Life as a Travelling Design Studio
by Melewi Blog
As MELEWI is a location-independent business, the world is our office. We work with a team and clients across different continents and multiple timezones. This may seem incredibly challenging and complicated, but trust me, it’s not as impossible as you might imagine.
Through trial and error (heaps of research, hard work and way too much coffee), we’ve discovered five secrets to what makes a successful distributed team:
1. Working with the right people
Having the right people is the most important thing to consider if you want a distributed team to work.
Not everyone is cut out for a remote working lifestyle. Some people might need a bustling and busy environment to be productive themselves. But in order to work remotely, that person must be independent, reliable, constantly improving, frequently communicating and always GSD-ing (getting shit done).
We make sure to only hire people who find our values resonate with their personal values! P.S. Check out our kickass global team.
2. Using the right tools
Just because a remote team is without a physical office doesn’t mean we’re lacking. I mean, isn’t this one of the many reasons why the internet is awesome?!
There’s been a boom of incredible SAAS and digital tools that enable us to run a tight ship remotely — allowing our team to get things done while communicating tightly and staying organized.
Some tools we use everyday are:
- Slack: Channels set for specific topics allows all communication to be context-specific. API integrations with tools like Hangouts, FTTT, and Github give everyone easy access to collaboration. Slack is our virtual office — allowing everyone to communicate and work together regardless of location or time zones.
- Google Hangouts: Without being able to have face-to-face interactions, Google Hangouts is the next best thing. The ability to hop on a quick video-chat allows us to work well as a team while reducing the amount of distracting “shoulder-taps”. Meeting via Hangouts is our new default — and this means we’re never restricted to where our awesome team members or clients can be from.
- Google Drive: We believe working collaboratively (specifically — agile) means having everything accessible to everyone. With Google Docs, Sheets and Draw, no one is ever tied to a physical document that can’t be easily shared or modified at any time.
- Invision: Collaborating on design work can be tricky enough on its own, but throw in distance, close client collaboration and suddenly too much communication isn’t enough. Invision gives you the ability to put up sketches and mockups, hotspot the designs to demo to everyone, as well as give feedback and discuss comments specific to the design.
Other tools integral to our working life include Dropbox, Trello, Harvest, Flow, Github amongst others.
3. Coordinating the right working times
Out of all the obstacles, this was by far the trickiest. How could a team work together when separated by hours of time difference?
This is where we coincidentally stumbled upon 37Signal’s awesome book ‘Remote’ (also, check out ‘Rework’ by the same guys). Their magic number was ‘four’. Apparently, a 4-hour overlap was the minimum needed to keep a team apart working cohesively together.
And it works surprisingly well! Introducing the 4-hour overlap resulted in a slight deviation off the standard 9-to-5 hours, but it also gave back more flexibility to everyone’s day — why be a zombie downing coffee at 9am when you’re more chipper at 9pm?
Working off separate time zones also meant reducing the amount of distractions and “hey-quick-question” shoulder taps (protip: it’s never quick). It’s amazing how much work you can get done when you aren’t frequently interrupted.
4. Prioritizing the right things
The ‘right things’ are different for everyone, but having a team united on what the priorities are drives everyone in the same direction. Add in constant communication and hard-work to the equation, and you’ve got a workforce that can conquer any obstacle.
Our daily 30-min standup meetings start off with us catching up and bonding. To some this might seem trivial, but above all, we prioritize having an awesome team — which means we also make sure to spend time with each other.
The standups end off with us discussing progress and ways to overcome obstacles. As a distributed team, it’s too easy to be lacking camaraderie and to sweep problems under the rug. Being aware of this, we take extra care to share every person’s successes and obstacles — celebrating the good and tackling the bad together.
Constant constructive feedback is another thing we prioritize having. To be part of the team, you must be constantly learning and improving. This means being open to constructive feedback. It’s never a matter of egos being hurt, but a matter of improving in every way possible.
5. Working and living by the same values towards the same goals
Everyone at MELEWI lives by the same values toward one unified goal: living to make users, product and business make sense together. Maybe that’s why our remote team, well, makes sense.
With the right setup and values, trust and collaboration becomes the default.
We make sure to work with awesome people, use lightweight processes and tools that help us get stuff done (effectively and efficiently; no thank you to heavy documentation).
And most importantly, we work together for the same purpose — to build amazing products and user experiences that speak to everyone, everywhere.
MELEWI is a travelling Product, UX & UI design studio working with passionate people from around the world. We’re experts at turning big ideas into big successes because we know the best businesses make inspiring products crafted with their users at the core.
Interested in collaborating with us? Get in touch! We promise we’re friendly. :)
