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Ask HN: As managers, how do you make sure your distributed team is aligned?

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Re: Ask HN: As managers, how do you make sure your distributed team is aligned?

#21

Post by carusooneliner »

Try video for leadership updates - it's more personal than written communication so helps build trust and you can explain things clearly with emphasis.

Couple ways you could do it: 1. a webcam recording of yourself, using quicktime (only on mac) or similar webcam recording tool 2. a screen recording where you talk through a slide deck of news, roadmap, etc. Again, using quicktime or chrome extensions such as the one I built: https://outklip.com. Outklip's advantage is you can record webcam along with screen, annotate during recording, do post-editing and upload to YouTube with a click.

I interiewed Sid Sijbrandij, the GitLab CEO (GitLab has 500+ members and is all remote) on running a distributed company. He said this about alignment: "I think it’s really important to write things down. People are very efficient at reading things. So, if you wrote it down you can refer to it, so you don’t have to say everything again, you can just drop a link. So, we write down a lot, in our handbook, on our OKRs page, you’ll find all our goals and strategy, etc. And at some point you keep repeating that, keep dropping those links and you keep answering questions. So, repetition is still needed, repetition is easier if you have one writeup and most people have already found it even during onboarding.". Interview video and notes here: https://outklip.com/blog/gitlab-building-a-distributed-compa...

Another interview with Sid about how GitLab uses video for remote work: https://outklip.com/blog/using-video-for-remote-work/.

Re: Ask HN: As managers, how do you make sure your distributed team is aligned?

#22

Post by cowpig »

We're not quite that size yet, but I've found that carefully curating our organizational culture has really paid off, starting with a document of principles[1] that we all agree with, and then on putting a lot of mental effort into training new hires to understand what the culture means and why it's important.

[1] https://gist.github.com/cowpig/8d8194ac55e3789d9a3c4136d1e1a...

Re: Ask HN: As managers, how do you make sure your distributed team is aligned?

#23

Post by sz4kerto »

First of all, make sure that the management itself is aligned. Patterns reproduce themselves across the organization and that process is mostly top->down.

Have your most important values written down. Technical and non-technical. Ask new joiners read them and refer to them when discussing short and long term plans.

Don't believe that a fully flat hierarchy is the solution for all problems. A distributed team makes communication harder, so you might need more process than usual -- for 40 people you almost certainly need other managers to help you.

Have a strategy for the corporation that everyone understands. Team leads will then understand what their team has to contribute, and individuals will understand how to contribute to the team. If the company strategy is not well-known, your remote team is doomed.

Focus on alignment to values and vision, not to what you tell people directly. You're doing your job well if people and teams become autonomous.

Find and remove anything that blocks lateral communication (i.e. that goes outside of the hierarchy chain).

Be skilled in people management. Recognize isolation, burnout, depression, tension early enough and be able to solve them. If you are not skilled, learn from professionals, not from blog posts.

If needed, break rules. An important rule in a distributed team is that people don't meet often. If necessary, break this rule.

Re: Ask HN: As managers, how do you make sure your distributed team is aligned?

#24

Post by decebalus1 »

cimmanom wrote: post #11

One thing we do is keep a slack channel for announcements only. We require everyone to acknowledge they’ve read and understood said announcements by adding an emoji response. Then you can follow up with anyone who fails to respond. (And discuss in 1-1s with anyone who makes a habit of failing to respond.)

> We require everyone to acknowledge they’ve read and understood said announcements by adding an emoji response. Then you can follow up with anyone who fails to respond.

Office space - millennial edition

Re: Ask HN: As managers, how do you make sure your distributed team is aligned?

#25

Post by diminoten »

manishsharan wrote: post #4

I think a distributed team,where individual members of the team are geographically distributed, is designed to fail. Sure you could accomplish some goals but the inertia is working against you. Such teams will be always outperformed by co-located teams. A better approach would be to have distributed teams where the teams are cohesive unit with co-located members. Each team has local autonomy and a central mandate. Th…

What prevents distributed teams from being cohesive?

Re: Ask HN: As managers, how do you make sure your distributed team is aligned?

#26

Post by gwbas1c »

I've been working on a distributed team for over 8 years, and gradually moved to architect of the product I work on.

There's a lot of good advice in this thread, but one more thing that I need to add:

Your tickets need to be well-written, and actively groomed. This means things like:

- Clear ticket title

- Clear steps to reproduce

- Process followed (Varies based on product, in our case this means attaching logs and documenting filenames.)

