Archive of posts with tag 'Remote Work'

Don't Confuse Motion With Progress

January 13, 2022 • #

When I read Cal Newport’s Deep Work a few years ago, one of my favorite ideas in the book that I keep coming back to in conversations is the idea of “busyness as a proxy for productivity”. Here’s how he puts it:

In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner

We’ve all worked with violators of this. People that always have fully-booked calendars, can never find a time to get tasks done, and constantly talk about how busy they are. One of the reasons people do this, whether subconscious or not, is that in the world of knowledge work, it’s seen as a virtue to be busy. “Man, that guy is always in high demand, it’s impressive how many things he’s doing every day.”

But behind the scenes, the impact of each unit of time spent “being busy” is miniscule. It’s a classic mismanagement of time and attention, but one that has obvious roots given the incentives in business to be seen. And when a behavior is rewarded, in this case with attention and sometimes even respect, it perpetuates.

So let’s talk about motion. Busyness is a form of motion, usually described in an individual context. Motion and progress are terms that apply more at a team or organizational level. What is progress anyway? Clearly progress isn’t just “Stuff Happening.” There’s got to be an outcome for any of it to be worth it. There should be specific and consistent directionality to goals, and measurable steps to get there.

The motion of the team doesn’t necessarily tie back to an outcome anyone cares about, though.

One example where this happens in practice is the infamous Recurring Coordination Meeting — the Standup, the Check-In, the Sync Meeting. Someone sets up a weekly recurring meeting, often with few specifics as to the outcomes expected from each one. In subsequent weeks, the team now pulls itself away from other duties to distract itself with Another Meeting. Now I’ve rarely met anyone who enjoys these kinds of meetings in the absolute sense. At best we tolerate them, or see them as some form of ritual necessity. But so often some initial hangup or friction point triggers someone to decide “we need to stay in sync on this topic”, and they make the Check-In Meeting. In a snap we’ve committed several people to an unknown number of future hours for an often poorly-defined expectation. We’d have been better off with one-off meetings until we feel the team going wayward again, if we need to regroup.

An aside: I remember an anecdote about Tobi Lutke, CEO of Shopify periodically deleting all recurring meetings to reset commitments. Like a brushfire routinely clearing the corporate undergrowth of recurring time-sinks that may have long since outlived their usefulness.

But let’s get back to the “motion” piece of this. You’re now meeting once a week on a subject, and because the time since the last one is so short, you end up discussing the same topics again and again. You run through a loop with each meeting, repeatedly discussing the same things, with a tad more detail each time. Because we’re touching the topic regularly, sometimes beating the same topic to death in more than one of these meetings with different permutations of attendees, we feel like we’re “doing a lotta stuff”. We’re moving around, Trello cards are getting edited, Jira tickets are moved up and down the list, a few commits get made. But none of these motions are, necessarily, indicators of actual forward progress along the line we want. They might be, but they just as likely make us feel like we’re making progress when we’re really not.

I can get in the car and drive around the block over and over. Motion is happening, but am I getting anywhere?

Just measuring ticket throughput, or cycle time, or stories-per-sprint, or any other metric doesn’t mean you’re making progress in any meaningful sense. Those metrics might be directionally positive, but are they doing the thing you think they’re doing?

It’s imperative to have good yardsticks by which to measure progress, rather than motion.

✦

The State of Distributed Work

August 12, 2020 • #

Like most teams, we’ve now been fully remote and distributed since March 13th, almost 5 months exactly after moving a team of 50+ to fully remote, with no upfront plan on how to best organize ourselves.

About 20 of our team was already remote (scattered across the lower 48) before the COVID lockdown started, but several of them were in the office fairly regularly. But that still leaves 30+ that were forced to figure out a remote work setup overnight. Even the previously remote staff had to get used to changes in communications with the rest of the team adjusting in-flight.

So what’s worked and what hasn’t? What’s the overall impact been?

My general view is that it hasn’t impacted productivity overall in a terribly material way. After a few weeks to find stability with the work-from-home reality, things settled into a regular cadence for the most part. Aside from many of us with kids and other home impacts having to manage solutions for school closures, e-learning Zoom classes, and cabin fevered children, the work cycle leveled off into a predictable flow.

