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Budget Thuis turned a team building activity into a transformational experience for your team with the format of Fuckup Nights. His goal was to create a space where his employees could lose their fear of failure, and turn it into a source of connection and collective learning.

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How to Collaborate and Innovate from Vulnerability with Tech Teams

The collaboration between Budget Thuis and Fuckup Nights was born from a powerful question posed to us by Mireille Bobbert, IT Manager:

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"Is there a way to talk about bugs that allows our technical teams to find each other more easily when they need each other?"

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Moderated by Alex Torres from the HQ of Fuckup Nightsthe event brought together 120 people from Budget Thuis' technology team. It was an intimate and honest experience, where three internal speakers shared stories about times when things didn't go as expected, and the valuable learnings they gained.

Proving that fuckups can happen anytime, anywhere, the event's laptop crashed during one of the talks, in an auditorium full of managers, leaders and technology experts. However, this was just one more bug that, as a team, they learned to solve.

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Failing in development is also part of the process.

Marc: Black Friday and the price of working in the early hours of the morning

In preparation for Black Friday, when Marc was working as an IT specialist at an online retailer, he wanted to "take advantage" of his sleepless nights to preview more changes to the pricing system, which would be live for this important event for the company. 

What I didn't know is that I was working directly in production (all changes were visible to any user).

At 5 am he discovered the disaster. He had one hour to reverse the errors before sending the newsletter to promote Black Friday. He succeeded, but he was very sorry because if he hadn't realized it earlier, it would have been a disaster for the whole company.

Among the main lessons learned from his story were:

• Never connect your development machine to production.
• Sleeping is an IT security practice.
• If it seems like a good idea because it's "just this once," it's probably not.

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Artem Ivchenko: The most important match... for everyone, except for him.

In the middle of the World Cup and with his promotion on the horizon, Artem decided it was the best time to run a manual system fix, which his team had requested for several customers whose requests had been stuck. Traffic would be low, he thought... What could go wrong?

He cancelled TV services for unsolicited customers... just when the national team was playing, leaving several people without the chance to watch the game they had been waiting for, and also failing his team. 

The decision he made at the time, took a lot of effort, time and money from his team to resolve.

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What lessons did you learn from your story?

• Never make critical decisions when tired.
• Every action in production must be reviewed by someone else.
• Automate. Whenever you can, automate. Updates should be automated and not performed by humans.

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Maor Avitan: The perfect handoff... until the system disappeared.

After creating an innovative solution for an agricultural company, which even made the news because of the good results, Maor said goodbye to his team with everything documented and trained. 

Until that same day, his replacement called him saying, "Maor, I think I deleted the program." 

Thinking that what he was hearing was almost impossible, he went home to check it out and saw that it was true.

He came back from his celebration, settled with support, and learned some very important lessons that he shared with his team:

• Tools outside their original purpose can be hazardous.
• Do not underestimate permissions.
• Never assume that your last day will be a quiet one.

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And what happened at the open mic?

After the stories, came the questions... and the confessions. Three people were encouraged to share their own experiences at the open microphone. No awkward silences, no judgment. Just genuine connection.

Mireille Bobbert, summarized the experience with Fuckup Nights and her team with the following message:

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"The event was excellent, people loved it - thanks again so much for your great help! :)"

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A community that connects the technical with the human

Budget Thuis, an energy, internet and telecommunications provider in the Netherlands, believes in making everything easier, honest and accessible. And that spirit also applies to its internal culture: talking about failures openly, without shame, fear and with purpose.

This culture of open and uninhibited communication about failures allows teams to quickly identify the causes of problems, implement effective solutions and prevent recurrence. 

By losing the fear of talking about failure, Budget Thuis helped its employees understand what it takes to make decisions and take risks, while innovating to deliver the best customer experience.

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Want to bring a Fuckup Nights experience like this to your team?

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At Fuckup Nights we design tailor-made experiences for organizations that seek to strengthen their culture through vulnerability, connection and collective learning.

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Contact us and let's create together a unique experience for your company.

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