Lessons from Leading a Remote Engineering Team

Summary

Managing remote engineering teams can expand hiring beyond office locations, support a more diverse workforce, retain employees through relocations, and enable distributed coverage such as 24/7 support. The guidance describes building such teams around relationships, trust, and communication, with “Default to open internally” and “Charge your trust battery” as supporting cultural values. It recommends asynchronous documentation and discussion in email, GitHub issues, Google Docs, and project systems, supplemented by a fixed weekly synchronous meeting and shared core hours. Managers should also support healthy home workspaces, maintain regular one-on-ones and timely contact, arrange selective in-person sessions, and actively champion remote employees’ visibility, recognition, and career progression. The approach requires deliberate effort but can provide hiring, composition, retention, and strategic benefits.

Context

Remote and colocated team configurations can both work, but remote teams introduce challenges around building relationships and trust, maintaining communication, supporting employees’ work environments, and preventing remote workers from becoming out of sight and out of mind. The stated motivation is to achieve hiring, diversity, retention, and location-based operational benefits.

Approach / What changed

Build remote teams through open information sharing, deliberate asynchronous and synchronous communication conventions, relationship-building practices, occasional in-person sessions, healthy home-work support, regular one-on-ones, timely communication, and active advocacy for remote employees’ visibility and career progression.

Takeaways

• Remote hiring expanded the team’s candidate pool to countries including Cyprus, Germany, and the UK, while also helping retain employees who relocated to Canada, France, the Netherlands, Poland, and the USA.
• Asynchronous communication is the default: discussions use email or GitHub issues, technical designs use Google Docs, and day-to-day work uses GitHub issues and Project Boards.
• For teams spanning time zones, the guidance recommends choosing one acceptable recurring meeting time rather than rotating it, alongside shared core working hours for ad hoc synchronous conversations.

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