Q: In the next year, more and more my engineers and designers will be remote. What advice do you have for cultivating a good relationship with remote engineers and designers?
@hnshah generously shared his insights in this week's newsletter, summarized below 🙏👇
@hnshah generously shared his insights in this week's newsletter, summarized below 🙏👇
1/ Remote work leads to an increase in miscommunication. On a distributed team, you are not in the same physical space, so you don’t get to see each other in-person. You don’t get to just walk up to someone’s desk and show them something, or ask them a quick question.
2/ Instead, all of the forms of communication with your team are digital: text, voice, and video. For engineers and designers, the number one impact of miscommunication is being forced to redo work. All because of something that got lost in translation.
3/ Good relationships with remote engineers and designers require ensuring that there are methods for avoiding miscommunication. You do this by maintaining clarity.
4/ Your goal on a remote team is to create a culture where it’s OK to ask for clarification when something feels unclear. This is the key to successfully working on a remote team. Ensuring that everyone is on the same page about exactly what needs to be done.
5/ Here are a few tactical best practices to help you build good relationships with your co-workers:
1. Always write things down
2. Screenshare when possible
3. Postmortem everything that’s shipped
1. Always write things down
2. Screenshare when possible
3. Postmortem everything that’s shipped
6/ Always write things down: Whenever you’re on a call, make sure that anything that’s important gets written down. Options that were discussed, decisions that were made and next steps, plus who is going to do them.
7/ (cont.) Always write things down: Go even further for your recurring meetings and have a single document that incorporates an agenda and structured meeting notes of what was discussed each time. It’s also important to fully and clearly document specs to ensure understanding.
8/ Screenshare when possible: If you’re talking about work that an engineer or designer is doing, screenshare and go right into the tool where their work and tasks are documented. For example, this could be your ticketing system, a spec document or even an Invision prototype.
9/ (cont.) Screenshare when possible: Work together by having a discussion, going back and forth on the feedback and ideally collaborating in the appropriate tool while on the call. This way nobody has to remember to update things later.
10/ Postmortem everything that’s shipped: Especially whenever larger bodies of work are completed and shipped to customers. Marketing, product, big customer wins. It should all be postmortemed to understand what went well and what didn’t.
11/ (cont.) Postmortem: This way you are constantly assessing how things are going and are able to discuss how to improve them. Having great process and documentation is the key to remote work. You can’t just come up with a process and expect it to work.
12/ For more remote work best practices that are backed by research that we’ve done, read these 11 best practices for working remotely written by my co-founder Marie.
usefyi.com/remote-work-be…
usefyi.com/remote-work-be…
14/ Thank you @hnshah for these fantastic insights, and to both you and @MarieProkopets for everything you do to help us all learn to work better.
