Zero to One during the Pandemic

Just as the now-infamous Pandemic has impacted the wonderful world of ours in various unthinkable ways — with regards to how we all live and operate — it also altered the way in which people worked. Most of the workforce across the globe were grounded(literally!), as soon as it arrived. All of a sudden most adults felt like (and treated like) the naughty kids who get grounded inside the house with no permission to get out! And the Business Travellers were hit even more strongly than the rest, having to cope with cool new — but unpalatable — terms like Green Lane, Air Travel Bubble, Circuit-Breaker, Social Distancing, Lockdown, New-Norm, etc.

[Image Credit: Vulcan Post]

‘Work From Home’ — a term, concept, and flexibility perk that was only popular in the tech industry(primarily in the western world), became the new-norm(There you go, I used that term I hate the most these days!) Due to the danger of Covid spread many organizations decided to switch to the remote working model — and that too, all of a sudden and overnight. Interestingly, despite the rapidness of the change, shifting to the remote model worked surprisingly well for many teams. This was primarily because they were used to some degree of remote work before and in general, had many years of experience with allowing their workforce to do their jobs from wherever and whenever they like.

However, what was unique in our company’s case was that most of us started off on the team itself remotely — with no kind of prior in-person engagement with the rest of the team ever before! This was quite uncommon, as well as daunting at the same time, in the beginning. So, how did we pull it off? This blog is an attempt to showcase the engagement model and practices we employed, and how we not only built an entire team from scratch during the pandemic lockdown but also launched a zero-to-one product working completely remotely!!

Onboarding

Abruptly losing the ability to physically interact typically has a potential productivity impact even on employees who have already worked with each other before. Now imagine the daunting task we faced when you have new employees — who have never ever interacted with other team members in person before — coming on board remotely! And that’s what we had to deal with at our Startup. Since we didn't curtail our growth plans, during the pandemic, we continued to hire and bring onboard new members even through the restrictive phases. This meant conducting the entire interview process via Virtual meetings and closing the deal without even meeting in person. Certainly not the easiest of undertaking. But we managed to execute on this well — thanks to all the online tools — and even met our hiring deadlines & quality bar.

But what was more demanding from our end was ensuring that the new employees coming on board had a seamless welcome experience, and were also ramped up in the right fashion. So, we made our New Employee Orientation (NEO) sessions completely virtual supported by Internal Wiki pages that enabled them to gain domain knowledge easily. This was important because getting folks tuned into the vision, strategy, product roadmap, and business goals were crucial to getting them fired up about what we were building, and how we were building it. We didn't compromise this process in any way thanks to the onboarding sessions, virtual ceremonies, and supporting tools our HR team had put in place.

Collaboration

Being located in Singapore during the pandemic, going into work was out of the question for us — thanks to the work restrictions — for almost the entire period from Ideation to Launch. This was a big impediment to cross-team collaboration, even as each team had figured out a way of working tightly within their units. And what made it even more taxing were the strict restrictions on the size of the groups that could meet in a public place. The maximum size was restricted to 5 people, and this limitation was never relaxed well after our Launch period. So, even if folks planned to meet outside to brainstorm ideas & approaches to solving specific problems, they had to phase it out! Physical collaboration and connections had vaporized so much from our work lives, that even our Launch Celebrations were via Google Hangout — toasting with Cocktail making kits that were delivered to our homes by our lovely HR department!

But, this did not deter the team in any way. Instead, we converted every Cool Cafe and Hip Restaurant in town into our co-working space and started sharing pictures from those interactions on our Slack channels. This motivated even the most grounded members to break out of the inertia and organize in-person catch-ups to discuss plans, requirements, and ideas in person. #CoffeeCollaborations #BarBrainstormings

Agile became more Agile

While working from home might have a set of generic effects on different kinds of teams, it poses a unique set of strains & tension to a product development team that is operating using an Agile Development Framework like Scrum. To be clear, virtual mode of operation has been supported for Agile teams via various online tools. But going fully remote is tricky, and needs to be dealt with a more organized and structured approach. So we had to employ new mechanisms for the various Sprint ceremonies and processes:

