Forming, Storming, Norming, & Performing
Greetings from Glassdoor Chicago! When I last wrote in June, we were deep in the trenches of hiring for our product, design, and engineering teams. We are now a product design team of 4 and have welcomed about 20 new product management and engineering peers to our Fulton Market office.
There is still an excited buzz on the floor as our new teams are forming and storming. Not only are teams delivering great work, I am proud of the culture that has taken shape — we have focused a lot of attention on nurturing a culture of collaboration, support, and fun. One of my favorite traditions is eating lunch together as a big group in our kitchen daily, and I hope this continues for years to come!
Community in Chicago and beyond
Establishing a local community and support system has been a top priority. We meet as a product design group once per week to share designs, give feedback, or help each other through any challenges. It helps us get to know each person’s strengths, build trust, and make the team feel comfortable coming to each other for input day to day. It also helps us to create a shared understanding of the various projects and contexts we work across.
The product, design, and engineering teams meet monthly for a retrospective where we discuss how things are going generally in the office and across teams. This helps us identify opportunities to continue iterating on our processes and environment, as well as allow us to share announcements or celebrate wins.
Connecting with our distributed team has been smooth thanks to video conferencing and frequent visits to our headquarters in California. Our 20-person product design team meets weekly and we stay connected daily via Slack. We trek out to California to visit once a quarter and have also hosted folks in our office in Chicago. It has been so beneficial to create opportunities for facetime — it makes the distributed work more personal and connected.
Company-wide, cross-team and geography events also make the geographic divides feel smaller. We recently participated in our bi-annual hackathon from our Chicago office, where over the course of 3 days we hacked on projects with colleagues from across our Bay Area, Brazil, Chicago, Dublin, and Ohio offices.
We also make sure that team members from across our various offices collaborate on projects to support the whole team. Guilds are small, discipline-specific working groups that take on foundational initiatives such as building out our Design System, deprecating old code, or onboarding onto new software like Abstract.
Challenge by choice
While we’ve had a lot of fun and success, building a distributed team definitely has its challenges. Timezones & geographic divides provide unique communication difficulties that we are still working to overcome.
Because the majority of our team members have joined within the last 6 months, teams lack institutional history & perspective — this is a blessing and a curse! As we build teams, we try to ensure that there are at least a few members who have been at Glassdoor for longer so that they can serve as subject matter experts and ambassadors to relevant resources, people, and processes. And generally, we have found that the fresh perspectives of our new teams have positively contributed to a strong culture of product thinking and innovation.
We are still excited about the team we are building in Chicago and of the great example we think we are setting for other companies to follow. For more on how we hire at Glassdoor, check out this article about landing the product design job by our Head of Product Design, Jordan Girman. We will be hosting a number of events at our offices over the next few months and we hope you’ll visit us then!
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For more on Bruce W. Tuckman’s framework for a team’s stages of development https://hr.mit.edu/learning-topics/teams/articles/stages-development
