Background: Why would a small team choose a technical team to spread out

My team (Qizhi Technology) is an Internet technology start-up small team, with about 20 members at present. The random personnel are mainly distributed in Hangzhou and Shenzhen. The main reason for such a small team to be divided into two places is recruitment. We are a new, niche and start-up team with relatively high requirements for technical members. It’s not that we want to be smart, it’s just that our business involves smart hardware, and there’s a lot of technology behind a solution. Therefore, in addition to the requirement of solid foundation, we also hope that the technical personnel have a strong learning ability, and have a strong initiative. At the beginning, the team was based in Guangzhou. Later, due to the business development, the recruitment problem could not be solved in Guangzhou in a short period of time. Therefore, the team then referred to the Internet talent flow report and chose to open a branch in Hangzhou. Shenzhen has more dynamic Internet talents compared with Guangzhou, so the technical team moved to Shenzhen. After settling in the two places, the recruitment of talents has been solved, and some other unexpected benefits have been obtained:

• Just now our main business distribution in the Pearl River Delta and Yangtze River Delta (next year will go to the world), in Hangzhou, Shenzhen two technical teams for technical support is convenient.
• We are partners with DJI and often need to debug unreleased hardware and SDKS together. A lot of communication is needed. The technical team in Shenzhen has optimized the communication efficiency with DJI to some extent.

More documents, less questions

Document more. More documents, a lot of things can be found, there is no need to ask a person, explain a time. The person asking the question might be a colleague, a product, or a marketing operation. By writing the document well at the beginning, it will be clear to anyone who has the problem later, and it will save time to explain. If A module is written by A, the person who knows the module best must be A. Now suppose A hands over the module to B, and A chooses the traditional way of handing over the module, and says what he thinks. B Choose the traditional “see what you think” approach, if you say so. Then look at the module yourself and ask if you have any questions. If not, let it go. After all, it’s impossible for two people to sit in pairs and read line by line and ask questions. So when A hands over to B, part of the information must be lost. At this point, if the module passes C or D to ask the question of module B. There is a loss of information and an additional investment of time. Of course, there is also the time forgetting curve, as the longer the project goes on, the more details about the implementation of the project will be forgotten. That’s a big part of communicating as a team: what the hell is this, why is this the way it is, why did you do it in the moment. You’ll get an inefficient, inaccurate response, and there’s a good chance you’ll find out for yourself. After a meal of operation, still nothing. What can a document be? It can be a requirements setting; It can be a prototype diagram or an interaction diagram of requirements; Can be a module of responsibility, implementation mode; The background of a technology selection; The application scenario and usage mode of a certain technology in the project; Can be a control design idea. After completing a phase of work, output documentation should be considered. This is not an additional task, but an important part of the job requirements. When you wrap a module, it is not complete until you have written the corresponding documentation. When you propose a bug, write down the steps and reasons for the bug, that’s done. So this bug is not dealt with, and also needs to explain why it is there. Give clues to things that have happened and that people care about in the future. One effective way to encourage writing is to incorporate time spent writing into your work. On many teams, this feature takes two days to develop, two days to complete and then the next feature, how do you have time to document? If you schedule time, write the document when it’s freshest in your memory after you’ve finished the feature. You can also make a summary in the process of writing a document, which is a beneficial arrangement for both the team and the individual.

Efficient IM in the office environment: Slack

If you want to do a good job, you need to do a good job. Since you need to communicate online, most of the text communication is in IM, a correct IM tool is very important. The only right choice is Slack. Wechat or forget, first of all, the limitation of chat records is a big weakness. How does a new guy look at his chat history when he joins? Secondly, it is impossible to manage wechat when there are many people. When two or three people in a group of 20 discuss a problem, the flow of unrelated people is disrupted. If grouped by project, a company would have too many groups. Another important point is that work is work and life is life. Most of us socialize privately on wechat. It’s ok to chat and play at ordinary times. There are too many things outside of work on wechat. The core reason is that wechat is not designed for the office environment. So choose IM for the office scenario. A screen sharing feature with Slack payments is handy for remotely navigating documents. QQ video sharing refresh rate is too low. The only downside to Slack seems to be the network, which requires a stable scientific tool for everyone to surf the web.

Meet regularly to build trust and improve communication

People are naturally introverted and extroverted. It’s also common to see people who are shy when they don’t know you well, but when they do, the conversation becomes more positive. This is a common situation. In addition, there are often new colleagues who are not familiar with other colleagues, and many questions are shy to take the initiative to communicate with them and execute according to their own guesses. Finally, I found that I misunderstood the waste of time caused by rework. The problem is even more pronounced with remote collaboration. Imagine that you are suddenly pulled into a group of about a dozen people who are online friends and all of them are communicating happily. You don’t know what they’re talking about or what their positions are. This time you have a question, in this group of “friends”, you do not know who to look for, the friendliness of the other side is hard to guess. I am a new person or less disturb others, do not give others an impression of a lot of things. People’s feelings are really very subtle, if in the same space worked together, familiar with the trust will increase significantly. In an office, just the question of the length of time, a slower month will also be familiar with. But people in both places can’t, so make sure you schedule regular meetings. Right now we have about one week of travel a quarter. When a task requires close collaboration, it is arranged to develop together. In addition to increasing familiarity, collaboration can also increase cohesion within a task. It is also best to arrange for everyone to join the team. After we are familiar with each other, we can communicate more boldly and positively.

Advocate the use of voice communication

Out of courtesy or professional practice, most communication is done by writing. But if it’s a small discussion, it’s easy to see how much more efficient voice is! Typing is still not as fast as speaking, and voice response is real-time and can be expressed more directly. So jump into voice chat when a few sentences don’t make sense. This situation mostly occurs in the communication of problems encountered in the execution of specific tasks. Many teams require a daily paper summarizing the day’s work. I think voice communication is better in groups, although it may take a little longer. Because in this process, we can not only understand the progress of grid work, but also exchange problems encountered. Synchronizing the achievement of the team’s goals promotes team cohesion. Simply sending a paragraph about the completion of today’s work is still less effective.

conclusion

Distance will certainly bring about the decline of communication efficiency. This is a natural consequence. Problems should be considered to solve, to optimize, problems will not go away. We should not avoid and ignore this problem, but should actively think about how to improve the communication and collaboration efficiency of remote teams. Don’t assume the other side has it all figured out. It’s the same as “trust but verify” in project execution.