Zoom life

Zoom fatigue is a serious thing. I don’t think we’re having more meetings or conversation on a minute-to-minute basis, but as many have pointed out during this lockdown, there’s something different about voice and video interaction that absorbs more energy, draws greater attention bandwidth, or something. It also seems that with all people remote, there’s a bit of a creeping tendency to inflate invitation lists and make meetings bigger than their in-person versions would be. No hard evidence of this, but it feels like we’ve got a higher average people-per-meeting than pre-quarantine. And for me, the more heads on the Zoom session, the more draining it tends to be.

Being on persistent video doesn’t help, since it pressures you to sit still and be visible in the frame, when in person we’d often be up and about, at the whiteboard, leaning back in chairs, or getting something from the fridge. We haven’t had enough time yet to develop the social norms about what’s acceptable and not while on remote calls. Personally, I’m inclined toward seeing other people and having them see me, since we’re all starved for the ability to interact face to face, but perhaps over time we’ll work out some norms about when it’s expected to be present at the desk and when voice-only would suffice.

Documents, artifacts, and async work

With collaboration, we’ve been far less impacted than I expected. We’ve been able to make do. Most product design groups live and breathe by sketching, drawing, or whiteboarding ideas, and I’ve yet to find any good distributed digital methods for replacing the exploratory process of sketching something out in a group setting. I’ve done a few Zoom calls where I’ll screenshare the iPad with Concepts open. It’s excellent that we’ve got tools like this today to do visual collaboration without too much friction, but it’s still very one-way — iPad sketcher is drawing, but others can’t “take a pen” themselves and add to it like they would at a whiteboard. I’m sure someone will develop a live Google Docs-like multiplayer sketchboard to fill this need (hint: someone please do this!).

Even in pre-COVID times, most of the company has always been pretty solid with asynchronous work. Things are facilitated through Slack as a foundational communication layer, then plenty of collaborative Google Docs and Sheets on top of that for interactive work. We recently set up Confluence, too, where we want to have a better central location for content — like an internal blog and a place that’s better for collaborative work on documents than Docs. The truth here is that there’s no shortage of tooling to help teams with async work; it’s a human behavior and comfort problem to get everyone in the right tempo of working this way.

Serendipity

One of the biggest benefits of co-located teams is the random hallway interaction you get that’s very hard to replicate remotely.

In some ways removing the random hallway chatter is what we often long for — a way to add more time to our day for deep work. But lots of hallway chatter results in not only human social connection, but also real work discussion and idea exchange. There still doesn’t seem to be a good mechanism to replace what gets lost here when you’re distributed. You do recover some productivity with more time for deep work (if you can keep the meeting-creep down), but it’s less clear what longer-term detriments there will be on the ideas never discovered or pursued that result from those random encounters. For a couple months some of us were doing regular “social hour” Zooms to fill this void. They were great for maintaining interpersonal connections, but didn’t solve the problem for new product ideas or work topics.

It still remains to be seen how many companies return to full in-person work models after all of this settles down. I’m sure many will go back to something almost resembling the pre-shelter model, but I’d bet that there’s plenty of residual work-from-home that’ll happen even in the most face-to-face-leaning organizations. Over time we’ll surely all adapt to some sort of regular pattern, hopefully landing on something more effective than we had before. I know that hybrid models have shown poor results in the past, but I think there’s a way to get to a place like that that works for everyone, now that we’re all subject to the same costs and benefits of working remotely.

✦

Figma and Remote Work →

August 11, 2020 • #

A thoughtful and transparent post from Figma founder Dylan Field on their plans for re-establishing a hybrid / hub / remote model for the future of their teams.

In many ways, we followed our normal design process in revising this policy. We thought about the competitive landscape and ecosystem, collected data, explored different options and then converged on a solution. However, unlike making a product change, this was weirdly emotional for me—small changes in policy sometimes felt like we were leaping between potential worlds. I didn’t feel like I had a framework for the decision until the end of our process and at times it was as if there was nothing to hold onto.

The idea of hybrid sounds attractive to me personally, but I can see the possible risks he describes here in ending up with sort of the worst of both worlds — expensive but oft-deserted office and lack of clarity on who’s in or out each day. We’re unsure what our plan looks like specifically, but there’s no immediate pressure to overcommit on a particular plan just yet. This is interesting food for thought on what others are doing.

