A lot of companies, such as Zapier, Crowdbotics, Automattic, Buffer, and GitLab are successful as 100% remote teams. A lot more entrepreneurs become successful in launching their SaaS products with remote teams on board. It’s not yet a common operating model, at the same time it’s definitely trending because of obvious benefits. At the same time, there’s not much information about how to work with a remote team and why they are successful in their remote work-model.
By all means, if you feel comfortable working with a co-located team, it’s up to you and this post is not worth reading. However, if you’d like to catch some ideas on how one remote team can deliver successfully – than keep reading 😉
From day one, Corpsoft.io has always been a remote partner to all our clients. And we encouraged working remotely with the same energy and self-devotion as if all our employees working in the same office co-located. We have always been aiming to work with people all around the world, so our client’s geography included really different time zones and schedules, moreover, the geography of our team’s working locations was also truly broad.
We’ve learned several components to successful remote work:
- Team scrummage;
- Digital ecosystem;
- Mindset for shipment.
Team scrummage
By far, the most important thing that we figured is that we should give up resourcing problems, allocations, hours tracking, etc. We “scrummage” like in rugby. When we get a project, we scrum as a rugby team:
- We all test when needed to test;
- We all work on UX when it’s time to work through application UX;
- We all work on customer development when it’s time to prove/reject app hypotheses about potential users;
- etc…
Our team is not only cross-functional, but each member of it is willing to provide a maximum contribution on every stage of the project, not only at the stage for which individual is most skilled at (i.e. we do not have just “coders” who develop, we have engineers who work on the whole cycle). That enables specific creativity spirit when extraordinary and not common ideas are circulating and leading to interesting results.
Digital ecosystem
In a co-located work you can check progress by just asking. When working with a remote team, a sense of control and keeping a finger at pulse is significantly reduced. Transparent communication can fix this, but a proper ecosystem of digital tools, that is co-used by the team and client, can make sure everyone stays on the same page and can continuously delivery without a physical standing next to each other.
Here are the tools we’ve found handy for us.
- Slack;
- Jira;
- Estimatess.io;
- Git;
- Google Suite.
Mindset for shipment
Growing the mindset for continuous shipment is crucial for us. The best way we see this is to keep our remote team small and flexible. We keep focus on a singular mission and hold responsibility for the success of all our initiatives. This works well since small teams can move and ship fast and also appreciate flexibility given in such an environment.
Try working with Corpsoft.io’s remote team. Building outstanding digital products with a remote team is not that challenging… Contact us now 😉
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