Badge Company Retreat: Montreal, May 2026
Badge brought the team to Montreal for a retreat with intentional collaboration and relationship-building, resulting in strategic alignment and creative momentum.
What Happens When Your Whole Company Gets in a Room Together
There's a version of a company retreat that's basically a slide deck with better catering. This wasn't that.
In May, we brought the full Badge team to Montreal for three days — engineers sitting next to sales designers next to operations folks, everyone eating smoked meat sandwiches in a park together. And what came out of it genuinely surprised me. Here's how it went.
Cross-Functional Collision, By Design
We didn't leave departments siloed. We built structured 1-on-1 pairings across departments twice during the retreat. We paired people who rarely interact, and sent them out into the neighborhood to have time one-on-one. The premise was simple: some of the best ideas this company has are waiting for the right conversation to unlock them.
What we heard back was striking. People discovered shared problems that others had already quietly solved. Projects found fresh momentum from a single conversation with someone outside the immediate team. People who had only existed as Slack handles suddenly became real collaborators with their own context, constraints, and creative energy.
The Conversation We'd Been Waiting to Have
One of the most meaningful sessions of the week was our Company Culture Roundtable on Day 2. Every single person at Badge was in the room for this one. No breakouts, no observers. Just the whole company, together.
What made it different was how we ran it. We used a real-time audience participation tool that let everyone contribute anonymously and vote on what mattered most to them. It changed the dynamic entirely. Instead of a handful of voices dominating the room, we heard from everyone. Themes surfaced that might have stayed buried in a traditional town hall format, and the conversation that followed was the most transparent, purposeful, supportive dialogue we've had as a team.
It was a reminder that culture isn't something leadership hands down. It's something a company builds together, out loud, when people feel safe enough to say what they actually think.
Building Together in Real Time
Day 2 also featured a Team Jam. We cleared the agenda, opened the floor, and invited everyone to work on something they hadn't been able to get to, with teammates right there to help. Hot topics ranged from AI tooling to marketing automation to core product infrastructure.
The energy in that room was something else. It felt less like a work session and more like a hackathon run by people who actually care about the same mission.
Strategy With Skin in the Game
Product led a great conversation, Where We're Going Next. Roadmap decisions, special projects, open questions: all on the table. When your whole company is in one room, there's nowhere to hide, and there's no delay between "here's the direction" and "here's how I can contribute to it."
That immediacy matters. Strategy that lives in a doc is different from a strategy your team helped shape in real time.
Free Time, Where it All Came Together
Sunday was unscheduled. Just: here's Montreal, go explore. People wandered into Chinatown, found epic poutine, and had the kind of long, unhurried conversations that rarely happen during the workday.
Wednesday was even more intentional about that energy. Morning activities (golf, hiking, sightseeing), lunch at Time Out Market, then games and experiences at Playvox before a team dinner to close out the night. Some of the most honest conversations about our company's direction happened during those moments. Not in the sessions. In between them.
What We've Taken Home
Retreats are expensive in time, logistics, and coordination. But done well, you're buying compression: the kind of relationship-building, strategic alignment, and creative momentum that would otherwise take months of async communication to approximate.
We came back with sharper clarity on where we're headed, a deeper understanding of what each team is actually building, and, maybe most importantly, a renewed sense that we're all in this together.
That last part is harder to measure. But it's the part that compounds.
Badge provides infrastructure for brands to connect with customers directly in Apple and Google wallets. If you're curious about what we're building or how we think about team culture, I'd love to connect.
By Tim Sherrill, Director of People and Operations, Badge
