posted on March 15, 2016
Walls dressed in purple, plush couches, themed conference rooms, countless photos of cars and pantries stocked with snacks — this is Turo.
I started working at Turo early this year, and I was immediately immersed into the company as if I had been there from the start. My second week on the job was Turbo Week, where I presented a project I worked on in front of the entire company, and even won an award for it. Who does any of that their second week on the job?
So here’s my breakdown of a Turo Turbo Week, from a new girl’s perspective.
Turbo week in a nutshell
Turbo Week is a semi-annual week-long event where Turo employees from across the country come together to take a quick look back at the last six months, and dive in and really start planning the next six. After figuring out the year’s priorities, they connect with their two most valuable sources of information: the Turo community and team. Mixed together with a dash of fun, competition, and voilà! You have Turbo Week.
We didn’t reinvent the wheel, we made it roll better
During Turbo Week, the whole team broke up into small interdepartmental teams, hacking away at various projects to help improve our members’ everyday experiences. Everyone spent long hours tackling their hacks and making major improvements to our product. Some projects were already shipped and active before the week was even over!
We’ve also rolled out a new Trip Checklist, new Android animations, a new Jobs page (which I helped build!) and, have big things planned for the near future.
We got honest feedback
In addition to improving the product, we hosted a member panel where we picked the brains of new Turo owners to gather feedback about the onboarding process.
The panel was made up of people with various reasons for using Turo. One was able to use it for his own personal financing: “I just wanted to try Turo, and it ended up completely covering my Tesla’s monthly payment,” he said, and another was a fellow startup entrepreneur who just wanted to rent out her car for the extra money.
All had insightful feedback on the onboarding process, which we’ll be taking into consideration as we continue to tackle the first half of 2016. Stay tuned for an update on how we’ve improved the onboarding process before our next Turbo Week in July.
And of course, we had fun
Note to self: the Turo team definitely knows how to have fun.
Each night after work, we went out on the town and just hung out. We painted, bowled, played games at an arcade, and rented out an entire recording studio for the Turbo Week finale.
It seems to me that even though the Turo team is getting bigger, they still manage to keep the team’s culture, relationships, and goals in intact, and Turbo Week definitely makes that possible.
Looking forward to 2016
I give full credit to Turbo Week and the Turo community for making my first weeks at Turo easy, fun, and super productive. If this how my first few weeks have been, I can’t imagine what the next months have in store.
Alessandra Maahs
Alessandra is a part of the Marketing team at Turo. When she’s not talking about Turo, she is either reading science journals, playing tennis, or exploring a new organic farmers market.
