Top engineering leaders who have built large, remote developer teams for tech unicorns, pre-IPO companies, and enterprises came together at the Turing Boundaryless: #BuildFromAnywhere event on 18 February 2021 to discuss the strategies, tactics, and tools for creating and managing high-productivity remote teams.
Turing.com co-founder and CEO Jonathan Siddharth kicked off the event with opening remarks where he elaborated about the massive advantages of being a remote-first company and why Silicon Valley tech giants are going for distributed teams.
“The new way is to look for the best people in the world who could contribute to your company’s success, not the best people who happen to be living near your office,” Jonathan said.
The guest list for the conference included Darren Murph, Head of Remote, GitLab; Pravin Desale, SVP of SDS and Appliances, Veritas; Suneela Joshi, Sr. Director of Engineering, Abbott Laboratories; Chris Herd, CEO, Firstbase; Anna Chukaeva, Co-Founder / COO, Carta Healthcare; Job van der Voort, CEO, Remote.com; Henrik Hussfelt, Director of Engineering, Proxy; Andy O’Dower, Veteran Product Engineering Leader, Former Head of Product, Carlease.com and Alex Bouaziz, CEO, Deel among others.
The much-awaited event delivered what it promised and much more as all the sessions were full of solid nuggets of wisdom. Here are the key takeaways from each session of the event in case you missed it.
1st Session: Secrets of Running High-Performance Remote Teams
GitLab’s Head of Remote, Darren Murph, joined Jonathan for the first session and discussed the do’s and don’ts behind successful remote-first companies. The conversation was full of new ideas as the duo touched upon various issues ranging from the importance of culture in remote work to asynchronous communication to time zone management.
Answering Jonathan’s questions, Darren explained some of the key concepts of remote work like ‘transparency and belonging,’ ‘psychological safety,’ ‘values fit,’ ‘documentation,’ etc., in detail.
“Many companies haven’t drawn the parallel between transparency in your work and belonging in your culture. But what we believe is that the more transparency and visibility that the entire team has to each other’s work, the easier it is for people to feel like they belong.” Darren said.
“Belonging is crucial to culture, especially in a remote environment,” he added.
During the session, Darren also shared his views about remote-first and hybrid-remote companies.
2nd Session: Managing Remote Engineers – Lessons from the Field
Turing.com CRO Prakash Gupta moderated the second session featuring renowned engineering leaders including Pravin Desale, Suneela Joshi, Anna Chukaeva, Andy O’Dower, and Henrik Hussfelt.
The high-profile panelists, who had gone through the challenges of managing remote teams during the initial months of the Covid-19 pandemic, gave the audience a unique opportunity to understand the key lessons that they had learned from the field.
“Remote-first is a mindset that you must apply to every aspect of your management,” Andy said.
Anna Chukeva, Co-Founder at @carta_health, joined us last week at the Boundaryless #BuildFromAnywhere event to discuss how she understands remote engineers’ needs. ?????
— Turing.com – Remote Work is The Future of Work (@turingcom) February 26, 2021
The engineering leaders also discussed the formulae that they implemented during the pandemic to continue to hire, onboard, and define success for a remote software engineer.
The session ended with a small poll where most of the panelists, barring Henrik, said they expect their organizations to go for a hybrid-cum-remote set-up in a post-Covid world.
3rd Session: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Managing a Global Remote Workforce
A new ‘remote-work mafia’ joined Jonathan for the penultimate session to discuss some of the challenges and opportunities to create a seamless, remote work culture. Firstbase’s Chris Herd, Remote.com’s Job van der Voort, and Deel’s Alex Bouaziz were at their absolute best during the conversation to give the audience an enthralling panel discussion.
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