I work at Mark43. My role is Senior Engineering Manager.

I currently lead teams focused on our Mobile Engineering Solutions and increasing our mobility footprint.

How big is it?

‍My team currently has 7 engineers, 1 PM, 2 Designers, 1 Scrum Master and 1 Product Consultant‍

Where are your teammates located?‍

My teammates are located across North America. 3 of 12 folks are in Canada (Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal) while others are around NYC, FL, NC, ID, VA in USA‍

What does your team do? What are you responsible for?‍

My team currently builds mobile-first experiences and solutions  for our customers in the public safety industry. My role revolves around being an engineering leader with technical expertise, team management, engineering culture, people management, stakeholder management, strategic initiatives and a certain degree of technical project management.

A strong remote culture relies on strong collaboration and a high degree of trust. When there is a sense of trust and respect in the team in remote culture, it brings a high degree of psychological safety and morale. This translates to building sustainable high performing teams. This also enables teams to focus on innovation and delivering roadmap commitments.

I make sure that I never miss my 1:1s with my direct reports or teammates. I also try to always prioritize any team needs over any other task/ initiative I might be focusing on.

In order to increase and maintain engagement, I proactively try to match existing and future opportunities with individual interests and passion. While it might not always be possible, the fact that I honestly strive to make it happen and have my team’s best interests at heart does go a long way in productivity.

The biggest challenge is being on top of many conversations that might be happening within the team along with getting a more active sentiment analysis. In order to meet org. goals and maintain life-work balance, remote work days can be intensive and often not have moments to pause, reflect and safeguard.

This is an area I plan to put more effort in this year. Over the past year, my teams have participated in “social hours”, “virtual wine tasting”, “virtual escape rooms” and social game-nights.

We have focused more on experiences recently with dedicated gaming conversations on slack channels. We will be exploring virtual games more this year as well.

For a few meetings on Monday, we start with “How was your weekend/ anything interesting you did?”

Few meetings in the week might simply start with someone sharing a cool thing or random fact they came across to start conversations.

For some candidate interviews, we do answer quirky questions like “Favorite Icecream flavor” OR “a thing that no one knows about you” style as icebreakers.

We use donut in slack along with other channels focused around celebrating achievements, culture and key milestones

We also have a Culture Task Force which focuses on org wide initiatives that I am a member of and at times evaluates potential tools/ products to solve our needs.

I continue to learn and grow each passing day. The resources I rely upon are a combination of short videos and articles along with books for foundational knowledge.

I recommend following work from Simon Sinek, LeadDev for daily resources and books such as “Turn the Ship Around”, “ Accelerate”, “Managing Humans” & “Team Topologies” to name a few.