✦

Will COVID Kill the Office? →

July 2, 2020 • #

Rory Sutherland’s latest column for The Spectator:

Covid-19 will change how humanity works. Lockdown has revealed that a large part of the busyness of business is driven by the need to signal commitment (presenteeism), rather than the creation of value. Many people have realised that the most stressful part of working is not the worthwhile work itself but the accompanying worthless bustle. We have seen how commuting is frenetic and often unnecessary. In the future, perhaps people will go into the office when they need to or want to, rather than simply because they must.

✦

Hybrid WFH is Dangerous →

June 10, 2020 • #

Interesting perspective here on the effectiveness of hybrid in-office/WFH models of work, which are likely to be popular in reopening cautiously:

Hybrid structures are hard to get right because, baseline working methodology will be entirely different. And I don’t mean pair programming, which can still be done using VS Code Share or what have you. I mean the decision making structures. How an organisation makes decisions sets the culture, defines your hiring and creates the career path for leadership.

✦

Weekend Reading: Universal Laws, Tandem, and Computers That Can See

August 3, 2019 • #

📚 Universal Laws of the World

A list of broad laws that apply to all fields. Thoughtful stuff as always from Morgan Housel:

6. Parkinson’s Law: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

In 1955 historian Cyril Parkinson wrote in The Economist:

IT is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Thus, an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and despatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis. An hour will be spent in finding the postcard, another in hunting for spectacles, half-an-hour in a search for the address, an hour and a quarter in composition, and twenty minutes in deciding whether or not to take an umbrella when going to the pillar-box in the next street. The total effort which would occupy a busy man for three minutes all told may in this fashion leave another person prostrate after a day of doubt, anxiety and toil.

His point was that resources can exceed needs without people noticing. The number of employees in an organization is not necessarily related to the amount of work that needs to be done in that organization. Workers will find something to do – or the appearance of doing something – regardless of what needs to be done.

💬 Tandem

This is a neat collaboration tool for distributed teams that just launched. It’s built on Slack and has integrations built for many of the common productivity tools that modern remote teams are familiar with. I’m keen to take a look at this for doing more real-time work with my remote co-workers.

👁 Computers That Can See

As computer vision continues its advance, machines are getting better and better at converting images and video into structured data. Computers have historically had sensor data feeds through text, binary data streams, and user inputs; eventually they’ll all have visual inputs, as well.

✦

Structuring Work and Teams at Basecamp →

July 3, 2019 • #

Like many working in product, I’ve been a follower-slash-admirer of how Basecamp works for years.

This model of working in 6-week “cycles” sounds like an attractive option for organizing a team, without falling into the onion-slicing trap of what agile can become — where more time is spent microscoring, tracking, and measuring velocities than on defining what needs to get done and why.

Once a six week cycle is over, we take one or two weeks off of scheduled projects so everyone can roam independently, fix stuff up, pick up some pet projects we’ve wanted to do, and generally wind down prior to starting the next six week cycle. Ample time for context switching. We also use this time to firm up ideas that we’ll be tackling next cycle.

I like the idea of spacing the cycles for the inevitable bugfixes, polishes, and the randomness that crosses the transom unexpectedly. And, importantly, it leaves time for the product team to think through planning out what to slot for the next cycle, and exactly how things should be build (see more about Ryan Singer’s hill charts). Another topic is on how to tackle The Big Stuff. Fried’s point on how they do that is to do some “scope hammering” — chop it down to whatever the 6-week version looks like:

The secret to making this possible is something we call scope hammering. We take the chisel to the big block of marble and figuring out how to sculpt, nip, and tuck a feature into the best six-week version possible. It’s all about looking carefully at a feature and figuring out the true essence. Not what can it be, but what does it need to be?

Before any project is included in a cycle, we’ve already figured out what we think the six week version is. We don’t include planning in the cycle time — all the planning and consideration happens in the pitch. It has to happen before the work is slated to be done by a team. That way the six weeks is all implementation and execution. No time is spent on big unknowns — we try to make sure all the big stuff is known enough before we get started.

This process would improve things for many folks, but could very well be unworkable for others. The article links to an example kickoff note that shows what one of the Basecamp work cycles looks like. I’m always fascinated to see new ideas on how teams work together.

