Our work process is based on Kanban with some elements from Scrum:
- We are our own product owners, as we have no customer projects.
- We work asynchronously, so keep scheduled meetings to a bare minimum.
- We organize our work using a Kanban board.
Read about writing User Stories and issues.
User Stories that are dependent on each other should be merged into one bigger user story. This kind of User Stories can have 2 assignees.
Each Monday we have a meeting to review the Kanban board and check in with our OKRs. We typically have one meeting per project starting with Operations.
Turn on your camera during the meeting. Try to refrain from doing other things (browsing, doing support, etc.) during the meeting -- we only have this meeting and it doesn't take a lot of time so we should all pay attention to everyone else for this period.
There are a bunch of tasks we have to do every month/quarter/year. To make sure they get assigned enough time for proper execution, we include them in the Kanban board as user stories. The only difference is, they don't need user story demo recordings since they happen so often and are repetitive.
For every month/quarter that a recurring task is required we (re)open the issue and create a comment for the new month/quarter.
Make sure you are completing your assigned tasks first since they are our current focus. If you've finished all of them, go through the issues in our [backlog] and or ask the project lead what to do next.
If you're a developer, you can also search the codebase and documentation for "TODO", "XXX" and similar strings. Try to understand why it's there and create an issue for it. If you like the task, you can start working on it immediately.
If all else is completed, you can always read a book, take an online course or just think about how we could make the company better.
Sometimes, things break in the middle of the night or on weekends. The great thing about being a remote-first team is that we cover different time zones so there is almost always someone available. The solution for the weekend is to have Niteans on-call.
Being on-call means being available for any critical, urgent issues that may arise. Some examples of this are servers offline or the product app is down. Each on-call day (Saturday and Sunday) counts as a 2-hour workday, even if there were no emergencies. Any work more than two hours counts as regular work.
Niteans can be on-call only if they already pass basic support training or have already reported for Everyone on Support.
Every Monday Meeting, we assign who will be on-call for the next weekend and note it in the Monday Meeting issue.