Discord and the Virtual Office

I recently started working for a new client that has a distributed team. Although, thanks to COVID-19, this is suddenly a very common situation, in the 20 years that I’ve been managing software development projects this is the first time where I’ve tried to manage a team without any centralized office, even for the core team members. As a result, I’ve found myself faced with new challenges and finding new solutions for them, one of which has been so successful that it seemed worth sharing. This is the story of how we turned a free videogame chat platform into a humming virtual office.

I’ve always felt that teams, particularly teams working on creative projects, such as many of the games, apps, location-based entertainment, and XR experiences that I’ve managed in the past, benefit tremendously from being co-located (i.e. sharing an office). Particularly for creative teams, I believe that there are important benefits that come from having team members working in the same physical space with each other on a daily basis, such as:

• Emergent solutions that arise organically, as team members overhear each others’ frustrations and challenges and chime-in to share ideas and help one another
• Stronger interpersonal connections that arise out of the non-work-related banter and interactions that happen inevitably at lunch, at the proverbial “water…