Come experience Menlo’s joyful and disciplined methodologies affectionately known as "The Menlo Way™."  Learn about our pairing practices, open and collaborative workspace, 40 hour work weeks, philosophy of making mistakes faster, High-Tech Anthropology®, and more!

Learn how Menlo Innovations uses visual management tools like story mapping, planning games, and work authorization boards to ensure that daily tasks provide the most value to a project’s long-term plan by focusing on project priorities. While historically Menlo has found these tools work best on paper, the company has recently found ways to adapt its visual management processes to work both 100% remote and hybrid while maintaining the integrity, goals, and values achieved with its paper-based system.

In this two-day event, your group will tour Menlo and see both our original and adapted visual management tools up close. You'll also learn how to establish a road map for beginning a project, make meaningful course corrections to a project that support a long-term plan, and avoid expensive scope creep that can lead to months of wasted efforts.

Learn how visual management tools like story mapping, planning game, and work authorization boards ensure that daily tasks provide the most value to a project’s long-term plan by focusing on project priorities. While historically Menlo has found these tools work best on paper, the company has recently found ways to adapt its visual management processes to work both 100% remote and hybrid while maintaining the integrity, goals, and values achieved with its paper-based system.

During this in-person workshop, the Menlo team will take you through a series of engaging exercises to introduce you to The Menlo Way of Project Management and explore how these concepts can help bring clarity, simplicity, and predictability to your organization.

Who are your target users, and what brings them joy? Are you focusing on the right problem? What is the best solution to the problem? At Menlo, we use High-Tech Anthropology® to address these questions and mitigate the inherent risks associated with product development to avoid the typical, expensive pitfall of building the wrong product for the wrong people.

In this two-day interactive in-person workshop at Menlo, we’ll introduce you and a group of other interested individuals to a condensed version of our unique approach to design thinking. You’ll learn what it takes to get stakeholder agreement on product direction and how to create products people love to use. You will run through our process from end to end, becoming familiar with a variety of techniques to gather critical user and business information and distill it into successful design. Throughout the workshop, we’ll give you opportunities to reflect on how to bring these practices back to your own work environment and provide you with takeaway materials to start you on your way.

Who are your target users, and what brings them joy? Are you focusing on the right problem? What is the best solution to the problem? At Menlo, we use High-Tech Anthropology® to address these questions and mitigate the inherent risks associated with product development to avoid the typical, expensive pitfall of building the wrong product for the wrong people.

In this two-day interactive workshop, we’ll introduce you to a condensed version of our unique approach to design thinking. You’ll learn what it takes to get stakeholder agreement on product direction and how to create products people love to use. You will run through our process from end to end, becoming familiar with a variety of techniques to gather critical user and business information and distill it into successful design. Throughout the workshop, we’ll give you opportunities to reflect on how to bring these practices back to your own work environment and provide you with takeaway materials to start you on your way.

This four-hour workshop features hands-on activities to teach you how to create a story map and use it as a tool to build consensus, re-prioritize, and respond effectively to changes in project timelines and budget.

Sure, joy sounds great, but how does it affect the bottom line? Why should we care about it in a business context?

In this four- or eight-hour customizable session, immerse yourself in the business value of joy. This experience includes a tour of Menlo’s “factory,” allowing for observation of our agile and lean inspired processes and plenty of time for discussion and questions. We’ll provide an experience tailored for your group on topics of your choosing. Some examples might include: building the culture you really want through the running of experiments, using High-Tech Anthropology® to create solutions people want to use, hiring the right people through Extreme Interviewing, using visual management to plan and track projects, and pursuing non-hierarchical leadership.

This tour can be scheduled with CEO Rich Sheridan or COO James Goebel as your guide!

Pairing: it’s not just for software developers! Did you know that most roles at Menlo also pair, and all roles pair together at some point? This crucial practice has been instrumental in coping with the rapid change to a remote, and now hybrid, workforce.

If you find your team members struggling with loneliness and isolation, observe communication breakdowns, or are held hostage by a "tower of knowledge" in any role, you may want to see how pairing could help your organization.

"We need more people!" is not simply a cry for increased headcount; it's a need to quickly increase the output of the team. Traditional interviewing consists of a candidate arriving at an appointed time and, over the course of an hour or two, sitting across from one or a number of people on their best behavior. Menlo co-founder James Goebel may take it a step further describing this time as "two people sitting across the table lying to each other." This can create a false sense of fit, cause long delays between meeting a limited number of candidates, create recency bias, or push for a result before the right candidate is found. Does this really find the best candidate and properly prepare new team members for what’s to come?

Our unique "Extreme Interview" process emphasizes efficiently finding people with the right fit for not only the job at hand but our cultural values as well. By designing our recruiting around what we're really looking for, we have been able to create an one-of-a-kind, effective hiring process... and we can help you do the same!

What does effective paired programming look like? How do you write test-driven code with someone else? Do we really share a keyboard and mouse? And what does Menlo mean when we say it’s ‘important to make your partner look good’? What’s it really like to pair?

In this four-hour workshop, participants will learn best practices for pairing and test-driven development (TDD) in an interactive session. You’ll get hands-on experience with TDD in a paired context by embedding in a Menlo codebase, including 90 minutes of pairing with a Menlo developer!

All organizations have a culture. But is yours an intentional culture, or a default culture? Most are default cultures defined by the personalities hired, the lack of expectations around critical behaviors, a lack of trust and/or a lack of systems to support an intentional culture.

Menlo Innovations provides a unique approach to transforming to an intentional culture. Our own cultural practices developed over nearly 20 years, and are honed through multiple years of organizational process and culture change engagements for industry clients.

Over the course of the workshop, the Menlo team will take your organization through a series of engaging exercises to help your team get at the answers to these questions – in a way that’s right for your organization.

Contact us to discuss how we can help with cultural transformation virtually!

Leadership isn't the same as being in charge; teams will follow those who inspire them and foster trust, not fear. This workshop is led by CEO Rich Sheridan and explores very specific and practical ways to be a leader that focuses on increasing the human energy, engagement, and results of your team. Over the course of two immersive days, you and Rich will share thoughtful discussion and hands-on activities to explore the values of joyful leaders and the practices that create a culture of joyful leadership.

Are you looking to identify tools to effectively manage time, budgets, and teams? At Menlo, storycards are our answer: they guide almost everything we do! Both pre-pandemic, where our cards were all paper, and post-pandemic, where we've shifted to using digital versions, storycards have helped us to communicate efficiently and effectively. This workshop will focus on using storycards as a tool to increase transparency and inter-team communication, as well as scope individual tasks and entire projects.