I’ve always been largely agnostic to systems in terms of which is better than another writ large. If a system increases your team’s output from 3 to 5, or from 4 to 7 on the whole, it’s a good system. That doesn’t mean there aren’t better ways to tweak or optimize, but there’s too much “that sucks, this is better” literature out there that confuses folks.

Use what works, and continue experimenting cautiously but confidently.

✦

Weekend Reading: Data Moats, China, and Distributed Work

May 25, 2019 • #

🏰 The Empty Promise of Data Moats

In the era of every company trying to play in machine learning and AI technology, I thought this was a refreshing perspective on data as a defensible element of a competitive moat. There’s some good stuff here in clarifying the distinction between network effects and scale effects:

But for enterprise startups — which is where we focus — we now wonder if there’s practical evidence of data network effects at all. Moreover, we suspect that even the more straightforward data scale effect has limited value as a defensive strategy for many companies. This isn’t just an academic question: It has important implications for where founders invest their time and resources. If you’re a startup that assumes the data you’re collecting equals a durable moat, then you might underinvest in the other areas that actually do increase the defensibility of your business long term (verticalization, go-to-market dominance, post-sales account control, the winning brand, etc).

Companies should perhaps be less enamored of the “shiny object” of derivative data and AI, and instead invest in execution in areas challenging for all businesses.

🇨🇳 China, Leverage, and Values

An insightful piece this week from Ben Thompson on the current state of the trade standoff between the US and China, and the blocking of Chinese behemoths like Huawei and ZTE. The restrictions on Huawei will mean some major shifts in trade dynamics for advanced components, chip designs, and importantly, software like Android:

The reality is that China is still relatively far behind when it comes to the manufacture of most advanced components, and very far behind when it comes to both advanced processing chips and also the equipment that goes into designing and fabricating them. Yes, Huawei has its own system-on-a-chip, but it is a relatively bog-standard ARM design that even then relies heavily on U.S. software. China may very well be committed to becoming technologically independent, but that is an effort that will take years.

The piece references this article from Bloomberg, an excellent read on the state of affairs here.

⌨️ The Distributed Workplace

I continue to be interested in where the world is headed with remote work. Here InVision’s Mark Frein looks back at what traits make for effective distributed companies, starting with history of past experiences of remote collaboration from music production, to gaming, to startups. As he points out, you can have healthy or harmful cultures in both local and distributed companies:

Distributed workplaces will not be an “answer” to workplace woes. There will be dreary and sad distributed workplaces and engaged and alive ones, all due to the cultural experience of those virtual communities. The key to unlocking great distributed work is, quite simply, the key to unlocking great human relationships — struggling together in positive ways, learning together, playing together, experiencing together, creating together, being emotional together, and solving problems together. We’ve actually been experimenting with all these forms of life remote for at least 20 years at massive scales.

✦

Weekend Reading: Product Market Fit, Stripe's 5th Hub, and Downlink

May 11, 2019 • #

🦸🏽‍♂️ How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit

As pointed out in this piece from Rahul Vohra, founder of Superhuman, most indicators around product-market fit are lagging indicators. With his company he was looking for leading indicators so they could more accurately predict adoption and retention after launch. His approach is simple: polling your early users with a single question — “How would you feel if you could no longer use Superhuman?”

Too many example methods in the literature on product development orient around asking for user feedback in a positive direction — things like “how much do you like the product?”, “would you recommend to a friend?” Coming at it from the counterpoint of “what if you couldn’t use it” reverses this. It makes the user think about their own experience with the product, versus a disembodied imaginary user that might use it. It brought to mind a piece of the Paul Graham essay “Startup Ideas”, if you go with the wrong measures of product-market fit:

The danger of an idea like this is that when you run it by your friends with pets, they don’t say “I would never use this.” They say “Yeah, maybe I could see using something like that.” Even when the startup launches, it will sound plausible to a lot of people. They don’t want to use it themselves, at least not right now, but they could imagine other people wanting it. Sum that reaction across the entire population, and you have zero users.

🛤 Stripe’s Fifth Engineering Hub is Remote

Remote work is creeping up in adoption as companies become more culturally okay with the model, and as enabling technology makes it more effective. In the tech scene it’s common for companies to hire remote, to a point (as Benedict Evans joked: “we’re hiring to build a communications platform that makes distance irrelevant. Must be willing to relocate to San Francisco.”) It’s important for the movement for large and influential companies like Stripe to take this on as a core component of their operation. Companies like Zapier and Buffer are famously “100% remote” — a new concept that, if executed well, gives companies an advantage against to compete in markets they might never be able to otherwise.

