2020 was a shitty year.

I began the year working in Almundo, an Argentinian tech travel company that had been acquired by CVC (biggest travel company in Brazil). Things were already tough merging teams from multiple companies to launch a unified platform in Latam when countries started closing their borders. Travel industry went into complete chaos. Sales were non-existent, and everyone in the company was working around the clock to bring our clients back home from their holidays with countries policies changing every minute.

In the midst of those challenges, I got an offer to move to Sydney with my wife and join Like Family, a 12 people startup trying to solve social isolation in Australia. We jumped right on board! We had been looking to move overseas for a few months and I couldn’t ask for a better opportunity working with a company with such a strong social purpose.

We set the start date to April 14th and I quit my job.

Two weeks before catching our flight Australia closed its borders to temporary visa holders (like me), allowing only citizens and permanent residents to enter the country. Thanks 2020!

Australia’s measures also impacted Like Family. Previously working 4 days per week at the office, was forced to move into a fully remote schema. Since everyone was going to be working from home, we decided to keep my start date and work from Argentina while applying for permanent residency with a different visa.

Here are some of my learnings setting the product direction while working from the other side of the world, in the country with the longest quarantine in the planet, at night (time difference between Buenos Aires and Sydney is 14 hours), with a new team, a new industry, and a new culture.

Over-communication and the death of emails

My first realization was that I was not using emails. Slack replaced it completely. It was no longer the reign of developers, but a company-wide tool to communicate and be in sync.

And it makes sense. Email is asynchronous. You send an email, and you don’t expect an immediate response. Although useful for scheduling meetings, sharing files, or ignoring vendors proposals, they do a pretty bad job at fostering conversation or getting feedback from a group.

Tip: Throwing more tools into the problem only makes it worst. It multiplies the channels and people no longer know what to use or where to pay attention.

Where was the catch? Slack makes it too easy to reach out to other people. This can cause constant interruptions that prevent deep work and focus. To prevent it, one must clearly define the purpose and urgency of each channel. On a personal level, communicating our availability to the rest of the team and learning when to disconnect.

Summing up my learnings:

• Use only one -internal- communication channel that enables synchronous conversations. In our case, Slack.
• Define the urgency and use of channels (both private and public groups). Where in ‘War room’ everybody is expected to answer right away, in ‘Good news’ they are not.
• Being remote there’s no such thing as over-communication. There is only a lack of it. Communicate, communicate, communicate. If no decision needs to be taken, sharing thoughts, ideas, results, customer feedback, or OKRs in the appropriate channel is far more efficient than scheduling a meeting.

Meetings and remote team formation

Besides meetings bad publicity, I agree with Andrew Groove that meetings are a great part of the managerial work. Even more in a Product Manager role where, on the contrary of being the ‘CEO of the product’ taking the shots, gaining influence, setting expectations, and creating alignment, are the definition of the role.

…we said that a big part of a middle manager’s work is to supply information and know-how, and to impart a sense of the preferred method of handling things to the groups under his control and influence. A manager also makes and helps to make decisions. Both kinds of basic managerial tasks can only occur during face-to-face encounters, and therefore only during meetings. Thus I will assert again that a meeting is nothing less than the medium through which managerial work is performed. That means we should not be fighting their very existence, but rather using the time spent in them as efficiently as possible.

High Output Management -Andrew S. Groove

I always thought that being in the same room was also important for culture and team-building. Not just the meetings but walking through the office, engaging in casual conversations, having a grasp of the team’s mood.

Since our tech and product team was just forming, we needed to set expectations, define boundaries, sharing ways of working, understand our personality types. In short, getting to know each other.

To help the team formation and alignment, we schedule a set of recurrent meetings at three different hierarchies:

Company-wide we set two weekly all-hands meetings: a Monday’s check-in and ‘wins & losses’ on Fridays. Also, a monthly wrap up to share OKRs results and backlog progress.

As a product team, although I’m not a big fan of strictly following any methodology, we scheduled every meeting on the books about Scrum: daily standup, fortnightly planning, grooming and review, quarterly retros. The goal was to be in touch more than to respect the ceremonies.

On the individual level, we moved our fortnightly 1:1’s to a weekly cadence.

If they sound like one too many meetings it is because they were. I also believe they were necessary. Three takeaways here:

• Outside those meetings that helped the team form and stay in sync, any other meeting needs to have a clear agenda, expected pre-work, and a clear expected outcome. If you don’t know why you are there, you probably shouldn’t be.
• Turn on your camera. Personally, I do think it makes a difference to see the team, pick on visual cues, see engagement and make the most out of every meeting.
• Be creative. This pandemic year highlighted tons of new tools to enhance virtual interactions. Among many other great tools: Miro or Mural for running workshops or design thinking activities, Figma for designing together, Slido for live polls or voting, EasyRetro for virtual retrospectives… Google whatever you need and you shall find.

Work-life balance and knowing when to stop

Living in a two-bedroom apartment and working at the complete opposite time zone, my biggest challenge and learning was setting the blur lines between remote work and family or personal moments straight.

I was working from 8 pm to 5 am, having several calls during the night, in a different language, one thin wall apart from my sleeping wife. On the other side, while I intended to rest she was singing ‘good morning’ songs to 4-years old trying to keep them engaged and learning in front of a computer (talk about challenges and loving your career!). As you can imagine, it wasn’t the best moment of our marriage.

On top of the time zone situation, enjoying what I do and in a startup environment, there was always work left to do. It was a new job, a new company, our opportunity to move to Sydney… so, during my first weeks, I found myself working most of the day and then staying up until 6 or 7 am several days.

Again, the silver bullet here was communication. I talked with my wife and with the team and set clearer work/home boundaries.

First, I stopped with my all-nighters to rest better and share more during the day with my family. Also, I tried to disconnect from slack and disabled the automatic updates of my work email. We also started sharing in advance our work calendars and commitments so that the other person would know when deep work or quiet moments were needed at home.

Regarding Like Family team, I asked them not to schedule meetings with me after 1 am unless it was critical and unavoidable. In that case, I would obviously join but try only to chat. By being 100% supportive of my situation, my team taught me that I was the one who had to learn (I’m still trying to) when to stop.

On the 17th of November, 7 months from that first day, we arrived in Sydney. And finally, after two more weeks of mandatory quarantine, I met the team!

Even with the ease of restrictions, at Like Family we decided to embrace the benefits and learnings of these months working full-time from home. We opted for a flexible schema were each team decides how many days they are going to the office, combining the focus of remote working, with the culture and team-building experience of sharing the workspace.

Last year was a terrible year. It brought the world apart with countries closing borders and people being locked into their homes away from their loved ones. And yet, technology enabled communications and relationships like never before. I hope some of my learnings will echo with people working fully remote and help them avoid my mistakes.

This was my 2020 and my learnings: from the most extreme lockdown in the planet to a new adventure 11,800 km apart from home.

How was your lockdown in 2020?