The Good, The Bad And The Ugly - Building Distributed Teams at RealmChristian Melchior - @chrmelchior

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What this talk isn’t

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and what it is!

What is Realm?• Mobile database company

• 2 main products: Realm Mobile Database and Realm Mobile Platform

• ~50 employees across the globe

• 2 main offices: Copenhagen and San Francisco

• ~1/3 work remotely away from the main offices all our the world.

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#1 Realise that every team is different

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name@realm.io

name@realm.io

Embrace the difference• Allow for experimentation

• A single team member can change the entire dynamic

• Don’t accept advise uncritically

• Partially vs. fully distributed team

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#2 Make communication asynchronous

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A new way of thinking• Harder than it sounds

• Interrupt-based vs. Push/Pull

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Standups

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Weekly status

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Code review

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• When you start the work-day or after completing a task.

• Make small pull requests

• Optimistic approvals: “+1 if X, Y, Z is fixed”

#3 Don’t let tools dictate process

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Who do you pick tools for• Team members ?

• Team leads ?

• Product Managers ?

• VP’s / Directors ?

• CEO ?

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What do we use?

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Slack at Realm• Currently 192 channels

• Everyone should be able to create a channel.

• Fine-grained channels

• Use threads

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• Only #general is required reading

• #<X>-team : Team channels

• #f-<X> : Discuss a specific feature

• #t-<X>: Very temporary channels

• #got: Here be dragons …

Slack is not perfect• Information overload

• Bad at storing persistent information

• Search in Slack is bad

• Notifications interrupt you

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Group notifications• @channel

• Never use this!

• @here • Only for real time interactions

• @g-java / @g-<group> • Best of both worlds

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Notification setup

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You are not at work all the time

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#4 Define how decisions are made

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Meetings• Weekly team meeting (3pm CET)

• Europe 😊 • America 😪☕ • Asia 😫☕

• Team leads meeting (8pm CET) • Europe 😫☕ • America 😊 • Asia 😴

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Decision making

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• Harder to get consensus

• Who makes “the call”?

#5 Be transparent in everything you do

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Communicate, Communicate, Communicate

• Surface blockers quickly

• Be explicit about what you need

• You avoid getting interrupted

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Pull Requests : Work In Progress

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• Visibility

• Lower the barrier for peers / community to participate

#6 Accept that turnaround is longer

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Learn to multitask

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• Immediate feedback is impossible

• Have a backlog of “easy” items

• Unblock others

#7 Assume that people have the best intentions

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Everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time,

their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand

Retrospective Prime Directive

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#8 Remember the social interaction

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Social interaction online• Okay to start the meeting with a little banter

• Video chat for meetings

• Remember special events

• Social chat channels: #pugs, #got, #food

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#9 Meet face-to-face

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It is harder to think of people as idiots once you

met them face to face

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Meet face-to-face• Realm-stravaganza ~ 1/year

• <Team>-stravaganza ~ 1/year

• Aligning on the vision

• Team building

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Lessons learned so far 👍• Everything becomes more transparent

• Trust + Flexibility = Happy employees

• Diversity

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Lessons learned so far 👎• Process problems are magnified

• Longer turn-around time for tasks

• No overlapping work hours

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9 tips for creating awesome distributed teams

1. Realise that every team is different 2. Make communication asynchronous 3. Don’t let tools dictate process 4. Define how decisions are made 5. Be transparent in everything you do 6. Accept that turnaround is longer 7. Assume that people have the best intentions 8. Remember the social interaction 9. Meet face-to-face

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Questions?@chrmelchior cm@realm.io

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