From London with love — long distance (working) relationships and making a remote product development team work
I love my team. Not just because it was Valentine’s Day recently and I’m feeling mushy*, but because I really do enjoy working with them. Part of it is doubtless down to old-fashioned good luck, but it got me thinking about how it could easily be so different.
* I was feeling pretty frosty on the day, but that’s orthogonal to my point
We came together fairly recently to form a small, cross-functional development team within the wider Product and Engineering team, but I have worked with most of the team members previously in various capacities and I am excited and confident about what we are going to deliver in 2016. We have an ambitious roadmap for the next 12 months but the people are equally ambitious and I have no doubt we will achieve a lot together.
We also have a lot of fun together. As a product owner I rely on my team working together to come up with solutions and features that help us to grow as a business. It’s vital that we get on well and as a result that we work effectively together — and the fact that half of the team is 1,600 miles away on the other side of Europe makes no difference to that.
Although I spend much of each day in meetings or talking with these people — whether that be daily stand-ups and our other scrum ceremonies, ad-hoc calls to talk through ideas for a new feature or just random, GIF-littered chatter on Slack — I have never actually met half of them. Of the 11 people in our team, five are in London, five are in Iași in Romania, and one works from Glasgow— from whence he periodically sends us jaw-droppingly stunning pictures of the highlands to remind us how jealous we should be.
First forays
Outsourcing is fairly common across the industry and Trinity Mirror is no exception. We work with Endava, an IT services company that has delivery teams in several countries including Romania. It would be lying to say the business relationship wasn’t viewed with a little trepidation when we first started, because we had outsourced some development work previously with varying degrees of success, but our digital department was growing quickly and we needed to grow the team to match.
The first project I worked on that wasn’t done fully in-house was a challenge to say the least. It was a steep learning curve as we grappled with how to communicate the complexities of the product requirements in emails with people who were working far away and who only seemed to exist on the end of an email address. The end product was a success, but it hadn’t been plain sailing and we knew we could have done better — so in the spirit of agile we reviewed, iterated, experimented and kept on trying. As our London team grew, our team in Romania did too, and with each new addition we continued to look for new ways to making things work.
Tools and investment as a minimum
Investment in hardware was a big part of making things work. We use Google Apps as a company so getting Google Hangouts to work was the first step, then getting everyone a headset, then getting hangouts to work without dropping off… You get the picture. It took a while to get used to and we still spend a frustrating amount of time telling people we can’t hear them and working out why someone can’t get into a meeting. But ultimately it’s a small price to pay for being able to make sure everyone has understood what we are working on and had the chance to ask questions.
We have now gone further and installed Chrome boxes into our meeting rooms and project spaces, so if you need input from someone in Romania, you can dial them in as easily as going to find a co-located colleague. Some things are more difficult when you aren’t all in the same space, but normally someone, somewhere will have had the same issue so there is often a solution out there. For instance, not being able to use Post-its to have our retrospectives was solved when someone found a digital white board which works just as well. You just have to be inventive and open to trying things.
And finally, while using Slack isn’t exactly revolutionary as pretty much everyone now seems to be raving about it now, getting the team using it certainly has been revolutionary for me. The hardest thing to recreate remotely is those ad-hoc casual conversations you have in the office — the ones you never plan but which can be so crucial. It’s not quite a virtual water cooler, but it’s probably the nearest thing you’re going to get and it has the benefit that you can fit more people around it. You can also use GIFs. Getting your phone out to find a GIF at the water cooler doesn’t really have the same effect.
Empowerment and team structures
But technology is only part of the solution. It doesn’t matter how many shiny things you give the team or courses you send them on, it’s very much the people that make it work and you have to allow teams to work out how to do that for themselves.
Personally, I have found it to be the little things that have made a big difference to the dynamic. Things like ‘fact of the day’ which our team does after daily stand-up and which gets us talking about things other than just work. Some of the Londoners have learnt a few Romanian phrases — mostly met with eye rolls or laughter — and we’re planning a team-building trip to Romania next month where I’m looking forward to trying some of our manual tester’s homemade chocolate that I’ve heard so much about. Getting to know each other as individuals rather than as faces on a screen and email addresses has helped us to work more closely together.
The structure has also been instrumental in making everyone feel empowered to speak up. We may be outsourcing, but my Romanian colleagues are very much part of our team. They are assigned to Trinity Mirror as people rather than as man hours and they are embedded in our team structure in a way that means they feel comfortable asking questions, making suggestions and disagreeing with an approach if they believe it isn’t the best thing to do. In fact they are actively encouraged to do so. In a strong team anyone should be able to influence and lead if they wish and I hope everyone in our team feels they can.
Long-distance can work
I’m not saying that we are perfect. Nor am I saying you can ever beat working in the same office. Communication will always be tricky to get right, which is why it’s such a hot topic to discuss online. There are plenty of things that we still struggle with and improving communication remains a big topic of conversation in our retrospectives. We’re working through those things and new issues will doubtless crop up, but I feel confident that doing things long-distance isn’t the main cause of those issues.
A couple of months ago I saw a colleague of mine well up as she said goodbye to another team member on his last day after having worked together for the best part of a year. Then I watched as she took her headset off, closed down her laptop and walked away from her desk. Even in a traditional setup, not everyone you work with will transcend the status of colleague to become a friend, but it is a testament to how things are working if some of the ones that do make that jump are people you have never even met.
