In a recent episode of the revered On Coaching podcast, coach Steve Magness claimed that “Community and Connection are the core of high performance cultures.” I agree.

And in a world of abundant data and individual phenoms, this feels counter-cultural.

At CrewLAB, we don’t think that the way to sustainable success is by toughing it out and out-training the other team. It’s not through a culture that only can celebrate the top athletes and weed out hundreds of people “unfit” for the team in the process. That mentality takes young people out of sports too early, eliminating their chances to develop fitness and skills over several years.

Not only that, an inward orientation, an obsession with yourself, your grind, and your numbers lead to anxiety and underperformance. You miss out on the opportunity to go outside and beyond yourself — to let the energy of the group that you’ve pledged yourself to bring you farther than you could go alone.

This is is gift that rowing gives us if we let it. Our lives are not just about ourselves. We’re only as fast as the weakest link in the boat. The harmony of the team amplifies our efforts.

So, with our role as the creators of technology that is forming some of the best teams in sports, the question we cope with is:

How might we amplify the transformative power of a team with technology?

The Team Culture Flywheel

To get that magnification of the team, we began our design thinking with an understanding that humans are social creatures and are heavy influenced by our environment. We’re charged up by interactions with each other and their opinions of us produce changes in our behavior.

With that in mind, we can conceive of a virtuous cycle of contribution to the team culture.

It just takes one leader to get it started. They contribute something of value with their team. This could be a workout they did, a video of a teammate's form, a motivational quote, etc.

They must include teammates by mentioning, tagging, or otherwise drawing another’s attention to their content. This shouldn’t be a private journal. This is a shared experience.

That, in turn, starts an interaction with the content. This could be a simple like, a comment or sharing something of their own.

This completes the loop. Contribute → Include → Interact → Repeat.

The team is better off because of the small contribution and the Contributor is encouraged because they get some social interaction and confirmation of their work.

This virtuous cycle continues and gains momentum as more teammates are included in the action and thus more interactions are generated and the hub becomes more powerful.

Like a flywheel (that heavy drum attached to your rowing machine), it takes some effort to start up, but once it’s spinning it’s easy to tap along.

It’s our job at CrewLAB to remove friction from your Team’s Flywheel and make it effortless to contribute, include, and interact so that your team will spin upward faster and faster with less and less effort.

This positive energy starts with just one person willing to topple the first domino and start the series of chain reactions on the team toward coming together as a group.

Simple concept, yet game-changing.

Design Approach

So as it relates to the CrewLAB product, this sense of team influence and virality has always been present, however, we identified some problems we can help with.

Pain Points

• Contributors are the minority. There’s general reluctance to share training and post in teams. This matches what we see in real life team dynamics, but feels like an opportunity for us to improve culture within the comfort of a team.
• Posts are too rigid. We’re hearing from athletes that they can’t share in ways that feel fully expressive of what they want to say and/or natural to their day to day training. People still perceive the product as a training log rather than a shared team space to interact.
• Captains can’t do it alone. Athletes that are initially bought in on accountability, sharing training and creating memories can fizzle out because their team doesn’t interact or show that they care. Similarly, coaches don’t know if people are seeing their posts/content
• Low ROI per Contribution. Visible contributing takes moderate effort with minimal immediate reward. The ratio is off which prevents habit formation. Good posts can get lost among a see of moderate ones.
• Easy to forget. Even with the intention of sharing workouts and videos, it’s easy to forget to do it.

Guiding Principles

• Creating content and interacting with teammates are positive contributions to the team and should be emphasized over all else
• We’re sharing memories, leveling up and influencing team, not logging workouts
• Focus on high frequency posting flow first (more efficiency, value, delight)
• Solve for multiple types of people… captains, training hardo, social butterfly, new kid
• Athletes should feel like what they are doing amounts to something bigger, personally and for the team. It’s not posting, its contribution to a shared work
• Minimize the steps and cognitive load for interactions
• Think about the quantity AND quality of turns of the flywheel
• Prefer sharing content through the feed. It’s the home of the app. It can take you to other places, but you should be able to get anywhere from the feed
• Triggers should lead to interactions, not optimize for views

Outcomes

We will know we’ve been successful if…

• The Flywheel can start within teams on their own. No external intervention required
• Teams are sharing rich memories. CrewLAB doesn’t become a cold data dump. The content feed is full of media and reflection
• Deeper relationships are formed via more conversations and shared cultural experiences. Chat and commenting are at the forefront.

Bets We’ve Taken

This lead to 4 areas of change to encourage maximal contribution, inclusion and interaction.

1. Home: Reworking the Home feed to boost higher quality posts
2. Comments & Chats: Enhancing the accessibility and ease of commenting and chats
3. Posting: Overhauling the content sharing process for more media and flexibility
4. Partner Workouts: Create a shared experience and memory from a workout done together
5. Inclusion: Make it easier and more obvious to bring more teammates into the action

Making it Happen

We think a lot about this stuff… Maybe too much. But we get it done!!

Conceptual Understanding

Story Mapping

Sketching

Memories

Dominic bothering Mitchell while he’s tryna cook

Peter and Aidan in the coding cave

Final Product

Home: Reworking the Home feed to boost higher quality posts

Comments & Chats: Enhancing the accessibility and ease of commenting and chats

Posting: Overhauling the content sharing process for more media and flexibility

Partner Workouts: Create a shared experience and memory from a workout done together

Inclusion: Make it easier and more obvious to bring more teammates into the action

What’s Next?

We’re hearing from our coaches that they are loving what we’re doing and what more functionality in our core features like lineups, roster, team chat. Lots of great changes coming soon.

PS - Have a listen to the podcast mentioned above.