Strategies For Scaling Remote Teams From NYC’s Top Engineering Leaders
Given the extreme competition for technical talent and the lack of supply, how can US-based companies successfully adopt distributed and remote strategies as a path forward?
At our June Beyond Salon co-hosted with Julia Rudlin, Director of Growth from Terminal, we discussed strategies for successfully scaling an engineering organization. Ten Female CTO, VPE, and Engineering Directors from Two Sigma, Flatiron Health, Spotify, Lyft, Hometeam, Giphy, Code Climate, Etsy, Namely and Conde Nast engaged in a radically candid conversation. We learned from each other, sharing best practices and challenges encountered when scaling teams.
Dinner began with a minute of breathwork to ground and unite the group, followed by a round of #ASKS (inspired by my dear friend Marika Frumes’ HER events). #ASKS require each guest to vulnerably ask for help from the group. Many participants’ #ASK was for recommendations for career & leadership coaches, as well as support in balancing the demands of work and taking care of oneself.
We then dove into best practices for remote employees and distributed teams, stumbling upon a few other fascinating topics along the way.
Here are some of the best practices for remote employees and distributed teams we discussed:
Tips for upper management
- It’s essential that the Executive team visits the distributed office often, and spend meaningful time with the team.
- Support for distributed resources and culture is most successful with it comes from the top.
- Scale your perks. Whatever perks are in HQ need to be extended to everyone (meals, snacks, gym memberships, happy hours, et al.).
Tips for successful autonomous teams
- Localize leadership — There should be a manager or leader in the distributed office to lead the team and be the local culture carrier.
- Autonomous decision making — Distributed teams should have distributed trust and a certain level of independent decision-making power.
- Ideally, your remote team(s) can run as an autonomous pod; avoid giving your remote teams the grunt work and don’t let your teams at HQ take all the exciting projects. Otherwise, you can make your remote teams feel like second-class citizens. It’s imperative to treat each team (wherever they are) as a ‘center of excellence.’
Tips for virtual meetings & communication tools
- When in meetings, make sure whoever is leading the meeting at HQ checks in with remote people on the video call to make sure the video and sound quality are good.
- When on video conferences, the host should engage with remote people for input
- Upgrade to Owl, which focuses the camera on whoever is speaking or implementing “one face one screen” rule, where every person must join the meeting from their own camera to avoid offline group chat, which is hard to hear over Zoom/Hangouts and can make remote attendees feel left out
- Google Hangouts, ZOOM & Slack are the most popular communication tools
Tips for team collaboration
- Download the Donut Slackbot, https://www.donut.com/. Donut spreads trust and collaboration across your organization by pairing up team members who don’t know each other well. You can set Donut to pair people at random or that are furthest (org-wise) from each other.
Globally, where are our teams located?
- India, Dublin, Dominican Republic, Russia, Portugal, Germany, London, Ukraine, Canda, Mexico, China, Sweden, Sapin, Minsk, Africa, Brazil, Prague, Argentina.
Other scaling tips:
- As much as we love Bootcamps that are teaching folks to code, it may be best to wait two years and hire them into their 2nd job post Bootcamp (unless you have the bandwidth to train very junior people).
- Best practice, when you can, start engineers off in a buddy system.
One last table topic that sparked an interesting conversation! Are women pushed into management too fast? We may need to punt that one for our next Beyond Salon! Want to be part of this conversation? We’ll be discussing it at an upcoming Beyond Salon. Sign up here to be notified about our events.
Special thanks to Julia & the folks at Terminal for supporting and sponsoring this Beyond Salon. Terminal has helped build many successful, growing tech teams across Canada and now in Mexico; hiring 200+ engineers for 30+ clients including Hims, Eventbrite, Chime, Gusto, and many others.
