On Tuesday I hosted a @ondeck #ODCC1 community session about 'Remote Company Building'

Topics:
Guiding Principles
Use Cases
Tools

This thread is a walk through the presentation

Our company - Perengo Inc - was remote from day 1.

Founders in Bay Area & D.C.
Team in Germany and Poland

Time difference of 9 hours

Grew team from 0 to 15 employees.

Post-acquisition (2019) remained remote as separate business unit and doubled headcount.

Most important principle of remote management:

Optimize for Single-Player Mode

> Provide direction for your team
> Give access to necessary tools and info
> Enable your team to get work done on their own

h/t @andreasklinger for popularizing this idea

Businesses can be analyzed across 2 dimensions

1) Location: Co-located vs. Distributed
2) Synchronicity of Work: Synchronous vs. Asynchronous

Remote first orgs are usually distributed + async

h/t @leonardofed

No need to reinvent the wheel.

Learn from the best:
@gitlab - Best employee handbook in the game
@buffer - Best org transparency via blog
@zapier - Best guide to remote work

Also, follow @darrenmurph @chris_herd @andreasklinger

Our guiding principles:

C.S.I.
A.C.D.C.
R.O.S.A.

Detailed description in the image

Communication is the life blood of any organization

View through OODA Loop:
Observe: Metrics; Sales
Orient: MKTG
Decide: Management
Act: Product; Sales

If information is siloed, you cannot go through the adaptation cycles as a collective org.

Follow @commandodev

Different types of communication require different channels

Think of comms along 2 dimensions:
Reach: 1 vs. N
Context: Sync (= immediate feedback needed) vs. Async (= self-paced)

* Transactional > Slack
* Evergreen (solid-state) > Wiki; Notion

Build your comms culture deliberately

To 'optimize for single player mode' we reduced meetings to a minimum.

The only all-hands meeting was a bi-weekly sync.

Self-org syncs between collaborators and within teams.

Other information relayed via written async comms.

I have written in more detail about our business-specific workflows in this blog post https://www.artlapinsch.com/remote-lessons/ 

I have written in more detail about communication for remote companies in this blog post (Part 1 of a series of posts) https://www.artlapinsch.com/remote-communication-ooda/

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