Scaling A Distributed Team to 50+ Employees
The Todoist team shares their routine and tool set.
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Distributed teams — teams with 100% remote workers — are on the rise. Though how many times have you heard (or said) “I could never work remotely”? We’re working remotely at UpLabs, and we’ve found that the real obstacle really is to unlearn the traditional 9-to-5 grind. Then anyone can learn how to work remotely, and the best part: embrace the work-life balance it gives you.
“Commuting to the office, best way to start the day!”
~ Said no one. Ever.
Building our distributed team came about as an evidence and is the synthesis of many “needs” and “wants” we’ve had for awhile. We want the flexibility for our own lifestyle — needing to be present both in the US and Europe throughout the year — and as a young startup, we can’t let ourselves be restricted to one area when it comes to hiring.
As we’re embarking on this new challenge, we found a great deal of insights from the excellent Remote book by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. But the best way we found to learn from other people’s success and mistakes? Talking directly to teams who went through it.
Meet Alex Muench, Designer at Doist. this company created Todoist, the to-do list and task manager app that makes working remotely easier :) And they’re a completely remote team themselves!
Hi Alex! Let’s get right into the topic. Why did the Doist founders decide to go for a distributed team?
I don’t think it was something that was decided in advance. Amir, founder and CEO of Doist, just started to look for people that were good and that could help him make Todoist better. At the time, he didn’t just decide and say, “Let’s create a distributed team,” it was just something that happened. By now we realize the huge potential of this setup and fully embrace the remote team culture.
How big is the team now?
Our whole team has around 50 people. We currently have six designers, ranging from Product to Web, and graphic designers. If we count every developer on the team, including all platforms, then we have 22 developers.
Speaking of Culture, it’s quite a challenge with remote teams. Jason Fried and DHH who wrote Remote say:
“You don’t need everyone physically together to create a strong culture. The best cultures derive from actions people actually take.“
What have you learned along the way at Doist to improve communication and make sure everyone delivers?
To improve communication, I’d say there are four main things to list:
- Trying to find people that match our culture and love what they do
- Giving everyone a voice and making sure everyone feels comfortable to share their opinions and ideas
- Having one-on-one meetings where everyone can share their problems or ideas on how to improve things
- Having informal meetings and retreats to boost team spirit.
There is a huge lesson that we learned around this topic, though. Let me quote our Head of Android, Gonçalo Silva:
“Todoist was originally built by freelancers. This also played a role in the inception of our remote culture. Amir would hire freelancers to carry on specific tasks (development, design, accounting, etc), and then they’d part ways. The results were terrible, because people were not fully invested in the company or the product. It was generally passionless mercenary work.
Once we switched to hiring people permanently, giving them full-fledged working conditions (and perks) as employees, and involving them democratically in all kinds of decisions, passion and high-quality work naturally started pouring in.”
Can you describe your daily/weekly routine as a team?
Every Monday we have our weekly design and product meetings on Hangouts, to recap the last week and discuss the upcoming one. I start my day mostly at 9 a.m. CET and go through my to-do list that I put together based on our meetings.
During the week, we stay up-to-date using our communication app, discuss ideas, make announcements, and chat.
Aside from the weekly meetings, do you have other defined rules?
Everyone is supposed to work approximately eight hours a day — a 40-hour work week. This is very flexible, though; it’s understandable to have a less productive week every once in awhile. Everyone can organize their work throughout the week by themselves. This gives us a lot of freedom but also a lot of responsibility (to ourselves) in terms of self-organization.
Other than that, we get to enjoy a series of company perks like working from a co-working space, reimbursement for high-speed internet access, and much more. I really appreciate that.
We don’t have stand-up meetings, as we work from different time zones without fixed time-schedules, so we try to be as asynchronous as possible. We recently started working as “Squads,” which means that small groups of people from different areas or departments work together on a goal with a deadline. For example: two designers, one from the support team and one from the marketing team, work together. For this, we have clear guidelines and always write weekly reports to keep everyone up to date. This helps us keep focus and move forward quite quickly.
What tools do you use to help you collaborate within the team?
First and foremost, Todoist helps us organize our tasks.
To communicate with the whole team, asynchronous and synchronous, we use our own team communication app that is currently in its alpha stage. (By the way, if you’re interested in testing it, hit me up on Twitter). Other tools are Google Docs, Hangouts, Cloudapp, CloudUp, Dropbox and Github.
Here’s the beginning of my projects list, filters and Karma statistics. I use the blueberry theme on Todoist (blue is my favorite color.) :)
Our main tool in the design team for user interfaces is Sketch. We also occasionally use Illustrator (mostly our graphic designer does). The prototyping tool that we use team-wide, as well as with the marketing team, is Marvel.
Here’s a prototype of the latest Todoist Quick Add on iOS:
I personally don’t code that much yet, but I definitely want to get better at it and learn how designers and developers can work together more efficiently.
Why not just stick to your own craft?
Having an idea of how things work can help designers and developers discuss ideas to come up with the best solution. It also helps us (as designers) to understand what is possible to implement and bring to life.
Knowing a little bit of code (or a little bit of design when you’re a developer) allows you to do simple prototype validations without bothering or being blocked by other people.
These are the two main advantages of knowing a little bit of the craft from the other side.
On an individual level, what are the challenges and advantages of being distributed?
I personally believe that working remotely is a huge advantage. It enables every individual on the team to choose the work space and time that fits them the best, instead of having an office with fixed hours.
We do, though, have a small office in Porto, but not all people from Porto work in the office on a daily basis. As an example of how remote work works great for us, our support team can be reached 24 hours a day, because we’re spread across all time zones.
Do you think Doist would be a better product if you were in the same office?
The challenge of the distribution of the team is staying in sync, exchanging ideas, and communication in general. We try to solve this with our own products and the ones listed above, and it works nicely. You have to trust each other, take initiative, and be sure everyone delivers. So you have to find the right people for your team. Our products definitely benefit from our team’s cultural diversity.
Do you have any advice to someone who is hesitant to join a company remotely?
My first suggestion is to just try it! If you’ve ever wanted to work on your personal best schedule and not be tied to an office, remote work might be for you. If you’re a night owl, work at night; if you’re a morning person, get up early and just start working.
The biggest challenges for me were learning how, when waiting for feedback on one project, to move on to another. You’ll definitely get used to it. It makes you even more productive in finding solutions and not arguing too much when you’re able to articulate your ideas in written word and then move on to solving the next problem. You learn a lot in this regard, and you improve your own writing and communication skills.
The biggest advantage is the cultural diversity, and learning from many teammates around the world.
Totally agreed :) Thanks Alex!
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Many thanks to Ana Ferreira, Gonçalo Silva, Becky Kane and Lewis Mundt.
More about Alex
My name is Alex Muench. I’m a 27-year-old UI/UX and product designer from Germany, currently working remotely at Doist. We work on productivity apps like Todoist, the to-do list and task manager app that you might know. Also, a new communication app for teams is in the works. This is my main project, as the (at the moment) only designer in a small, internal team of six.
You can follow Alex Muench on UpLabs, Dribbble and Twitter.