The Remote ↔︎ Co-Location Experiment
Last March, we survived one month of Stampede’s first co-location experiment in Langkawi (plus a weekend getaway to Koh Lipe).
The premise is rather straightforward. Stampede believes in doing the right thing. Since a third of our time is spent working, how might we design a great working experience for our people at Stampede?
For that, we arranged for half of our team to be co-located in Langkawi for one month.
What we wanted to test
As a remote team, we wanted to test two things:
1. Does periodic co-location make a great remote team?
2. Does the combo of co-location then remote build great product?
What we have found
- Team rituals have centring effect. We start the day with coffee together, then Blitz and end it with a debrief session. Without these the day feels like an unstructured blur.
2. Understanding performance peaks and lows is key. After the first week we observed that mornings are perfect for deep work. Afternoons can get sleepy so it helps to have stand up discussions. We then schedule our days based on this natural biological rhythm.
3. Having meals on time and soaking some sun help keep us feeling alert and productive. Everyone pretty much go to bed on time and wake up fresh in the morning. During the co-location no sick leave or fatigue was recorded.
4. Uniform (Stampede t-shirts) has unifying perks 👕♥
5. The team is now more comfortable to disagree with each other and engaging in constructive debate when solving problems. Once decision is made, everyone agrees to commit.
6. Commuting drains energy. I’m perfectly okay when leaving work but 20 mins on the road and I’m flat by the time I reach home.
7. Purpose and productivity are infectious. When you see your colleague being productive contributing to a purpose you believe in, it makes you want to make magic too.
8. Deciding what and where to eat is draining and lead to unnecessary time and brainpower wasted. Next experiment: good food delivery everyday.
9. User testing is fun! After building our product’s first version, we set up a makeshift testing lab and get actual users to test. We watched them use the product, analyze and seek for patterns in the data. At the end of the day we know what to do next. That’s efficiency.
10. Invest in several portable whiteboards. If you need to preserve whiteboard content for future reference, clip several mahjong papers to it, write or paste the sticky notes there and flip them over. Don’t be that “Do not erase” guy.
11. Be the team where knowledge sharing thrives. Impromptu sharing is best. Seek to go off-tangent like coaching storytelling to programmers or sharing up-skilling tips with interns.
12. Explore the unconventional way to do things. If you are a remote team, consider co-locating for a month. If you’re a physical team, go remote. Or better still, move your team to an island like Langkawi for a month 😉
13. Be awesome at non-work stuffs too. We had a satay session hosted by fellow Kajang ambassador Mujib Jazmin and we took the boat to Koh Lipe, Thailand for the weekend for more sun, sea, sand and Thai massage!
What we did
If you’re curious, here are several methods that we used, in no particular order, from what I can recall:
Double Diamond
ABC — Always be Capturing
ABD — Always be Debriefing
Just Enough Research
Designer vs Scientist
Crazy 8
Lighting Demo
Note & Vote
How Might We
Journey Map
Prototyping
Design Validation
User Testing
Roadmapping
Golden Circle
User Persona
Empathy Map
User Journey
Thank you to our host Jetpack Langkawi. We’ll miss the buffalos and the paddy fields and the visiting cats but we’ll be back!
