We are a smallish group of about 30 developers working on Stingray. We have multiple teams spread over Stockholm, Montreal, Paris, San Francisco and Prague. This makes it a bit more complicated to have good communication and synergy.

How to build a remote team

Last year, when I attended GDC, I had 30 minutes to kill after lunch and decide to go watch this presentation on Remote Team management? I am glad I went to see it! This studio only hires remote workers for their production. And they got it to work seamlessly. Here are few takeaways from the talk:

• In order to ensure property communication among the development they force all developers to work on the same core hours regardless of their location You really have to like Pacific time!
• The artists can work from any time zone since they can’t “break the product”.
• They use Slack with a bunch of channels. And they have created channels just to blow off steam: to talk about their weekend, and their hobbies and post pictures about their favorite food.
• They use Ventrilo with lots of “virtual chat rooms” as well. And they try to talk to each other often. Some chat rooms are work related. While others are really for watercooler discussions.

Some more mundane and less relevant remarks on that talk:

• Not all good talk are one hour long (this one is only 30 min)!
• The subject seemed a bit boring at first, but the whole gig was really captivating. A good presenter can make anything sounds interesting.

How is it at Trello?

This article was posted recently and highlights some of the key rules the Trello team apply to make their “remote collaboration” works. Some key points for me were:

• Avoid impromptu design meetings and decisions: it is easy to talk to your co-located colleagues and take a big decision (ex: let’s create a global event service). And it is easy to communicate that decisions to the rest of your remote team 2 weeks after the fact with a Pull Request without much explanation. And two months down the road someone will reinvent the same event service because they didn’t know about it in the first place.
• Use video calls. And ensure everyone has a camera: I hate remote meetings with a passion. But it seems having meetings with everybody on camera help connecting with remote colleagues and makes communication easier. It also helps humanize those people who comment harshly on pull requests.