Niteo is a distributed team spread around the World. Here's a quick overview of how we work and communicate.
Written communication can sometimes be misinterpreted and could lead to the other person's heart rate going up for no reason.
A bad example of this can be: "Hey, do you have some time to talk?". If a senior Nitean sent such a message to a trialist, they might interpret it as "Oh no, I did something wrong" and start stressing out completely unnecessarily since the senior Nitean just wanted to ask them if they have any dietary or other preferences for the upcoming IRL. Or imagine sending over Hey, do you have some time to talk on Monday?. There goes the weekend!
To avoid that, we encourage Niteans to state what they want from the other person, what they would like to talk about, and where they would like to talk about it, e.g. chat, voice, or video.
A good example of this can be: "Hey, I'd like your opinion on which approach is better for the project. Can we meet on huddle?".
Instant messaging is done through Slack on different channels (operations, support, development etc.). We have standups on Slack huddles every Monday and Thursday at 12 noon UTC, where everyone has a minute or two to say what they’re working on and if they need any help.
Twice a month, senior team members have Catchups with everyone on the team to keep themselves in the loop.
About once or twice a year we fly the whole team somewhere nice and we’ll have an IRL (in-real-life) meetup. Here we discuss company status, projects and the future in a group setting. IRLs normally happen in January and in July, perfect timing to review the (half-)year. Every Nitean is encouraged to attend in person, but we provide remote access as well. It's OK to remotely attend an IRL every now and then, but generally we expect everyone to be there in person.
In addition there are ad-hoc in-person meetups that happen about once or twice a month, as needed. Some of us might get together to watch a talk at a local conference or we go to lunch together to discuss project work.
We organize our work using a Kanban board which is described in detail in the work process and kanban documents.
Project and task management is currently done with GitHub and ZenHub. Support handles tickets through Help Scout.
We track cash flow with Xero. Finance reports are published to teamniteo/finances on a monthly basis and are viewable to all full-time team members.
Monthly company newsletter covers the main events of the month and is a great reference point for digging deeper into parts of the company one does not know that well.
Niteo runs several SaaS projects, serving a few thousand customers. We use several techniques, libraries and services that allow us to make several deploys to production every day. That does not mean that we do not test code before shipping it. Rather, we have a workflow that runs a variety of checks and automatic tests and makes it very fast and easy to test new features in staging environments.
And even if we do push buggy code to production, we only push it to a fraction of users to minimize impact. The outcomes are great: happy users, since they get features and fixes fast. And maybe even more importantly, happy developers, since the code is actually being used minutes after being merged rather than being stuck in a bureaucratic production deployment workflow. Nejc has given numerous talks on the subject.
We plan and think in quarters. Every beginning of the quarter we review what we’ve done and if we hit all goals. Then we plan goals for the next quarter. A quarter is just short enough for actual plans while also being long enough to get things done.