In our previous blog, we had talked about our learnings from hiring a remote team.

But hiring a great team is just the starting point of building amazing products. There are constant challenges that almost every remote team faces due to miscommunication or rather the lack of it.

We have constantly worked towards overcoming the problems that arise from difference in locations and time zones. Having managed and delivered over 100 projects successfully, we have our fair share of learnings from the same that we are happy to share. ?

Managing remote teams well is about three things and we strongly focus on them —

1. Clear and Crisp Communication
2. Strong work culture aligned to delivering excellence
3. Efficient Use of the Tools

Clear and Crisp Communication

“The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place” — George Bernard Shaw

1. Documented requirements and well-defined goals

In a co-located office, there’s no difficulty in sharing the information in-person. You can just walk up to the person to clarify any confusion and communicate your thoughts well.

In a remote situation, however, it is best if everything is shared via written communication. Our product managers understand the client’s requirements and document to-the-point User Stories (features to be built) with clear Acceptance Criteria(criteria of completion) and share it with the team.

Then, the client and the team members collaboratively shape the requirements so that when they head into the execution, all stakeholders have been consulted and there’s a complete buy-in.

The tasks are well-defined and our community members love us for this as it makes their lives so much easier! ?

We follow scrum, an agile framework to build software incrementally (in sprints) with a time boxed and iterative approach, instead of trying to deliver it all at once near the end. A scrum sprint is a regular, repeatable work cycle during which work is completed and made ready for review.

At the beginning of the sprint we do a sprint planning meeting to ensure that the requirements are locked in, everyone’s clear on their deliverables and can’t wait to get cracking. ?

2. Importance of meetings

When people are operating from different time zones, it is not feasible to have a meeting every now and then.

Since synchronous time is highly valuable, we try to do as much work asynchronously before we get on a call/head into a meeting! How do we do that?

For example, we automate daily stand-ups through a scrum-bot Standuply that gathers all the updates from team members before the meeting asynchronously and  publishes it to the team channel. Everyone reads this data before the meeting.

Hence, when the meeting begins, the valuable synchronous time is not wasted discussing standard stuff. Instead, the meeting is used to dive straight into the subtle nuances of how to unblock the team or whether there’s a better way to achieve our goals.

3. Result Oriented Work Environment

You’ve now defined tasks that the various team members need to work on and they have assigned themselves a timeline for completion. Now, do you let them do their work and simply touch base with them at pre-defined points along the way — or do you keep micro-managing and sending e-mails to check their progress?

We work in a Results Only Work Environment where if Person A commits to delivering a feature by say Fri 4 pm IST, there is no micromanagement of the same.

We’re all adults here who know what it means to adhere to commitments. We take complete ownership of our deliverables and ship regularly- this allows us to deliver amazing products with great quality on time! ?

Strong work culture aligned to delivering excellence

“Making something people want includes making making a company that people want to work for.”- Sahil Lavingia, CEO Gumroad

1. Taking responsibility

Every Indie member take immense pride in their craft- whether it is design, development or product definition. This means in the times of crisis situation, they take responsibility and go out of the way to come up with a solution, no matter what it takes. ?

We also have a few regular mechanisms ensure that they continue to feel the responsibility and commitment towards their work.

1. Standups and impromptu check-ins to keep updated with what is going on with the team.
2. Regular feedback loops so that required corrections can be made early in the development process.
3. Retrospectives scheduled once in every two weeks to understand what could have been done better in the previous project.

These small mechanisms help us in building a culture of accountability.

2. Relationship building

Working remotely can sometimes be a lonely experience and hence it is great experience to connect with the person behind the screen every once in a while.

One way to do this, is to encourage members to have off-topic conversations.

There are tools like Icebreaker that help us with that. Each week a handful of members are selected and asked a few short questions about themselves. The answers are published in a public channel of their choosing along with names, departments and roles.

We also encourage the team members to have video calls every once in a while as it helps a great deal in connecting with the other community member.

Efficient Use of the Best Tools

So we’ve gotten the communication down and instilled the right culture- but our work is not done yet. In a remote team, the importance of tools lies in making sure everyone stays on the same page and can continue to execute without a physical person working next to them.

We use the best-in-class tools like Slack, Github, JIRA, Invision, Zeplin, Google Drive, Skype and we can say without a doubt that we would never be able to deliver quality products without using these tools efficiently! ?

1. Slack

At Indiez, Slack is our virtual office. ?

It’s where we live, breathe, plan, work, communicate and brainstorm.

We have put lots of efforts into creating the right channels and set up some great automations to keep things on track.

For instance, we use Standuply  to automate daily standups and get updates from everyone in the team. We also use Meekan to match everyone’s calendars, and quickly find common free times for meetings.

We use Slack to automate the process of taking feedback, for organising polls and for delivering automated information based on usage of a certain keyword. Slack also has great reminder tools that enable us to set reminders for our team-mates as well.

The one thing that helps us manage everything on Slack is that we integrate all other tools to it making it the one platform where everything can be tracked.

To eliminate noise and clutter, we keep in mind the context of the channel while creating one and quickly create more bifurcated channels if the existing ones have too many members or become too noisy.

2. Jira

Jira is a very comprehensive tool built for software development specifically for Agile management. Given that we follow agile methodology to work, we use Jira for almost every project.

We have built custom workflows for Jira where a particular issue will go through following steps — To-Do, Doing, Submitted to QA, Submitted to PM, Submitted to Client, Done.

3. GitHub

Github (GitHub) is the most popular source-code hosting platform by all standards, helping to discover and connect with other great developers worldwide.

It easily integrates with other services like Slack, Trello, and continuous integration services like TravisCI and Jenkins. Github also doubles up as both a communication and project management tool through its issue-tracking system.

Multiple developers can work on a piece of code simultaneously and it make it very easy to merge the codes.

4. Appear.in

Appear.in (appear.in) is a great tool for video calling. You can easily create a video conference from slack itself which makes it super easy to initiate calls.

5. Zapier

Zapier (Zapier) is a brilliant tool to build automated workflows across tools. As we use several tools to manage teams Zapier makes it very easy to keep them in sync.

Besides this there’s a long list of tools we use daily like — Google Calendar, Asana, Trello, Sonar Qube, Gmail, Airtable, Confluence, Dropbox, InVision, Drive etc.

These are the various ways that we at Indiez use for remote team management. Having said all of that, we are still learning how to manage teams more and more efficiently. And we continue to improve everyday.

If you have any insights from your experience, please share that as a response. ?

Also, help us share the word by recommending this blog to those who share our vision for #futureofwork. ?

So excited to build the #futureofwork! ?

If you have anything to discuss about how the #futureofwork is going to shape up, raising investment or how we build amazing products or you just want to say hello, feel free to drop a message at [email protected]

P.S. Thanks for reading this far! If you found value in this, I’d really appreciate it if you appreciate this post (by clicking the ? button) so other people can see it!.