Sorry As A Service — Remote, diverse and hard-working.

We had conversation with Sabīne Supernova from Sorry As A Service.

Sorry As A Service sends personalised gifts to customers, when companies mess up. They help companies to scale the personal touch.

”Know the moment when your flight is cancelled? Yeah. My recent experience forced me to wait two hours on the plane before departure only to hear we’re not going anywhere. And instead of helping us get new flights, we were given a phone number. In the middle of the night. After 3 weeks away from home. No apologies. What a difference it would have made if they had sent some nice personalised message with Sorry As A Service to at least say ‘sorry’!” — Kaili

What is the most important team value you have?

We value strongly the independence of people — everyone knows where to focus and what is important at any given time. Which means we can work independently and simply get things done.

How many people work remotely in your company and how often?

We are entirely distributed as a team, full time and occasionally meet in one of our offices. Right now we have 4 offices — Tallinn, Tartu, Riga and London.

We are a small but very diverse team: we have Latvians, Estonians, English and also a truly rare find — a Norwegian Irishman!

We typically meet couple times a month, but it does differ each month.

What is the biggest challenge you have faced as remote team?

Productivity and alignment are probably the biggest ones for us. Today we have a quite well-established routine in our team — we do daily standups, weekly planning and reviews. That ensures that everyone knows where the company is going.

As we have quite different sleeping patterns in our team. Especially our CTO. Thus, morning standups are not always the best solution. We have everyday stand-up right now at 4 pm — for some it is a morning, for some midday :) Important is to find what works for you the best and just do that.

How do you communicate with your team?

We use Slack, of course 😊 With Slack, we organise all our conversations into structured channels to make them easy to find. We also use Slack to share files.

We have also used a lot of integrations with Slack. For example, we use integration with Jira where we manage our tasks. There is integration with social media so that we see the entire feed in one place. We have also set reminders for standups and important events.

Our chats are often also filled with GIFs, I must admit. We’re sometimes serious, too. But mostly we love a pinch of good humour everywhere. We tend to make a lot of jokes about ourselves and often humble jokes about our cultures.

You know the Estonian slogan for the ambulance? Time heals!

Or what is the difference between an Estonian introvert and an Estonian extrovert? When an introvert speaks, he looks down at his shoes. When the extrovert speaks, he looks down at your shoes.

Good and funny ones. Then again some are about Latvians and six toes… :P

Do you use visuals when collaborating with your remote team? How do you work with those?

We do have a whiteboard (more like a tile actually) in the office, where we tend to write down our ideas.

If we need to use something visual, mainly product people, we use Marvel, Balsamiq, Google Docs and Deekit, of course.

We use Deekit when we are having Skype / Hangouts call to speak and comment on some product ideas. We think this is really useful as any other tool like Marvel or Balsamiq are not in real-time. Love also the templates. The only terrible thing is our drawing skills. If Deekit could improve that… :D

What has been the best resource on remote working for your team, if you have used any?

Our main resource is called “Trial & Error”. We try one thing and see if it improves the productivity. If not, we would simply find a better way. The important thing here is to have retrospectives — time to look back how well we are doing on different aspects and then discuss how to improve.

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Originally published at www.deekit.com/blog

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