Experience Design Consulting

Your event had a great agenda. Your people still left feeling like nothing changed.

That's not a facilitation problem. It's the layer nobody designs, the one underneath the run-of-show, and it's the reason some rooms change people and most just end.

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15+
Years designing live experiences
40+
Countries inspiring the work
100k+
Community members reached
A circle of Jana's clients, shot from above, at the edge of the ocean
Who this is for

You bring people together. You want it to mean something.

If you lead people or culture

You're bringing a remote or hybrid team together for an offsite, and you need it to move something real. Belonging. Alignment. What it actually feels like to work on this team. Not just a well-run agenda.

If you lead a community

You're bringing your online community into a room for the first time, and you want them to feel like they've known each other for years by lunch, not like an audience that showed up.

Culture leaders and people teams
Planning an offsite that needs to move belonging and alignment, not just check a box.
Founders and thought leaders
Bringing a community together live for the first time.
Executive and leadership teams
Want what happens in the room to carry into how people lead when they get home.
Experience and retreat designers
Want to add this layer to their own methodology.
The gap

Most gatherings leave the most important thing undesigned.

You can spend $50,000 and still watch people leave unchanged. It happens more than anyone wants to admit, and it's almost never a budget problem. The missing piece is the invisible layer: the sensory arc, the emotional sequence, the conditions that make people feel safe enough to be real with each other.

Most event planners don't know to build this. It comes from 15 years of designing events where something actually happens.

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Why this work matters

He had never told anyone except his wife and his psychologist.

We had about 200 people in the room. A former military special operations officer was there, and during a reflection exercise, he shared a story he had carried alone for years. A call he made that cost his team lives. He was shaken just saying it out loud.

What happened next is the thing I've spent 15 years learning to create conditions for. The room didn't meet him with judgment or discomfort. They met him with love. Every share that followed was more open, more real, more connected than it would have been without that moment.

He shared it because the room felt safe enough. And the room felt safe enough because of decisions made before anyone arrived: how the space was arranged, how the morning opened, what was asked of people in the first hour. None of that was on the run-of-show. All of it was designed.

That's the invisible layer. And when it's there, rooms do things nobody planned for.

A line of people holding hands, walking into the ocean at sunset
A group of Heroic athletes jumping over hot coals, cheering A group beach workout session A man laughing on stage holding a microphone Two people presenting on stage
The methodology

This is what Gathered does.

Gathered is built on one idea: the architecture underneath your event matters more than anything on the run-of-show. This isn't event planning. Your planner builds the agenda. I build what happens between the lines of it.

I work with founders, culture leaders, and community builders to design the sensory arc, the emotional sequence, the moments of connection your planner would never think to schedule, but that every attendee feels from the first minute in the room.

01

The most important thing in any gathering isn't on the agenda. It's the conditions you set before anyone walks in.

02

Place is a teacher, not a backdrop. The right sensory sequence opens people that nothing on your slide deck will touch.

03

Awe is a leadership development tool almost no one uses on purpose. Design for it, and it changes what your people become together.

Three ways to work together

Choose the depth that matches your event.

Every engagement starts with the same question: what do you want your people to walk out knowing, feeling, and carrying? Everything else builds from there. All fees in USD.

Single event

Gathered Advisory

$5,000

One event. You want it to land differently than anything your people have experienced before. We design the invisible layer together: the sensory arc, the emotional sequence, the design your planner didn't know to build.

If you're already spending five or six figures on the venue, the speakers, the flights, this is what makes sure that spend actually lands.
  • Discovery session to understand your people, culture, and purpose
  • Full Gathered experience design framework for your event
  • Sensory layer design and moment sequencing
  • Your complete Gathered blueprint, delivered
  • One implementation review call
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Most popular

Gathered Consulting

$5,000/mo

You bring people together more than once and want every gathering to compound on the last. I become your ongoing experience design partner across your full calendar, and the work gets better with every event.

3 month minimum commitment ($15,000 USD total)
  • Monthly strategy and experience design sessions
  • Async review and feedback on all event programming
  • Full invisible layer design per event
  • Values and culture integration across the calendar
  • Post-event debrief and iteration toward the next one
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Highest touch

Gathered On The Ground

Let's talk

For the gatherings where presence matters. I design the invisible layer and I'm there on the ground to pull the strings in real time: reading the room, adjusting, making sure what we designed actually lands the way you imagined.

Scoped to your event
  • Includes full Design Intensive, invisible layer fully built
  • On-site presence for your event
  • Real-time experience direction and adjustment
  • Scoped by event size, complexity, and days on site
  • Travel and accommodation billed at cost
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The session guarantee. If after our first working session together you don't see exactly how the invisible layer changes your event, I'll refund every dollar. No awkward conversation, no conditions. I'm only interested in working with people for whom this is the right fit, and a first session tells us both whether it is.
What people say

The proof is in the feedback.

"Jana's starting question in every planning session: 'How can we make it so that everyone who leaves says this is the best event they've ever been to?' She succeeded very often. If something didn't go as planned, the action we took at Jana's leadership made it better than if nothing had gone wrong in the first place."

Calman Hilkert, Head of Programs, Heroic PBC

"If you want your retreat or workshop to actually land in the hearts of the people attending, you want Jana in the room. She creates experiences that people feel in their bodies and remember long after they go home."

Mark Walker, Executive and Leadership Coach

"Working with Jana doesn't just change how you lead. It changes how you show up in the world. She builds spaces where people feel safe, inspired, and genuinely seen, and somehow keeps it all running flawlessly behind the scenes."

Tania Griffith, Fractional CRO and Growth Strategist

"Jana's role transcended standard event management. Each event had a purpose and vision that connected to the attendees, and this approach helped set these events apart from anything else in the space."

Brian Maxfield, Fractional Integrator

"Most organizations talk about alignment between what we say and do. Jana actually builds it. Getting to work with Jana means working with someone who makes organizations better by making the people in them feel more connected to the work, to each other, and to something bigger than themselves."

Greg Williams, CFO

"Her commitment to belonging is extraordinary."

Brian Johnson, Founder, Heroic

"Pure magic. Every moment meaningful, every person felt held."

Alexandra Johnson, Founder, Rock Your Goddess Life
About Jana

A little about me.

Jana Dybinski hiking in Patagonia Jana Dybinski
Founder, Gathered

I wanted to be a National Geographic explorer when I was a kid. I never quite got there, so I made a career out of taking people to the edge of their world instead.

For 15 years I've been the person in the room who notices what's missing before the event starts. Not the venue, not the agenda, but the invisible layer underneath all of it. The sensory arc that either opens people or keeps them politely closed. The sequence of moments that decides whether someone leaves changed or just leaves.

Six years on the executive team at Heroic, one of the most ambitious global communities committed to human flourishing on the planet. A cultural transformation that took one company from a 1-star Glassdoor rating to a Great Place to Work. Flagship events for hundreds, intimate retreats for twelve, multi-day journeys in places so far off the map that the getting there was half the shift. All of it became a framework I call Gathered.

Forty-plus countries have shaped how I see people, place, and what happens when you put both together in a room with intention. That lens is in everything I design.

  • 6 years on the executive team at Heroic
  • Cultural transformation: 1-star Glassdoor to Great Place to Work
  • 200+ world-class faculty partnerships built
  • 40+ countries driving inspiration and cultural awareness
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Ready to start

Your next gathering could be the one they remember.

Most events are forgotten inside a week. The ones that aren't were designed that way, from the inside out. Tell me about yours and we'll figure out together whether this is the right fit.

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