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In my experience, I have worked for different types of IT/RD companies: product companies, outsource, out-staffing. Some of them were office type, and some of them full remotely. Before my first experience in remote work, I was 100% sure that it’s tough to build a successful product if you have all the team remote. But I was wrong. Building a high productive team is possible in remote mode also.
What is needed to make a remote team productive?
To have a healthy corporate culture and real-life applied corporate values. Values that you write on your company website are not just simple text that makes your company more attractive but pillars of your daily activities. If you announce that one of your values is TRANSPARENCY, then all the company processes and necessary actions must be transparent. If you declare that one of your company values is cultural diversity, you need to apply a policy that will not allow people to discuss religion and politics. The best values for a healthy corporate culture are Transparency, Cultural Diversity, Good and healthy communication between the team members no matter the position one or another person has, and AGILE in changing/updating the processes any time requested.
Well-defined and agile at the same time, processes are super important in building remote teams. Processes create the rituals, where all the team members or a part of them are involved. Like stand-up meetings, replenishment, sprint planning, etc. The processes applied in your project must make all the team get together at least once per day. Simultaneously, processes have to be organized in a logical pipeline with fewer bottlenecks as it’s possible. You need to define the pre-production stage for a specific task scope; after this, the production or development side of the pipeline, QA, beta/alfa testing, and at the end, deployment with releasing the functionality to the customers.
Cross-Functionality of the skills. If, for your project, DevOps is highly critical, and only one person knows from A to Z this part of the job, it’s crucial to onboard at least another resource into the DevOps logic and architecture of your product. Otherwise, it’s risky. People in your team have to cover the functionality or processes that are not in their usual habitat.
All the things I wrote above are essential in the non-remote team also, but in that case, it’s easier to apply it in reality. In a non-remote group, non-formal communication helps a lot. When the team is remote, there is not so much non-formal communication, and the importance of the points from above becomes critical.
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