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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?

#41

Post by jrhusney »

> Is there a product for slow-thinking updates?

I've been working on a distributed team for 4 years now. I product manage an open-source online retrospective and meeting app and went _way_ deep on researching other distributed teams last year. What I learned about sharing updates is it's as much dictated by culture and ritual as much as it is by a tool.

Zapier is almost 1,000 people now. Here's what I learned they do:

- Every Friday non-managers write a short update of what's changed that week

- Managers read them, extract a few highlights, and roll them up to leaders

- Leaders do the same and roll it up to the CEO

- The CEO writes a blog post and sends it to the entire company

- That post is commented on and questions are asked by everybody

Some folks within Spotify write a daily update answering the same prompts:

- This is what I did today I think you should know about

- This is what I learned and I think you'd find useful

- This is what I need from you

- This is what I am doing next

For our company, we prefer weekly updates to daily updates (we value time autonomy vs. having an always-on culture). Our fully-remote team foes something similar to Zapier and end up posting our company updates publicly at https://focus.parabol.co (if you want to see an example)

I don't think a separate tool is really necessary. Pick your poison between a stand-up bot or something more flexible like missions.ai (at time X create doc, share doc, prompt people to get started...)

One more tip: if you find yourself writing an answer to the prompt "this is what I need from you..." you probably have an item to add to the team's meeting agenda. Full disclosure, we started our company to make capturing items for meetings easy, so, I have a dog in the hunt.

EDIT: formatting

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

#42

Post by james_at_plaid »

codemac wrote: post #37
jedberg wrote: post #30

> 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 o…

Email is great, along with keeping a google doc of all previous updates sent in reverse order. Then author the email in the google doc, paste it into gmail and send - along with a link at the bottom to previous notes.

Because I want to encourage comments/questions, I do almost what you describe, except that the email ONLY contains a link to the doc. So in effect, the email is just a notification that the doc has been updated.

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

#43

Post by james_at_plaid »

At Plaid, I'm in a unique situation where I manage a division of the engineering team which is dedicated to being distributed; the rest of engineering team is not. My goal is to ensure not only that my team is aligned, but also that important information is flowing between my team and the rest of the company.

For this, I use a weekly update that's sent to the team and also the "periphery" of the team -- all those who care about and influence the team's success. Each weekly update is prepended to a Google doc, and I send an email out (just with a link to the doc) when I update it.

The update has three sections: "Last Week" (everything I experienced last week that I think is relevant) "This Week" (a list of my priorities for the upcoming week with a cut line) and "Biggest Mistakes and Missed Opportunities" (just what it sounds like). It's intended to be comprehensive and often runs more than one page.

To make sure "people don't actually miss things," there are two parts: 1) I make sure the update contains all the things I don't want people to miss 2) I make sure the weekly update is valuable enough to everyone so that they read it.

On occasions where I've been late in updating it, I've found that I'm repeating the same information to multiple people more often and also having to say, "Sorry, you'd have known that already if I'd gotten my update out on time."

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

#45

Post by epynonymous »

i manage a lot of teams in a remote site, here are my thoughts, it starts with leadership at the remote site, make sure this person and you are aligned, to build alignment, trust goes a long way, but in the absence of trust, since that takes time to build, make sure your goals (short and long term) are clearly stated and known to him/her and that they can convey that message to the team. at that number, also make sure that the next level managers are getting the right message.

face to face is always best, zoom is great, wiki pages, etc.

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

#46

Post by gwbas1c »

mandeepj wrote: post #40
gwbas1c wrote: post #27

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.…

> 15 minutes to figure out the teleconference software We just Skype for Business and Zoom at work. Both are just one click. Webex is also good. It's little confusing though (too many options). My partners use it so I have to also use it. Maybe, you need to evaluate your teleconf s\w.

I don't know why people are downvoting you.

There are idiots who constantly take 15 minutes to figure out those teleconference software. Each and every time. I can understand taking 3-5 minutes extra the first time using something like that, and I can understand occasional technical difficulties.

