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Why Distributed Teams are Less Effective (2010)

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Re: Why Distributed Teams are Less Effective (2010)

#2

Post by redguava »

It sounds to me like your experience in a remote team was sub-par, but that doesn't make remote teams bad... just that one.

Culture, chatter, gossip, staying up all night to get a release done... all of this can be done with remote teams if you have the right tools and you build it into your culture.

Of course there are pros and cons for remote teams, but my experience is that the pros far outweigh the cons.

I work in a team that has us spread across 4 countries (Australia, Poland, UK and Brazil) and very clashing time zones. It works amazingly well.

We have much more talented people working in our team than we could have gotten if we restricted our search to the local area only. I am positive having better staff far outweighs any cons of being remote.

My recommendation to anyone but my competitors would be to seriously consider a remote team.

Re: Why Distributed Teams are Less Effective (2010)

#6

Post by metajack »

I disagree, and I've pitched companies to Suster and other VCs who've held this viewpoint. It's unfortunately very widely held by VCs, and in some cases is rather extreme, with certains VCs demanding you not only be non-distributed, but that you be non-distributed in specific places.

I become a believer in distributed teams from my experiences working on open source projects. In those cases, it's not possible to coalesce the team physically except on rare occasions. They seem to work just fine.

Anecdotally, the best teams I've ever worked on were distributed, and I will continue to start companies with distributed teams and work with companies as a distributed team member.

I will say that I think getting everyone together on a regular basis is good and useful. It makes the social dynamics much better if everyone can be reminded that their coworkers are actual people every 6-12 weeks.

Hiring for distributed teams is both easier and harder. On the one hand, you can choose anyone, anywhere, and many people in non-name brand locations are hugely excited by the idea of working on small teams on cool projects. The downside is that it takes more discipline to be effective on a distributed team, and you must have vastly superior communication skills than the norm. Lots of perfectly smart and capable people can't or don't enjoy working that way. You often don't know until a few weeks in.

Re: Why Distributed Teams are Less Effective (2010)

#7

Post by jacquesm »

Just like with anything else, the execution is what it all comes down to. Distributed teams are easy to mess up and hard to get right. If you're betting a sizeable chunk of money on some company and you are incapable of evaluating whether or not they have a distributed team that functions well then you should probably stay clear of it.

I've seen spectacular results and spectacular failures in distributed teams, it all depended on management, selection and processes in place to keep things moving. Mess up any of those and you won't be able to run a distributed team, but then again you probably won't be able to run a local one either.

Re: Why Distributed Teams are Less Effective (2010)

#10

Post by smalter »

I have no qualms with what Suster writes here. At the same time, I've encountered a number of very powerful counterexamples that gives me pause.

- 37signals: Renowned for its strong company culture, 37signals talks often about how having a distributed team is a competitive advantage because it allows them to hire the very best fit (excellence at work and culture fit) without regard to location.

- Singly: Up-and-coming post-Series A company. I've gotten to know them because they use my product iDoneThis (http://idonethis.com) to replace their daily standup. Neither their CTO nor their VP of Engineering works on site in SF and they are an API company! Yet they have an extremely strong engineering culture, and much of it revolves around a no nonsense approach to work and zero tolerance of meetings, and that's facilitated by being distributed.

- Ravelry: They've not only built a tight-knit team that's distributed, they've built a ravenous community and fan base with their product (2M+ users). They've said that because they're distributed, that makes them work extra hard on communication and making work fun.

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