- When someone clarifies things, they must update the actual ticket title / description instead of clarifying in an email / comment

- Management must not expect engineers to handhold ticket writers through things like this, and must expect that testers and support own clearly communicating what the issue is

- Do not combine multiple bugs into the same ticket

- Do not "fail verification" when finding a new bug

- Relate similar tickets, don't identify new bugs / issues in a comment

Some examples of "bad" tickets:

- Giving a title that's basically "It's not working." Every product has an analogy of "It's not working." In our case, novices who don't take the time to explain a problem will just create a lot of tickets titled "It's not syncing."

- I had a ticket today where the steps to reproduce said, "Take a screenshot." There's MANY ways to take a screenshot. The steps to reproduce must say which tool / button combination were used.

- Constantly needing to ask for things that are expected in the process. All products have different needs. In our case, all tickets need logs and a sample filename to look for in the log. When I need to constantly ask testers for this information, it's a problem that management must address quickly

- "Oh you fixed it but now it does this." What this creates is a situation where many bugs are part of the same ticket, and someone needs to spend hours reading through all comments to understand what the bug is. If the bug is fixed and a new bug is found, verify the first bug, file a new ticket, and relate them.

Edit: Actively grooming means:

- The bugs assigned to someone must be realistic. Don't leave 100 bugs assigned to someone for a release when there's no chance that they can do them all.

- Don't let your ticket submitters triage their tickets. QE shouldn't assign a ticket to anyone. That just results in the 100 bugs assigned to someone situation.

- Dumb feature requests should be closed immediately. Someone using your ticketing system to make dumb feature requests (and assign them to people) should be stopped immediately. (An example is a tester requesting lots of automation or helper tools from developers via the ticketing system.)

- Out-of-scope bugs should not be assigned to a release

- Major projects are not bugs, don't leave "bugs" that require major refactoring assigned to someone when you aren't going to dedicate the time to do it

- Establish a feedback loop so that QE can better steer tickets on submitting them. (IE, if there is a clear server error in a log, it's not a client bug.) QE should be smart enough to do enough diagnostics to direct the bug before it hits triage.

- Don't constantly assign tickets to the wrong team. If someone keeps saying, "this kind of ticket goes to this team," listen, otherwise they will go to your upper management, CTO, architect, ect or and make you look like a fool for not knowing the difference.

Re: Ask HN: As managers, how do you make sure your distributed team is aligned?

#27

Post by gwbas1c »

When I worked for Intel, we all went through training on how to run effective meetings.

Why? In a distributed team, meetings can become a severe time sink. A lot of people hold meetings to feel busy and important, and even less people put in effort to keep the conversation focused so that the meeting ends on time.

Some basic things are:

- Determine an agenda in advance. The agenda must be part of the meeting invite. An agenda is more than "Talk about XXX." You should have a list of 3-6 topics that will be discussed in the meeting.

- Make sure that everyone on the invite list needs to be there. Explain why you're inviting people in the meeting invite.

- During the meeting, make sure that, as time progresses, the topics on the agenda are discussed. If one topic is discussed too long, there's different techniques for moving to another topic. (Binning it, declaring it a rathole, ect.)

- Decline poorly planned meetings.

And, I shouldn't need to say this, but meetings begin on time and end on time. Don't make everyone wait 45 minutes to start what's supposed to be a 30 minute meeting, but then it really drags out to 90 minutes.

Furthermore, have a 0-tolerance policy for latecomers and people who always need 15 minutes to figure out the teleconference software. Hold your interviews in the teleconference software you use with your team as a way to filter out the idiots.

Re: Ask HN: As managers, how do you make sure your distributed team is aligned?

#29

Post by fhbdukfrh »

I think some touch on this but you cannot possibly align 40+ people directly. If these are all devs, at this scale you need 3-4 engineering managers or 5+ leads. That's were you should be focusing and empower them to carry your message outward.

Looking for a tool to do this is wishful thinking

Re: Ask HN: As managers, how do you make sure your distributed team is aligned?

#30

Post by jedberg »

> Is there a product for slow-thinking updates where I can share teams news and align my +40 people team?

Email. Email is perfect for this. If you use GSuite, groups with the email gateway is ideal for this. You can have threaded discussions with a long history.

Stripe was(maybe still is?) really good at this. They made a policy very early on that every email had to CC a mailing list (unless it was truly a personal one on one communication). The lists has a structure were some were designated as archival only. Even if no one read the list, at least the archive was there for the new employees. Or for an employee who was on vacation to read and catch up when they came back.

> How can you be sure people don't actually miss things in the noise of Slack/Email?

For Slack, make sure it's truly just for real time discussion. If something looks like it's going to be a long discussion, move it to email.

For email, if you're using groups/lists for everything, then there shouldn't be a lot of noise. You should be able to just go to the groups interface or filter on the group the message was sent to.

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