What's not acceptable is after 2 calls still having technical difficulties.

For example, A year ago I started working with a driver developer who would constantly drop out of the teleconference after 7 minutes, without a polite "technical difficulties" IM or email. Turns out he was always calling in from within some kind of VM and always needed to reboot in the middle of the meeting. We had to get the manager to tell him to stop it.

Another example is that, a few days ago, I interviewed someone through WebEx. She took 10 minutes to figure out how to get her microphone to work. After 5 minutes I made up my mind that, unless she was spectacular, I wasn't going to hire her. (She interviewed very poorly.) What's extremely frustrating is that she didn't have the decency to just have WebEx call her phone, and instead kept me waiting for 10 minutes. That's just plain rude.

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

#47

Post by twunde »

codemac wrote: post #37
jedberg wrote: post #30

> 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 o…

Email is great, along with keeping a google doc of all previous updates sent in reverse order. Then author the email in the google doc, paste it into gmail and send - along with a link at the bottom to previous notes.

This is super-important, especially for when someone is on vacation or when new hires come onboard and want context. We use Confluence this way and have engineering/team updates in there going back since the company was less than 10 people. It's super-useful when someone is trying to find the original reasoning about why a company does something one way vs another. I will say that this should be in whatever internal documentation system you use, whether that's a wiki, Google Docs, etc. The main thing is that it should be searchable and easily found.

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

#48

Post by cosmie »

mandeepj wrote: post #40
gwbas1c wrote: post #27

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.…

> 15 minutes to figure out the teleconference software We just Skype for Business and Zoom at work. Both are just one click. Webex is also good. It's little confusing though (too many options). My partners use it so I have to also use it. Maybe, you need to evaluate your teleconf s\w.

We use Skype for Business, and it's a common cause of issues. We have constant issues with different individuals not being able to join meeting invites (although the dial in always works, the app doesn't), people being able to join but video/screenshare or audio not working, it refusing to acknowledge the leader so it doesn't start, etc.

Our IT team has sent out a bunch of surveys trying to triage the cause of the intermittent issues, but haven't been able to result the problems yet. It drives us nuts though. And that's with the resources of a Fortune 100 trying to deal with it.

Glad it's working well for you, though. That gives me hope they can't get it working more smoothly for us eventually.

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

#49

Post by juangacovas »

gwbas1c wrote: post #46
mandeepj wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 15 minutes to figure out the teleconference software We just Skype for Business and Zoom at work. Both are just one click. Webex is also good. It's little confusing though (too many options). My partners use it so I have to also use it. Maybe, you need to evaluate your teleconf s\w.

I don't know why people are downvoting you. There are idiots who constantly take 15 minutes to figure out those teleconference software. Each and every time. I can understand taking 3-5 minutes extra the first time using something like that, and I can understand occasional technical difficulties. What's not acceptable is after 2 calls still having technical difficulties. For example, A year ago I started working with…

Well I have a story about Webex not working with the very last version of Chrome at that moment. Setting up a previous version of Chrome was not a walk in the park. I guess not all countries can "have WebEx call her phone" without hassle.

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

#50

Post by edwhitesell »

cosmie wrote: post #48
mandeepj wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 15 minutes to figure out the teleconference software We just Skype for Business and Zoom at work. Both are just one click. Webex is also good. It's little confusing though (too many options). My partners use it so I have to also use it. Maybe, you need to evaluate your teleconf s\w.

We use Skype for Business, and it's a common cause of issues. We have constant issues with different individuals not being able to join meeting invites (although the dial in always works, the app doesn't), people being able to join but video/screenshare or audio not working, it refusing to acknowledge the leader so it doesn't start, etc. Our IT team has sent out a bunch of surveys trying to triage the cause of the in…

We used Skype for Business until a few months ago and had a fair amount of issues. We switched our Office 365 accounts all over to Teams and everything has been working a lot better since.
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