DesignOps 2020-Designing Distributed: Leading Doist’s Fully Remote Design Team (Session Notes)

Speaker: Ana Ferreira, Head of Design at Doist

— Anna is Head of Design at Doist, a pioneer of remote productivity software
— In 2020, people were abruptly thrown into remote work, and might not be enjoying the experience
—  Today talk will be about leading fully remote design team at DoIst, and the learnings that have resulted.

— As disclaimer: Work from home is different when it is caused by a global pandemic

— Everyone is human, and everyone gets stressed, especially in 2020
  • Time-scope and work-cycles had to increase
— 2020 has been a strange year, but Anna felt a kind of inner peace that she had worked at Doist for so long
— Talking with friends, and learning about how people were handling remote work
— Talk will focus on best way to handle work resiliently in remote setting

— Anna points out three differences in how Doist does remote work: Trust, Balance, and Communication

— Two of differences embedded as part of Doist core values
  • Trust implied in all other values at Doist
— Other principles include:
  • Capable and responsible for one work and make communication a priority
  • Ambition and Balance in Work with non-work lives
  • Impact in everything done in product from user stories to workflows

— Without trust, no relationship can prosper

— However, companies are using methods that undermine trust
  • Tracking Software
  • Online Indicators
  • Enforcing Work Hours (to the detriment of personal life)
  • Discussions happen exclusively in silos

— Things happenings in silos is particularly damaging— people don’t know necessary information
— Unaware of impact pandemic is happening to company, and basic operations
  • This influences work and sate of mind

 

— Doist is opposite of all these negative actions
— People know they shouldn’t be waiting for a response, and have clear understanding of expectation
— Each employee from CEO to front-end, to marketing, set and design their own work schedule to find the hours that work best for them
— Organize work around life, as opposed to life around work

— During challenging times compressed workday made to create help with partners
— For Ana, an example was this philosophy in action was not being productive and stopped work by reading book by window and got sense to return to work after an hour
  • The flexible scheduling does wonders for sanity

— All channels are public including leadership discussions at Doist
— Nothing done for blame game purposes

— Ana found a study conducted in 2016, where companies in high trust get lower employee turnover
— Good for Doist and Tech Industry standard
— Trust should be encouraged in workplace

 

 

— Second important element is balance, as companies typically don’t respect the time of their employees
  • Busy is a badge of honor. Working nights and weekends expected.
— Eventually though, the work doesn’t get done, and employees leave company and repeat process at their next job.
— People are encouraged to put on their own oxygen mask first, and to take care of themselves outside of work

— At Doist, workers disconnect on nights, vacations, and other designated times
— Transparent about these values in their communication
— Even on 1:1s were transparent about what needed to be done, and encouraging people to reach out if they needed help

— Burnout still happens, but make it public in company
— Help understand why productivity went down and recognize vulnerability
— Try to encourage people to snooze on nights and weekends
— Goal is to work hard and focused while working, but be able to disconnect and enjoy life

 

— Communication is key as well. Ana saw too many people complaining about being stuck in video calls, which were more exhausting than normal meetings
  • Sense of constant notifications
  • No opportunities available to conduct deep, focused work

 

— Everyone was pushed to their limit, and we struggled with communication in past, and felt overwhelmed and fear they couldn’t connect
— Built own internal tool to create balance within the organization
— Calendar only has four meetings, and the rest in deep focused work
— Can take time to coordinate between people
  • As a side note, meetings are not best way to solve communication issues

— Asynchronous communication is expected. At Doist, there is a cultural understanding of never expecting immediate answers

— There is a distinct advantage to this:
  • People have a voice and can check up with each other
  • Allows people to ask and provide better feedback—get clear answers
  • Lets you build documentation as you are having discussion
  • Keeps content search and readable by anyone at time
  • Allows you to bring discussion at any point
  • Example of developing new landing pages
— Finally, this kind of communication allows people to allow deep and focused work
  • Since we communicate in our terms focus on tasks

— Meetings don’t exist for decision making, but for brainstorming and one-on-ones
— Before meetings make sure agenda is shared in advance and people know what is discussed
— Create a list of next steps
— Brainstorming meeting of next steps and summary shared with everyone in company

 

— Mindful communication allows people to organize work hours as what is best for them

 

— Pyramid of tools that are used at Doist
  • Synchronous (only emergency, in-person meetings and mindful meetings)
  • Asynchronous (software is used to make it do the work, as well as knowing each other and having fun)

— It means we care about each other personally and give space for people to share struggles, doubts
— Encourage people to organize work around their vacation, and to use their vacation days
  • Doist uses tools to facilitate asynchronous communication

— Always have smaller tasks. Need to work on something that doesn’t demand mental power

— Preference is to brainstorm asynchronously, and meeting outcomes are shared with other groups

— Fun and good to improve team spirit
— Everything is recorded,  and people can rewatch if they want to redo the workshop
— Shared documentation lets people know why decisions were made, and continue each work
— All documented in original format
— All items In company are public
— Have clear owner of each task. from small as icon to Doist board
— People can ask for support, and but designers for schedule
— Doist evaluates the work and not the raw number of hours

— In summary:

  • Care about your colleagues, and choose people over work. We are all human, and we all go through hard times
  • Create an environment of trust, where you encourage employees to create their own work schedules. Everyone will be productive and happy
  • Evaluate the work produced, not the hours done. The results are what matter
  • Don’t rely on meetings to do the work. Find other ways to communicate.
  • Make sure you are needed for any meeting, and if not, ask for a meeting summary. If there is no summary, create it

—If you need to have a meeting start with an agenda, and end with a list of next steps. From personal experience this will make all meetings more productive and time constricted .

— The most important piece of advice that can be given as contributor, manager, or company:
  • Block time for Deep Work, and encourage people around you to do the same
  • Deep Work is where value is produced

That concludes the presentation. Thank you!

 

Questions

  1. How do you communicate to clients or deadlines?
Work on their own products, which does help.
Hard deadlines don’t happen too often
Big releases, where people worked on day of release
Bugs and shipped feedback and finalize everything
Led to no one feeling stressed, as deadlines reduced
  1. How to manage knowledge sharing across all teams? Any magic tool for knowledge sharing?
No magic tool for sharing
Try to document everything. For any feature worked on make sure you have product spect to start with
To begin project without clear idea of problem, time to solve, necessary teams to fix problem
Get people in group
If feature will be responsible to make things happen
Ability to ship everything, and small circle of communication
Documentation files are created for everything. Implementation and design spec are created
Even for person on support team, they will read design documentation and know all the feature work
Document as much as possible. Things will fail, but as more documentation happens can catch more.
  1. Companies have found good group of remote workforce? How to build culture of trust for remote work?
Someone from Spotify had nice metaphor of trust battery
Any relationship you start has 50% charge, as interactions increase you will charge
Trust implicitly people you work with, and they likely won’t disappoint, and will deliver instead.