Managing Teams Remotely

Sooo… Not sure you’ve noticed, but there’s been a pandemic going on outside for the last ~6 months-ish.

Within this context, most tech companies (and non-tech companies as well) had to pull an unexpected shift to operate their businesses completely remotely, with everyone working from their homes.

My company was not different, and I happened to be transitioning teams when that all happened. So I basically had to “on-board myself” as the new manager of my new team and get up to speed to work with them, all without seeing anyone in person.

That being said, I had some experience in the past working with remote teams, located in different countries (including leading projects), and I had met my new team members in person before as well, I was just not their manager at that time. So I guess the transition was not that hard in the first place.

Anyways, I have been learning more and more about both management and working with remote teams (not only by experience, but reading a lot about it too), and it’s been quite interesting to find that certain management styles and techniques become more or less important when managing distributed teams.

So last Tuesday (June 2nd) I was invited to give a lightning talk at the first online edition of Tokyo Tech Meetup, and that’s what I decided to talk about: Managing Teams Remotely.

Kudos to the organizers Shane Reustle and Shoin Wolfe for the very professional and inclusive event (they had Japanese ⇔ English interpretation the whole time, it was pretty awesome).

Here’s my presentation deck, with some extra slides containing the text summary of what I talked about (I’m realizing more and more the value of having 2 versions of slide decks, one with less text for the presentation, and one with more text to share as a standalone material).

The event was recorded, so I’ll also try to share the video later on. In the meantime, let me know what you think of the points made in this talk. Do you agree? Do you think there’s some critical stuff missing? I’d love to hear more opinions :)