A Handbook for Managing a Remote Software Development Team Through 2024

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Remote work has lately been all the rage. It is entirely reasonable that people have yearned for more flexibility and less time wasted traveling even before the worldwide epidemic.

Still, many companies are dubious about hiring remotely even with examples from Facebook or Spotify during the global epidemic. Moreover, a lot of misunderstandings and preconceptions especially about monitoring remote developers such as Controlio exist. Outsourcing is supposed to be for MVPs and tiny chores, not a means of producing outstanding things.

YouTeam staff members know this personally. Helping our clients increase their development teams, we typically deal with mistrust and uncertainty about remote workers which, however, transforms as soon as they test it.

Advice on running a remote development team tools from startup CEOs and CTOs supervising distributed teams though there are inherent hazards involved, there are several cases of successful tech businesses and outstanding products created either totally or partially by the distributed tech teams. We have chosen to get in touch with some of such organizations, like Zapier, Doist, Toggl, Hubstaff, Buffer, Wistia, Product Hunt, TMetric, and ask them about their best practices for recruiting and managing remote development teams in order to demonstrate this.

The organization has to choose someone who will help it expand and exactly complement the workforce. These five simple guidelines can help you avoid uncertainty wherever your remote software engineers are located— Eastern Europe or Subcontinent Asia or otherwise.

1. At least virtually, but in person if at all possible, meet with your designated developers

For this assessment, it is crucial to consult not only the people allocated to your team but also company development managers who typically excel in communicating. One should be aware of the communicative nature of these people, their degree of English, whether they can provide solutions and tackle challenging challenges, etc.

Especially if your project is bigger, it is sense to grab a flight and see your potential software partners onsite and in-situ. To show yourself that these are reliable people, try to schedule meetings with the senior executives and individual developers—not only the Business Development Manager or Project Manager—and watch their body language and communication style.

Still, always alert since businesses can have strong sales ability but lack the ethics to support it. This is the explanation for the actions to be followed while selecting your new partner in software development.

Get Familiar. 

YouTeam has developed a technique of directly scheduling time with remote software engineers of interest since it understands that clients should engage with team members as soon as the process calls for it. Make sure you have someone technical on the client-side—that is, CTO or Head of Technology.

Having someone technical on the client-side, such as a CTO who can monitor the quality of the code under development and also help with the technical decisions taken, is usually beneficial. For instance, you still cannot read the code, like a lead developer does, even if you are rather experienced as a project or product manager.

Since the software development company may have bigger projects, which they consider to be more critical and hence invest less attention on your product, they may also try to cut corners. You will require a CTO to guarantee certain features of the offshore or nearshore development process run properly and effectively.

3. Present excellent product documentation to prevent ambiguity.

Should you lack the required product documentation, you could enter the development stage with an unclear product vision and create the incorrect product. Therefore, it is crucial to go through a thorough design process to precisely specify the extent of the employment.

To enable you more influence over the process, most design documentation must be created on the client’s side. This can occasionally be used as a trial period to observe the operations, speed of work, and actual resource commitment to your project of the design/development firm and its personnel.

4. Provide appropriate working hours.

If all of your developers are from various countries and so reside in separate time zones, remote work can present a huge difficulty. Establishing appropriate working times for the team or every house developer personally will not only enable members to be organized but also enable them to work on their most effective hours either at night or during the day. Plan meetings or any other calls for some hours of the day, but avoid stretching them out all day to provide your developers time.

5. Change with the times and be ready for unanticipated events.

You should also be ready to be flexible since remote workers have far more freedom than those who work from the office and with a micromanaging approach to operation. In this scenario, team management should not be extremely rigid; rather, it should be given in the manner every member feels comfortable and knows that someone else can assist should something go wrong.

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