Lean Startup

One of the most common and pervasive problems we all face is working across time zones. Cass Phillips will share concrete tips for successfully scheduling, communicating and managing across time zones.

In any workplace, people need belonging, affirmation and meaning. But organization values and employees sense of purpose are even more critical for increasingly virtual teams. Chris Byers, CEO of Formstack, a 32-person company with 11 remote workers (including Chris), will explore why purpose is so important for distributed workers and will talk about how that’s played out at Formstack.

Many aspects of running virtual teams are deceptively self-evident: Of course you need conference calls and some kind of water-cooler interaction. But as so many of us know from inefficient team calls, awkward long-distance introductions and other common problems, the obvious needs of a distributed workforce don’t often have obvious solutions. China Brotsky, director of operations and finance for SumOfUs.org, a 20-person non-profit with team members stretching from California to Tel Aviv, will cover the particular tactics that her organization has refined for effective, satisfying communication.

Cheryl Contee runs an established consulting firm and a new startup, both of which are fully distributed. She’ll touch on what’s different between the two and dive into processes her teams have refined over time to build culture and establish trust.

When Yammer established a new product group in 2013 with ten people in three different offices around the world, the team resolved not only to address potential communication problems, but to actively experiment with exciting ideas. With lessons from the bleeding edge, Christina Lucey, senior product lead, will detail what’s worked well, what hasn’t caught on and what they’ve learned about implementing new processes among far-flung offices.

Sadie Honey and Aaron Pava will share how CivicActions, a 20-person firm, has built a culture of safety and trust, specifically addressing ways to overcome conflict avoidance and knowledge silos, both which can undermine distributed teams. They’ll provide specific techniques any team can use to deepen relationships and increase flow, along with advice for experimenting with new tools on an established team.

Engineering teams commonly use group chat for shared communication. But it’s not limited to developers at all and can be super-useful for any team. David Yee, Co-Founder of Editorially (and author of numerous chat-bots, both useful and pointless), will talk about how his companies have used group chat and a surprising benefit to it for distributed teams.

Distributed teams require a higher standard of communication than co-located teams. Everett Harper, who leads customer development for Tetherpad, will focus on the example of sharing customer feedback with coworkers and will show how being explicit, embedding information appropriately, and providing habitual updates allow remote workers to stay connected over important issues–even when they aren’t time-sensitive.

Bob Sutton’s new book, Scaling Up Excellence, explores the challenge of building a growing organization. In this conversation with Eric Ries, we’ll look at the particular issues of scaling up on distributed teams and a range of principles that leaders can adapt for successful growth.

Office Optional Group Q&A #2 by Lean Startup