My Team’s Top Tips for Going Remote

Pivotal Labs has gone fully remote. While the impetus for this change is less than ideal, I feel proud of what we have done to adapt and remain effective. Today I wanted to share a few things that helped ease the transition for my team and may help yours as well.

1. Assign a Zoom Room for Each Pair — At Pivotal Labs, we pair all day. In the office, our cross-functional team sits together making it easy to collaborate on an ad hoc basis. In a remote setup, we wanted to maintain the ease of these interactions. To solve for this, we assigned a Zoom room to each pair so it’s possible to come “tap them on the shoulder” if you have a question or wanted to get some feedback. This mimics the interaction of walking up to someone at their desk.
2. Download Krisp — Krisp is a video conferencing add-on that mutes not only your background noise, but also that of everyone else on the call. A colleague had recommended it with rave reviews, but before adding it to my already-crowded toolbar I wanted to validate that it really did what it claimed. To test, I put my favorite Britney Spears song on my phone and carried it to the other side of the room. I ran Krisp’s audio test while Britney played and I chatted some gibberish. I was astounded at the difference “with Krisp” and “without Krisp” — in one you could hear Britney clearly and the other barely at all. This was a “Pass” for me and now Krisp sits up on my toolbar.
3. Add a “Stand Down” For Engineering at End of Day — In the office, it’s easy to stay up to date on technical details simply by overhearing the other engineering pair’s discussions. One option would have been to make stand up updates more detailed. We did not want to alienate product and design, so we created a separate engineering meeting, “Stand Down” and it became our new way to close out the day. We noticed it helped our next day’s stand up be shorter, more succinct, and more focused. Win for all.

I hope these tips make your transition to remote as minimally disruptive as they did ours. I’d love to hear about how this works for you.

Erica is a Senior Software Engineer at Pivotal Labs.