• Product Backlog Prioritization: A product backlog is a prioritized list of work for the development team that is derived from the roadmap and its requirements. In an Agile framework, this is an evolving artifact and needs to be updated regularly, based on new learnings. And since we were in the travel domain, in which the pandemic was changing the landscape rapidly & frequently, we had to constantly pivot and adapt to the changing demands. Despite our remoteness, We managed to keep this well-organized via a monthly Product Backlog Prioritization exercise that involved all the stakeholders and the leadership team, conducted via virtual meetings
• Requirements gathering: This was one aspect of product development that got a bit more exhausting than normal in our case. Even simple discussions- involving breakdown of requirements, clarifying problems being solved, etc — that could have been easily handled via informal face-to-face conversations, now needed virtual meetings! What would have been quick brainstorming whiteboard sessions, or coffee chats now meant yet another ‘sync meeting’. This meant multiple meetings, especially for the Product managers and leads. The days were getting packed with meetings to not just require what the stakeholders wanted, but also to discuss potential solutions to the problems to be solved and reviewing the implementation approaches, etc.
• Validating Features & UX Research: While not being able to hit the streets and talk to our potential target audience hampered our UX research, we employed some creative techniques to still continue to validate what we were building. This included collecting feedback from our own inner circle, friends & family, and other employee networks to validate product designs and flows. We also dabble with the idea of engaging crowd-sourced online UX research platforms but backed off as we felt they weren’t the same as directly engaging with the users yourself.
• Feature Spec Reviews: Having long meetings — especially with a fully virtual attendance — meant exhaustion, and could potentially lead to meeting fatigue. So, our Product Managers optimized the Spec review discussions by ensuring there were a good pre and post-meeting workflow in place. This involved sending out mails with Pre-read material & Feature Summary, Stakeholders adding their comments into the documents before the kickoff discussions, and finally Post-meeting summary communications sent out by PM’s calling out all the key decisions, agreements, and alignments.

We felt It was important to do the pre/post-meeting communications via mail, even though we had a Slack channel workstream because things could get drowned & lost very quickly — and easily — in a messaging channel as new conversations kicked in!

• Sprint Planning: This was undoubtedly the most draining exercise in the product development process under the cloud of the pandemic as we were handicapped by the inability of the team to meet in person. Our Sprint planning meetings typically ran up to 4 hours(or more!) for each of our 2-week long Sprint cycles. And conducting this virtually was not just taxing, but required a good amount of organization and prep-work. This included using Team workspace tools like Confluence to create Sprint Plans, discussing among the leads the Sprint Goals ahead of a Sprint plan meeting, etc.
• Work Streams: Since Slack was our main communications and collaboration tool, we created specific workstreams (as a channel), to have a ‘persistent conversational workspace” and orchestrate the collaboration between smaller slices of the team that was tasked with a specific product feature/functionality. This reduced the randomizations and distractions that might be caused by overloading common channels(with a broader audience) with specialized discussions (involving only specific members). This was important to ensure highly-optimized productivity for a fully remote team.
• Daily Standup: This recurring ceremony of a Scrum team was especially more critical to us. This was the only exercise via which everyone in a team could hear each other on a daily basis. Being fully remote, and not being able to see or interact face to face — this team-wide update was very helpful in keeping the team bonded together. In the early days — when we were in full lockdown, and the organization was small — we had company-wide daily standups. Every team shared their updates with the whole organization. This was very important to keep the entire company attached and feel tight. But later as the restrictions relaxed, and we could actually meet in person (as smaller groups), we reduced this to individual team level daily standups.
• Sprint Demo & Retro: Finally, working remotely didn't mean we skipped on the most important ceremony of the Scrum framework — the Demo that happens at the end of every Sprint to showcase what the Product Development team had built to the rest of the org. The Demo -as well as the Sprint Retrospective — were conducted virtually. This helped in keeping the Development team motivated and kept the rest of the org updated about how the product development was coming along.

Tools to the Rescue

Frankly speaking, remote work and virtual scrum teams are not new trends in any capacity, and the number of companies that telecommute — in at least some capacity — has been only growing throughout the decade. So, it’s only natural that by now we have a plethora of services and tools that allow teams to communicate, collaborate, and work together effectively no matter how dispersed team members can be around the globe.

