Maintaining Momentum With a Remote Team

Addapp is a growing startup, and as co-founders we often think about how we can be more productive as a team; keep up momentum and importantly make sure everyone is happy.

Right now we have a team of 7 people full-time. Within our team there are 7 different nationalities and we’re based in and around 5 cities in the USA and Europe: San Francisco, London, Rotterdam, Leuven and Berlin.

Having a remote team has some amazing benefits, which have been written about extensively over the past year-or-so. What we’re going to talk about today, isn’t how remote team can benefit businesses, instead how we’ve managed to gain momentum and work successfully as a remote team.

This is the first in a new series of monthly blog posts from Addapp’s co-founders. Each month we’ll discuss our challenges, successes and lessons learned as we grow Addapp.

Remote Working and Momentum

Every single person contributes to the success of a startup. When momentum is gained, it’s not down to one person and it’s the same when momentum is lost.

So, how do we try to maintain momentum?

Constant communication

Like thousands of other start-ups we use Slack as our main day-to-day communication tool. Slack for us means “what’s happening now?”. It’s our way to find out, inform, share, help, and have fun, of course (who doesn’t like sharing cool gifs?!). We have integrated many of other tools into our Slack account which helps us to see what’s going on and get a good overview of all the important areas of our business.

Don’t pin everything on one deadline:

Since we launched our iPhone app in October 2014, we’ve shifted the way we work towards deadlines a little. Whilst we have some large milestones in our calendars, we’re not solely focused on these dates.

On the way to achieving our big milestones, we have a number of smaller milestones along the way. This helps us to develop a culture of execution at Addapp. Every two weeks we have goals to release new bug fixes and app improvements as well as backend improvements in the way we process data.

This approach means that after we hit a milestone (big or small), we’re completely focused on the next one.

Everyone does support

As co-founders, we think it’s important that we stay involved in customer support. Right now, as a team, we’re trying to reach out to everyone who joins Addapp individually. So if you sign up, you should at some point receive personalized communication from one of our team members.

This helps us keep up momentum as everyone knows what our community members are saying and which parts of the app need addressing. It’s a common misunderstanding that support is done by only a few people with a specific job description. We don’t believe that. We believe that support should be done by everyone. Some of our team members do it more, some do it less, but everybody does it. In this way, everybody has the chance to listen what the users say, either positive or negative, directly without any filtering.

The tools we use:

• Slack: “What’s happening now?”
• GitHub: “What’s planned and what’s the status?”
• Skype: “Let’s talk”
• Intercom: “What do our users say and we say to our users”?

Process

Process is important in any business. At Addapp, we’ve tried to streamline our processes and the way we work over recent weeks — one key area we’re improving on is documentation and making sure all internal processes are stored in one place.

Addapp Wiki

When someone asks a question, we discuss it and then add it to our team Wiki for everyone to view. Andreas (our Co-founder and CTO is very strong in promoting documentation within the team and everybody in the team has found it extremely useful. We have documented our vision, our values, our timeline, our release planning, tool guidelines and more.

Every new person in Addapp goes through all the documentation on their first day of work and when any team member has a question, the answer can more than likely be found in the Wiki.

Culture

We’ll talk more about how we’re building culture in a future post, but encouraging our team to get to know more about each other outside of work and make sure we chat daily about non-work related topics are key to creating a fun, productive culture around Addapp.

#happiness

Back at the start of January we launched a new channel on Slack. It’s called #happiness and focusses on both user happiness and team happiness. We actively encourage each team member to share and discuss their personal goals in this channel. Over recent weeks:

• Kouris has started to spend some time on CodeAcademy
• Ash is trying to exercise in the morning before work
• And various members of the team have started measuring their activity and steps taken against each other throughout the day

Addapp updates this month:

• At the start of January we had every member of our team together for the first time when we met up for three days in Rotterdam.
• We’ve released two updates to our app in the app store
• Two new people have joined our team to assist with marketing and data science.

Thanks for reading,
Kouris & Andreas