Team Connection Program

Designing and scaling in-person experiences that foster connection, collaboration, and belonging across a global organization

Role: Experience Strategy & Design Lead
Scope: Global · 6,000+ employees · 20+ teams

 
 

Overview

The Team Connection Program is a global platform of in-person experiences designed to help teams build connection, collaboration, and belonging.

As Adobe navigated return to office, I saw a gap between large-scale events and the kind of connection people were actually looking for within their teams. I partnered with teams to design experiences grounded in their context, often tapping into cultural shifts toward more analog, play-based, and participatory interaction.

What began as a series of small experiments evolved into a global platform reaching 6,000+ employees. I then defined what makes an experience feel engaging and worth showing up for, translating those principles into playbooks, formats, and tools that enable teams to create and sustain their own experiences.

 

Impact

  • 6,000+ employees engaged

  • 20+ teams and organizations

  • Global rollout across multiple sites

  • 95% reported increased team connection post-intervention

Designing the Experience

Part 1: What makes a great connection experience

Through research and experimentation, I defined what makes a meaningful team connection experience.

  • A host to welcome participants and set tone

  • Intentional, not forced

  • Designed for interaction, not passive participation

  • Flexible to team context

  • Creates opportunities for authentic connection

  • Leaves teams feeling more connected and aligned

Part 2: Experience formats

I designed a range of experience formats to support different team needs, and playbooks to enable team leads to scale the experience.

  • Flagship events
    Developer Day, Product Experience Day

  • Team rituals
    Lego Block Parties, Call Blitzes

  • Summits & offsites
    Structured team gatherings

Part 3: Experience flow

Each experience was designed as a series of intentional moments:

  • Arrival → sets tone

  • Shared context → alignment

  • Interaction → connection

  • Reflection → meaning

Testing What Actually Drives Connection

I approached the program as a series of experiments to understand what actually drives connection and engagement in real-world settings.

Through live pilots, I observed how people interacted and iterated on formats based on behavior and feedback.

Examples include:

I observed a growing desire for analog, play-based experiences that felt more human and interactive than traditional events.

Featured Experience: Lego Block Parties

Play-Based Experience in Action

Lego Block Parties were designed as a playful, low-pressure way to bring people together, tapping into a broader shift toward analog, nostalgic experiences. By leaning into hands-on, shared activity, the format made it easy for people to interact and connect in a way that felt natural and energizing. It quickly became a repeatable model used to kick-start team connection initiatives across locations.

We then applied this approach with real teams to help them launch and sustain their own connection rituals.

Case Story: Express Team

From 0 → Sustained Team Rituals

We partnered with the Express team to kick off their first connection experiences, using play-based formats like Lego Block Parties to create immediate energy and engagement. These early activations were intentionally simple, designed to demonstrate what a great experience feels like and give the team a quick win.

What started as three pilot events evolved into a sustained model of monthly rituals, with the team continuing to design and run their own experiences over the past two years.

Scaling Connection across the Organization

As formats proved successful, I translated them into a formal Team Connection Program strategy, with different levels of collaboration approaches from playbooks, to consulting, to experience design and delivery.

A key shift was taking the learnings from the experiments and translating them into playbooks and tools to enable team hosts, managers and community builders to design connection experiences independently, while maintaining consistency and quality.

This included:

  • Playbooks (DIY Team Connection Guide, Culture Champions Toolkit)

  • Team Connection Ideas & Kits

Team Connection Program Strategy

Team Connection Ideas & Kits

DIY Team Connection Guide

What Participants Said

“The guide was very comprehensive with its recommendations — in fact, I’ve already shared it with other community builders at Adobe!”
— Guide user
“Connecting with peers across different product lines that call the Atlanta area home… the feeling of unity was unmatched!”
— Super Sales Day, Atlanta participant

95%

felt more connected to their team post-Lego Block Party (across 7 locations and teams)

This work shifted my perspective from designing individual experiences to designing systems that enable connection at scale.

The most impactful experiences were not the most structured, but the ones that created space for people to interact, share, and build relationships.

Defining what makes a great experience, and enabling others to deliver it, became the core of the work.

Designing for Connection at Scale

Next

Developer Day