Managing partly distributed teams

CTO Connection
Managing Partly
Distributed Teams
Kevin Goldsmith

@KevinGoldsmith CTO Connection / November 2021
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Types of distribution
• Fully co-located

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• Fully distributed

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• Fully distributed
• Partially distributed

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of people surveyed expect to work from home at least 1 day per week and
80% expected to work at least 3 days from home per week after Covid-19
according to an Owl Labs Survey
92%

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Unless you are trying to enforce an in-person culture, reinforcing the
idea that there is a center and people remote from the center sends a
bad mess
Distributed
NOT Remote

What makes working in
distributed teams challenging?

@KevinGoldsmith Nimble Autonomy
Distributed team challenges
• Conway’s law
• Empathy
• Communication
CTO Connection / November 2021

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Conway’s law
Datamation Magazine, April 1968
Organizations which
design systems...
are constrained to
produce designs
which are copies of
the communication
structures of these
organizations.

Conway’s Law Implications

“
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Eric Raymond restatement of Conway’s Law
If you have four groups working on a
compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler.

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Are we trapped by
Conway’s Law?

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No

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but

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It is easier to work with Conway’s
Law than to work against it

Subverting Conway’s law

• Be deliberate

• Be deliberate
• Find communication bottlenecks that conflict with architecture and
eliminate them

• Be deliberate
• Find communication bottlenecks that conflict with architecture and
eliminate them
• Design the organization to design the architecture

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The reverse Conway maneuver

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Sam Newman, Building Microservices
Netflix learned from this [Amazon] example, and ensured that from the
beginning it structured itself around small, independent teams, so that
the services they created would also be independent from each other.
This ensured that the architecture of the system was optimized for speed
of change. Effectively, Netflix designed the organizational structure for
the system architecture it wanted.

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Nimble Autonomy
Merriam-Webster Dictionary
: the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and
vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another
of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and
experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner
also : the capacity for this
Empathy

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Familiarity breeds trust

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is not the same as

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Level the field

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Take notes on paper

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Don’t hide

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Don’t hide *

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Someone who has forgotten that the people they work with are actual humans
well that is fine for you people at
corporate…
Recognize warning signs

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Get together regularly

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Leaders travel

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Humanize

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Include distributed individuals

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Fewer communication channels

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Document clearly

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Don’t get too obsessed with tools

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Establish common working times
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Take turns working off-hours
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Take turns working off-hours

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Break up the default pairing

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The modern workforce is
distributed

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Distributed teams create
challenges

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The challenges can be
overcome

@KevinGoldsmith
@NimbleAutonomy
https://nimbleautonomy.com
https://kevingoldsmith.com
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Managing partly distributed teams

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