Rick Newman is a Director of Engineering at Salesforce Heroku, and he's joined in conversation with Badri Rajasekar, the founder of Jamm. Jamm was created out of a need for remote and distributed teams to not only work together, but for people to feel connected and invested with each other. Under the belief that remote teams were often confronted with a deluge of emotionless texts--from Slack DMs to PR mentions to email--Jamm makes it possible to send video messages to people in your organization. Meetings can also be open access, allowing curious individuals to pop in and join conversations, or allow audio-video chats to play in the background.
Badri recalls that, early in his career, he believed that the only way people could align together was to establish stringent processes. This could take innocuous forms such as "No Meeting Mondays" or mandating formal summaries after every meeting. But now he recognizes that a culture of creative freedom within teams often results in more organic unity. Creating this organization requires clearly stated goals and trusting that individuals will be able to execute on them.
There also seems to be an artificial tension between synchronous and asynchronous workflows. Badri argues that instead, organizations should recognize that each style of work comes during different periods. Synchronous workflows are often best defined at the beginning of a spring, where product managers, designers, engineers and the like can discuss what problem they're trying to solve. Asynchronous workflows can then go and implement solutions, review code, and ship deployments. Moving past this false dichotomy lets people talk to each other when they want to, not because they need to. Video chats then take the space of being a communication system people look forward to having with each other, rather than a meeting that they are expected to participate in.
Links from this episode118. Why Writing Matters for Engineers
117. Open Source with Jim Jagielski
116. Success From Anywhere
115. Demystifying the User Experience with Performance Monitoring
114. Beyond Root Cause Analysis in Complex Systems
113. Principles of Pragmatic Engineering
112. Managing Public Key Infrastructure within an Enterprise
111. Gift Cards for Small Businesses
110. Scaling a Bernie Meme
109. Meditation for the Curious Skeptic
108. Building Community with the Wicked CoolKit
I Was There: Stories of Production Incidents II
107. How to Write Seriously Good Software
106. Growing a Self-Funded Company
105. Event Sourcing and CQRS
104. The Evolution of Service Meshes
103. Chaos Engineering
102. Whether or Not to Repeat Yourself: DRY, DAMP, or WET
101. Cloud Native Applications
100. Math for Programmers
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