TL;DR notes from articles I read today.

How to build a remote team that will last

Some tips to do remote working right:

• Define and refine your company’s culture and put the company values and culture docs in a virtual handbook for new employees (and old) to access easily at all times.
• Introduce remote workers to all their colleagues and ensure they have access to all the same tools and resources as they would have when in office.
• Communicate using a variety of tools, apps, and media. Use chat apps as a sort of virtual water cooler and allow off-topic, informal conversations. For specifically work-related conversations, use a collaboration suite. Add video check-ins through Skype and Zoom, use these for weekly/bi-weekly meetings as well.
• Remote workers are mostly invisible to you except telecommunication, so regularly measure their engagement and happiness.
• Build healthy, rewarding habits for your whole team as part of your company’s culture and values: encourage free interaction with and by new members. Send positive messages through shoutouts for appreciation and send direct communication along the most productive channel, send the non-urgent messages through Slack.
• Encourage remote workers to switch off communication channels for blocks of time for focused work and also to take regular breaks.


Full post here, 5 mins read


Maximize your team: How I created an engineering roadmap

• It takes considerable effort from you as a leader for your team to be successful. Draw up a roadmap for the team:

  • Identify a long-term focus
  • Evaluate previous efforts
  • Allow visibility into what the team is focusing on
  • Ensure planning efforts and workloads are easy to timebox and monitor so the team knows when they are ahead or behind.
  • Collaborate with other teams and use your business needs to prioritize value over cool factor.
• Set the roadmap at a meeting and brainstorm together to visualize the destination you want to arrive at, and when you want to get there. Use a value system to filter or prioritize the ideas generated - nice to have, important but not urgent, critical for efficiency, debugging needed right away, important and urgent.

• Create a roadmap document:
  • Summarize team and business goals.
  • List responsibilities and desired outcomes for the team. Include a list of all the things the team is managing and what is likely to be phased out or removed to help prioritize.
  • Review achievements for the previous year both for tracking goals and for motivation.
  • List this year’s goals, with 4-5 overarching objectives with 3-5 subheads each. Organize each section in a similar way to the main roadmap document.

• Avoid cluttering the document with too much detail of plans and solutions to issues targeted - that’s a different exercise, which you should restrict to the relevant team and not the entire larger team.

Full post here, 6 mins read

Get these notes directly in your inbox every weekday by signing up for my newsletter, in.snippets().