Thunders in Nice: what we did and why we keep doing this

Last week, 31 people from across the Thunders team spent 5 days in Nice. We're part of the Allianz accelerator there, which made it an easy choice for the venue (and meant we got to put the Thunders logo on the screen at Allianz Riviera.)

We do this once a year. Get everyone in the same place, talk honestly about where things stand, and work out what comes next together. The team has grown a lot since the last one. At some point, getting everyone together stops being a nice idea and becomes necessary.

What we worked on

• Town hall. The full picture: where the company stands, what's working, what isn't, and where we're going. Everyone heard the same thing at the same time. That matters more as the team grows.
• Q1 retrospective. A chance for every team to step back, look at the quarter as a whole, and appreciate how much ground we've covered. The progress is real and it was good to see it all in one place.
• Q2 roadmap. New integrations, a copilot that makes Thunders significantly easier to use day to day, and mobile testing.
• Claude d'Azur. The hackathon had a name. That should tell you where we were and how we built. One day, self-selected problems: customer features, internal tools, process improvements, all AI-native, all built with Claude. Some of what came out ships in the next few days!

Then some of us went to the casino 🎰

Why we keep doing this

Thunders is built on a simple premise: testing should adapt to your product, not the other way around. Executing on that takes a team that's genuinely aligned, not just on the roadmap, but on how we think and how we work.

That kind of alignment doesn't happen over Slack. It takes being in the same room and having the conversations that keep getting postponed.

The venue matters too. Three days at Allianz Riviera, a stadium overlooking the Baie des Anges. It does something to the quality of conversation.

See you at the next one!

We do this once a year and that won't change. The next one will be bigger.