We work in cycles of three weeks. This way we constraint ourselves to have shippable releases in each iteration. It doesn鈥檛 mean that every feature will take three weeks of work, but it helps us reduce the scope or divide a project into pieces of work that can be presented.
In every cycle, there are two tracks of work happening at the same time: the development team is working in shipping the defined features, while the PM and designer are shaping the upcoming work.
When we work on any task we apply the boy scout rule "always leave the code you are editing a little better than you found it" in a continuous effort to improve the overall quality while we allow ourselves to take conscious technical debt when it is needed.
Every week a team member rotates to be on call. During that week, he or she will be the first line to support incoming issues (this could range from understanding what is happening and notifying the "expert" to completely solving it or deprioritizing it an including the description as bug to be included in the backlog). When there are no incoming issues to work on, whoever is on call will be working on transversal improvements of the infrastructure or the internal tools.
The product team use the #daily Slack room to share the main tasks they will tackle that day. This is especially useful to discover blockers and have a clear picture of how we are moving towards our weekly goals.
Although is not mandatory to do it every day, it鈥檚 recommended to share your plans at least twice a week.
Each Monday, everyone joins an all-hands meeting where each team shares their main updates and problems for their week. We also briefly talk about new hires, clients, and product updates. The sales team also gives an update about the most interesting clients meeting from the previous and the next week. All the information along with the monthly objectives are centralized in a shared document.
The main objective is to keep the team aligned around the goals, as well as to maintain transparency on how the company is doing.
The Product team gathers in a 40-min video call to discuss on the blockers and progress for the current iteration, while the Data Science team gathers a 45-min video call focused on the ongoing tasks. The Sales team meets on Friday to discuss the status of opportunities and challenges found.
We run our Health Monitor exercise every two months as a checkpoint to see how we are doing across eight attributes common amongst healthy teams.
Lang.ai is currently a fully-remote company. We keep the following principles:
- Flexible working hours over set working hours.
- Writing down and recording knowledge over oral explanations.
- Written down processes over on-the-job training.
- Public sharing of information over need-to-know access.
- Opening every document to change by anyone over top down control of documents.
- Asynchronous communication over synchronous communication.
- The results of work over the hours put in.
- Formal communication channels over informal communication channels.