Remote working is here to stay
The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.
– Peter Drucker
Shipping digital products
Is well known that being successful when creating digital products is an ambitious and tough task which, like all complicated things, depends on multiple factors. Even the definition of “successful” is most of the time blurry and leads towards various options each one dramatically different from the others. However, there’s a single common requirement across all of them, and that’s the necessity of a production-ready version of the product in order to have ‘a chance to be successful’. Sounds obvious, right? Well, you have nothing until you got that first version running on production so what you really want is to ship the MVP as soon as possible and you’re going to need an outstanding team to do it.
Organising people with different skill sets and (sometimes) strong opinions is an ongoing challenge that never ends which by getting it right, it allows you to create remarkable products in a reasonable amount of time.
The art of a building the right team
Poor communication, lack of experienced developers available, endless backlogs, unrealistic deadlines, limited budget… many factors are going to have an impact on the product creation process, and chances are you will be affected by more than one at the same time. Although that’s a hard reality, you’ll certainly be able to get over most of these issues by having a good team full of smart people!
The job market
SF, NYC, London all have vibrant ecosystems of growing startups where you can find many promising projects (aka unicorns), and you feel that momentum every time you have a chat with other folks in an event or meetup. However, growing tech startups require talented people and when it comes down to hiring we all find ourselves in a very similar situation where the recruitment process is becoming extremely hard due to a very competitive job market with a running out talent supply.
Remote working then appears as an attractive option allowing you to focus on finding the right talent wherever the location of that is. Suddenly, anyone in the world is your potential new hire.
All this set of events inspired me to put some words together about my experience leading teams with some of the key members working remotely and the main advantages/disadvantages I’ve found so far…
Some of the benefits
Let me start by highlighting some of the extra values you get by having some of your talents in different locations.
Find the skills you need for your team
Each stage of the company requires access to different skills and as you grow you might have troubles finding the experience you need in all areas maybe because of the lack of a particular background or perhaps space is too in demand. Either way, remote workers break all these constraints and offer a full range of available skills.
Get the most out of your budget
Apart from all competitive companies looking for the same talent than you, the reality is that most of the popular startup hubs in Europe and US have become so expensive that you’re forced to pay salaries that you can’t really afford. Looking for people elsewhere gives you the option to maintain a balance between outstanding talent and reasonable spending.
Focus, focus, focus
One of the main advantages I’ve found when working with remote people is that they tend to be more productive. How easy is to get interrupted by somebody when you’re working in a full-of-people open space? Engineering work needs concentration to produce quality work, and context switching is potentially the worst enemy of focus.
Engineering requires concentration in order to produce quality work, and context switching is potentially the worst enemy of focus
Higher level of happiness
Avoiding the commute, flexible hours and fully customised working space are only a few examples of obvious things which make people happy and for remote workers, they come by default (not to mention that the more comfortable the team, the better for the company).
The downside: it is a big challenge for everybody in the company
Having part of your team working remotely is not only an operational change, but it also has a significant impact on your company culture, and you need to be ready to implement changes that will influence every single member of your organisation. Here are some of the side (negative) effects we’ve had to overcome during the past two years.
Working remotely has to be their first option
Remote people have to want it and feel comfortable with it. It’s too big of a change to force people to do it; they have to want to work from a location far away from headquarters and be ready for all challenges involved.
Get your remote people to work in the office during their first month so that they will understand your culture and your office environment
Not everybody can work remotely permanently
It requires a particular mindset. Remote people have to be used to own things, self-organise themselves and plan ahead otherwise there will be the uncomfortable feeling of “we’re not making progress”.
Look for candidates who have previous experience working remotely to minimise the risk of bad hires
Communication is harder
Communication is harder and it requires you, as a manager, to make an extra effort. When you’re sitting next to each other, information is going to flow naturally, but with remote people, you need to make sure the necessary people are involved in all relevant conversations, always.
Use tools like Slack, appear.in or sunrise to improve your communication and to ensure you’re all always on the same page
Everybody in the team needs to know remote people’s availability
For the team to effective work together, everybody needs to be aware of when people is online and how to reach them in case of necessity to avoid situations where it’s not clear if remote person is busy, off that day or just ignoring requests
Create and share public calendars for remote workers and define availability hours, lunch breaks and ‘‘away from keyboard’’ times
Face to face is still required
Although the internet nowadays provides many ways to solve most of the mentioned problems, you will have to visit your team members periodically, or they will have to fly in every so often to really share your company values and culture
We ask remote workers to fly in one week a month and match them with company socials, hack days and swarm weeks
Wrapping up
Having a talented remote team is a big challenge that has an impact on all the company, from your way to communicate to your culture and it requires you to rethink some of your existing processes. Remote work is here to stay so making the extra effort today and being patient (it takes time to get it right!) will bring you many successful digital products delivered in the future :)