🛰 Downlink

A neat Mac app that puts real-time satellite imagery on your desktop background. Every 20 minutes you can have the latest picture of the Earth.

✦

Weekend Reading: Remote Work, Autonomous Behaviors, and AirPods 2

March 23, 2019 • #

👨🏽‍💻 Why Naval Ravikant Thinks Remote Work is the Future

Anyone that works in a successful company with a large distributed staff can attest to remote-first being the future for knowledge work organizations. The more we expand our remote team at our company, the better we all get at realizing all of its benefits. It seems like an inevitability to me that there’ll be a tipping point where all new tech companies begin as remote-centric groups. Naval, the founder of AngelList (which is a key player in recruiting and hiring infrastructure for startups):

“We’re going to see an era of everyone employing remote tech workers, and it’s not too far away. In fact, now’s the time to prepare for it. But I think in the meantime, the companies that are going to do the best job at it are the ones that are remote companies or that have divisions internally that are remote. It’s going to be done through lengthy trials. It’s going to be done through new forms of evaluating whether someone can work remotely effectively.”

🚙 Twelve Concepts in Autonomous Mobility

Jan Chipchase from Studio D posted these fun, creative, realistic, and sometimes scary speculations on what sorts of behavioral side effects could play out with the proliferation of autonomous vehicles. See also the follow on 15 more concepts.

The practice of what we currently call parking will obviously change when your vehicle is able to park and drive itself. Think of your vehicle autonomously cruising the neighbourhood to be washed, pick-up groceries and recharge its batteries whilst you’re off having lunch. What is the optimal elasticity of your autonomous vehicle to you? What are the kinds of neighbhourhoods it likes to drive around in when you’re not using it? This is an especially pertinent question, when a vehicle is considered a sensing platform — the technology to autonomously negotiate the city can collect rich data for other uses.

🎧 Apple Releasing New AirPods

While the batch of feature enhancements isn’t mind-blowing, I’m glad to see Apple continuing to evolve these. AirPods are the best product they’ve released since the iPhone. I use mine for hours every single day — far more than I ever used any previous headphones. I recently got one of these Qi wireless chargers for my office, so I’ll be glad to have the inductive charging for the AirPods, too. Of course the extra battery life will be a huge plus.

✦

The Missing Communication Link

October 8, 2018 • #

Slack grew huge on the idea that it would “replace email” and become the digital hub for your whole company. In some organizations (like ours), it certainly has, or has at least subsumed most all internal-only communication. Email still rules for long form official stuff. It’s booming into a multi-billion dollar valuation on its way to an IPO on this adoption wave.

But over the last couple of years there’s been something of a backlash to “live chat” systems. Of course any new tool can be abused to the point of counter-productivity. As tools like Slack and Intercom (a live chat support software) have become widespread, people and companies need to find normal patterns of use that are comfortable for everyone. In our company, Slack is where nearly everything happens — including quite a bit that, on the surface, looks like noise and random chatter (our #random is something to behold). One common argument is that people now spend more time keeping up with Slack conversation than they ever did with email. Maybe so, maybe not. But regardless, isn’t analysis of the time spent on one versus the other missing the point?

My general argument “pro-chat” is that a world with Slack adds the layer of communication that should have been happening all along and wasn’t. For me, I know that I’m better informed about the general activity of the business with Slack than without. It takes some care and attention to keep it from becoming a distraction when it’s unnecessary, but I’m willing to make the effort.

Anyone that compares the world of Corporate Slack to the prior one would notice a striking similarity in work patterns. Workplaces are social, people are people, and will talk, joke, commiserate, and enjoy each others’ company. I try to picture a world where we could effectively work as a distributed team with 50+ people dispersed over 11 states without tools like Slack. Looking at it that way, it’s easy see the downsides as manageable things we’ll figure out.

Effectively using new systems for collaboration is just as much about adapting our own behavior as it is about the feature set of the new tool. Each tool is not perfect for everything (as much as their marketing might say so). I think much of the kickback is from those that don’t want to change. They want all the benefits of a system that conforms around their comfort zone.

✦

Browse the full archive →

✦