What 100 Team Shoutouts Taught Us About Who We Are

I analyzed 100 nice things you said to each other in Q1. Here's what I learned about our company. | Team Letter | March 31, 2026

Hello Alpaca!

Today’s a fun day — we’re launching one of our largest single product features we’ve ever built — Shoutouts!

For the last few months, our Alpaca team has been testing out Shoutouts each week when we do our own Alpaca Pulse survey. It’s a simple step at the end of our pulse survey to take one moment to recognize another member of our team. Just write your shout out, see it on our dashboard, and if you want, make a postcard to share.

The recognition is anonymous. There’s no reward attached, no leaderboard, no program. Just an open door to say something kind about someone you work with.

Pun intended: BIG huge shoutout to Maci and Alissa — this feature was part of their Hackday project back in October, and look what it has become!

So far this year, our small team sent 100 shoutouts to one another. So of course I did a little analysis (nerd alert!) on those shoutouts. I wanted to see what the nice things you said to each other could tell us about our year so far.

Here’s what I learned:

We talk about growth the way great teachers do.

When someone on our team is praised for being “open to feedback and willing to take coaching,” or for “pushing herself outside of her comfort zone,” the tone isn’t evaluative — it’s celebratory. Growth at Alpaca is spoken about the way great educators speak about a student’s breakthrough: with warmth, with pride, and with the understanding that the courage to stretch matters more than the outcome.

People here notice when a colleague refines their pitch or learns a new framework — because we’ve built the kind of safety where being a work-in-progress is something to celebrate, not hide.

We notice the work behind the work.

So many of these shoutouts celebrate the invisible labor that holds everything together. Keeping a software platform running 24/7. Coordinating conference logistics down to the last swag bag. Screening candidates with warmth.

Our culture doesn’t just value the big wins — the booked demos, the closed deals, the shipped features. It values the connective tissue: the person who makes the trip feel effortless, who keeps the data accurate, who makes a new candidate feel excited rather than anxious. I love this about us.

Care is the work, and the work is care.

It’s hard to know where our work stops and our relationships begin. Cooking a team dinner together appears alongside booking four meetings before noon. Airport pilates sits next to conference booth strategy. Someone is celebrated for “cutting the chicken for team dinner” in the same breath as “keeping us close to teachers and leaders in real time.”

The care we extend to each other — a ride home, a bit of encouragement, sticky notes left on a desk — is the same muscle we use when we build products and show up for school leaders at a conference.

Joy is a practice, not a byproduct.

Joy shows up constantly in these shoutouts, but not as something that just happens to this team. It’s something we build. March Madness brackets. Thank you note parties. Collaborative cooking. People aren’t credited for being joyful — they’re credited for creating conditions where joy can exist, even in the middle of a demanding week.

When we build products for educators whose top words include “fatigued” and “exhausted,” this instinct matters. If we know how to create genuine care inside our own team, we’re far more likely to build something that does the same for the people we serve.

Now — what’s missing.

I wouldn’t be doing this analysis justice if I only told you the pretty parts. We can also learn a lot by noticing what we didn’t recognize each other for. So here’s what I noticed in the gaps:

Let’s celebrate the impact, not just the effort

Our shoutouts are almost entirely about effort and presence — rarely about outcomes. We praise each other for working hard and showing up, but almost never for a specific result or a measurable difference made for a customer. Learning to celebrate impact alongside effort is an important edge for us.

More cross-department recognition

Most recognition stays within departments. There isn’t much flowing between, say, Engineering and Customer Success, or Marketing and Sales around shared wins. As we grow, those cross-team connections are the ones we need most.

Let’s say the hard stuff

In our shoutouts so far, nobody is praised for navigating something hard, failing, or recovering. We celebrate stretching — but not resilience through difficulty. No “we hit a wall and you helped us figure it out.” We have safety around learning, but we’re still building comfort around vulnerability in the face of actual failure.

Everyone is a leader

Our shoutouts so far don’t tell much about peer leadership. Shoutouts about leadership qualities cluster around our managers, with very little recognition of peers stepping up to lead a project or hold each other accountable. That distributed leadership muscle is going to matter a lot as we grow. Let’s look for it, recognize it, and encourage it.

Here’s what I know is true: recognizing each other makes a difference.

100 shoutouts so far is a tiny data set, and I cannot wait to see what a full year of shoutouts reveals about our company. But even in 100 little anonymous moments, the picture is vivid: this is a team that celebrates growth over perfection, notices the work that others miss, refuses to separate caring from doing, and treats joy as something worth building on purpose.

Congratulations to the WHOLE team for the launch of shoutouts — let’s keep building positivity together!

KB