Normally people like to talk, or rather argue, about how to manage remote development teams. The first mistake in this discussion is the focus on the word 'management'. The mere fact that they are remote already implies a certain loss of control. And the harder you try to regain control, the less control you may actually have. Forty years ago "The Mythical Man-Month" debunked the idea that throwing people at a problem will help, and yet we still see that kind of thinking with remote development. Successful companies these days usually have successful managers who focus both on removing barriers to performance in their direct reports, as well as giving their own managers the illusion that they have the control they desire. In Neo4j we have taken this further with a company culture that understands and respects the loss of control necessary to deliver the highest quality products in the shortest time.

1. Manage Distributed Teams
Craig Taverner
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2. The Perception of Control

3. My history with distributed teams
AmanziTel
Proprietary
Neo4j

4. AmanziTel

5. Neo4j

6. But Seriously - how do we do it?
It’s all about information flow!

7. Phases of Maturity
• Architecture mirrors Geography
• Three offices means three products
• Architecture mirrors Personality
• Products or modules centred on strong individuals
• Architecture mirrors Design
• Architecture independent of geographic or character centres

8. Open Source Rules!
• Open Source projects succeed despite unmanaged, distributed
teams
• No HR - contributors promote themselves
• Distributed source code control at the core
• Organically grown development processes
• Works without face-2-face
• Centred on the source code
• Agile, agile, agile!

9. Recruitment
• Proprietary <— office employees
• success: strong leadership
• fail: strong leadership
• AmanziTel <— managing outsourcing
• success: mini-project and code review
• fail: remote managers grow weak teams
• Neo4j <— attract top talent
• success: recruit top, proven talent
• fail: hard to find

10. Development Process
• Distributed revision control: git & github
• Everything is a branch
• Pull-requests and code reviews
• Team code reviews
• Agile Development
• Small teams
• Standups & wall-walks
• Acceptance, integration and unit tests
• Communication
• Regular but brief
• Video always, faces visible

12. The Perception of Control