non-trivial projects.
In conclusion
Arguably the best GenZ catchphrase so far, “go touch grass” is, in fact, an excellent piece of advice. It’s all too easy to generate countless assumptions about how things need to be done in a particular type of project. But if you, as a company, are committed to creating unique, custom, and pragmatically perfect software solutions, you’ll need loads of context – and context is a beast whose habitat is usually company premises and informal conversations.
And importantly, it’s not just about disjointed experiences. The impact of traveling to an event or a client location goes far beyond the delivery day – it creates a culture. This culture is of confident and observing cross-functional experts that are not afraid to think outside the Zoom call box and collaborate more efficiently. At this point, we’re measuring the impacts of more travel where it’s possible, but at the end of the day, metrics are just narrow quantifications. You can’t measure evolution holistically, but you can measure its outcomes. And what we’re seeing now is that Lionwood.software is systematically getting better at what we strive to do – delivering the perfect solution.
