At Boomering we’re completely remote. One of my cofounders is in Berlin, the other in Pune. Our developers are in Pune, and our designers are in Nairobi. I’ve managed remote teams before, so this isn’t entirely new, but there have been some significant learnings so far. I expect this is because this is a brand new startup, rather than a 400 person scale up where I managed a remote team previously.
Agree a Roadmap Early
We didn’t do this upfront, and it was a struggle to get the team aligned on it afterwards. Initially, we specced out all the features we wanted to build for Boomering. We estimated the time and cost to delivery, and then transferred these into Jira as user stories. At this point we had a development technical document, an estimation document for front end and backend, and all the user stories for the product. However, what I had failed to build out was detailed sprint planning documentation. Because we were remote, we thought we could manage our planning sessions casually, and let developers pick stories in a way that made sense. This worked great initially, when we were working on scaffolding and the initial layouts. However after a couple sprints what I noticed was that we were working on interesting features, but not finishing the bits that we needed to launch an MVP. Those bits were back end pieces like integrations and API calls. To be fair, our back end developer bailed on us around this time and it took us a week to onboard someone else. However that wasn’t entirely the issue. I wasn’t communicating the goals clearly.
Communicate
If you are not going to do daily standup or a remote sprint planning session, it is your job to communicate as founder via writing the sprint direction and hypothesis at the end and beginning of every sprint. I want us to be a hypothesis driven company, so every sprint needs to deliver something that we can validate. That started disappearing after three sprints in, and I’ve worked hard to bring that back to the business. I suggest not getting to that point. Write out your sprint goals and hypotheses, and better yet, do this on a roadmap everyone has agreed to over three months up front!