However, we didn't realize how immersive we were going to be, with regards to usage of such tools, until we went fully remote on our own. Below are just some of the tools we utilized:

• Collaboration and planning: For cross teamwork that involved planning and sharing inputs & feedback, we used tools like Slack, Confluence, Google Docs, and Slides, etc
• Brainstorming: For early-stage discussions to come up with potential solutions and ideas, we used tools like Miro, and JamBoard, etc
• Task Management: For assigning and tracking general individual tasks, we used tools like Asana, Trello, etc
• Sprint Execution: For Sprint-related execution, we used tools like JIRA, Confluence, Zeppelin, Google Sheets & a range of Integrated Apps that worked well with Slack
• Meetings: for discussions, we primarily stuck to Google Meet, but also tapped into Zoom for informal sessions(like virtual happy hour, show your crib, etc. Interestingly, our dIscussions were smoother and more productive via the Google Meet, as the Chat feature kept the Side discussions to the Side- Literally!! In an in-person meeting, such side discussions(which might be valid and warranted for are quite distracting — and even disruptive), as more than one conversation in a meeting is hard to follow. But in a virtual meeting, both can be done effectively and efficiently

And of course, we also had to work with every kind of communication tool — from Cisco WebEx to Microsoft Teams — when we had to interact with external partners and our Sister teams within SIA(Don't get me started on the number of ‘Meeting platforms’ that are out there!!)

And these are just a few of the tools. We had also gotten used to a list of additional tools for other miscellaneous functions, that might deserve its own blog post!

Keeping the Crew together

One of the biggest challenges around having an entire organization ‘Working from Home’(or working outside of shared office space in general) is implementing it in a structured way, and ensuring the right amount of discipline is in place. Since remote environments could be distracting, we employed the right levels of communications and put in place frequent cross-team engaging events to keep the team intact.

We established a good amount of predictability by having at least one instance of a company-wide engagement every week. Our Weekly All Hands was a significant ceremony during which the whole team came together. Apart from getting to hear the updates from various teams, this virtual gathering served as a great medium for the employees to get all their questions answered — by the leadership team — via the Q &A portion of it. The Q&A was a cardinal part of the meeting as we were able to address various concerns and anxieties that propped up regularly — thanks to the frequent changes to the industry landscape & future caused by the Pandemic.

From a management perspective, we kept track of our employees’ sentiments during the rollout of structured remote working and paid close attention to the impact the lack of physical contact might be having on our people. We proactively planned off-time moments such as ‘virtual coffee chats’ and ‘Friday virtual happy hour drinks’ sessions to give the team members the opportunity to connect with each other. Also, most home environments are not best suited for prolonged office work. So we empowered our remote employees even further by delivering to their homes necessary work-ready equipment — like high-comfort office chairs, powerful larger monitors, etc. And finally, the icing on the cake was the cool goodie bags and care packages that were frequently delivered to the team members by our fabulous HR team — to keep them excited and charged up. Decadent CupCakes, Wicked book of Brownies, Killer Cocktail kits, Craft Beer packs — you name it, they got it!

Can Virtual compete with In-person?

Now that we managed to build a company and launch a product from Zero-to-One while working remotely entirely, can we sustain this working model in the long run? Certainly not an easy question to answer! In my personal opinion, there are pros and cons to both working remotely and working in a shared office space.

Working from home arguably results in an Increase in Productivity (or rather ‘Amount of time spent on Work’) in most cases. Study after study have demonstrated that remote workers are more productive, satisfied, and engaged than their office-bound colleagues. Not surprising as Remote work eliminates the wasted time of commuting, the potential traps of office politics, and the death of the workday by a thousand paper cuts of interruptions and meetings.

But of course, there is a flip side to this argument — just like in any other workplace practice or model. While for some folks being able to scoot from bed to the laptop in seconds, instead of commuting daily is an advantage of working from home, for other folks going back to the office would be “perfect”. For these folks being in the office means shorter(and more effective) meetings compared to virtual alternatives, and personal interactions lead to better rapport and cross-team collaboration. These were the ones that welcomed the lockdown ending announcement — from the local government — informing them that employees can return to the workplace, subject to conditions :-)

So, if you ask me, whether a person thrives while working from home could depend on factors such as the person’s reliance on social interaction at work and one’s tolerance for ambiguity. The office is a very effective place to solve ambiguities because you have more social cues — It’s easier to talk with someone else, and even avoid potential conflicts and disconnects easily.

So what's going to be the future in general for Tech companies like us? It is not a binary — but rather a Hybrid. More people may end up straddling working remotely with working in the office. It is going to be an interesting trend to wait and watch. To observe how various companies are moving forward once the pandemic based restrictions ease further. If they are returning back to the same model they had pre-pandemic, or employ a fresh Hybrid model, and allow an ample percentage of working-from-home in the weekly work cycle.