Mar 12
How We Cowork
We are a fully remote team of individuals in different time zones. We value asynchronous, written communication.
- Buddy System
a. You will be paired up with another engineer/designer of a similar role to help you get up to speed.
b. The purpose of the buddy system is to help each other, and have another person you can work closely with, and constantly ask questions.
2. Virtual Offices
a. At least one day out of the week, each team member will join a “Virtual Office”, which is a Google Meet session with one other team member working on similar tasks.
b. Both team members in the virtual office will work with Google Meet active, earphones, but microphones muted. If anyone has any issues to discuss, they can instantly discuss with the other team member in the virtual office.
c. Virtual offices will last for the entire work day. Each team member in the virtual office will work on their own work.
d. Virtual offices mimic working in the same physical office as another team member, seated next to you.
3. Google Meet
a. We hold weekly meetings to catch up on progress and ask questions.
b. Meetings are 2–3 times per week, and 15–30 minutes per meeting.
c. We use Google Calendar to schedule the meetings.
4. Slack
b. We prize asynchronous, written communication.
c. Do not wait until meetings to discuss issues. We value discussion via Slack messages.
d. Our channels are organized by product, issue, and team (e.g. design, engineer).
5. Trello
b. Similar to JIRA, GitHub/Lab Issues
c. The tasks to-do lists are organized on Trello for designers and engineers.
d. Each task starts off assigned to a (1) researcher, which gets passed to a (2) designer, (3) front-end developer, (4) back-end developer, (5) tester, (6) marketeer.
e. Each team member has a list in Trello that is sorted in order of importance. Each team member will work on his/her tasks in the order in the Trello board.
6. Google Calendar
a. All our meetings are open and transparent for any team member to join if necessary. We always keep an updated schedule.
7. Documentation
a. Written documentation is extremely important in an all remote team.
b. Google Documents
i. For non-technical documentation like this one.
c. GitBook
i. For technical and API documentation
d. Lucid Charts
i. For technical design, architecture, and flow diagrams.
e. GitHub Lists/Boards/Issues
i. For technical releases and issue tracking.
