Director of Engineering at Shogun Labs. I lead a number of engineering squads that are spread across two product lines, PageBuilder and Frontend.

How big is it?

Overall engineering is around 85 people, and that includes a team of 10 engineers who support us via a staff augmentation agency.

The 75 engineering Shogies (Shogie is our moniker for Shogun employees) are roughly distributed in these roles:

• ~ 45 Software Engineers
• 11 Engineering Leaders (managers and directors)
• 8 Quality Engineers
• 6 Site Reliability Engineers
• 5 Technical Project Managers

My org has 40 engineers, and we’re actively hiring for 5 more backend engineers.

Where are your teammates located?

My engineering colleagues are located across 16 different time zones and 22 countries.

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

Our teams build, test, deploy and support our entire product line. 3 squads are dedicated to our PageBuilder product, 6 squads to our Frontend product, and we have a squad each for Quality Engineering and Site Reliability Engineering.

1. ‍Transparency: Assume good intent and share everything and anything in a widely accessible area (that is usually in Notion or Slack for us). This includes everything from stand-ups, and retros, to summaries of our investor board meetings.‍
2. Asynchronous by default: Given that our people are spread so widely across the globe the most practical means of communication is async. Our daily stand-ups are asynchronous and we encourage/challenge each other to communicate offline whenever someone initiates a meeting request.‍
3. Celebrate: We find many ways to celebrate the big and small wins. New Shogies joining, new members in the employee families, project completions, work anniversaries, helping each other out etc. I am personally always on the lookout for small wins and acknowledge them in real-time. More about this in the next question.

Celebration and gratitude come to mind for me.  Beyond the regular things like all-hands, OKRs, transparent culture etc., I am very focused on celebrating all types of wins and showing gratitude.  Some examples:

• We share a profile and pictures of each Shogie on their first day in our broadest slack channel, #x-general.  This helps others to celebrate publicly, to get to know a little bit about the new member, and helps the new Shogie feel connected right away.
• We use pretty sophisticated onboarding workflows using a slack tool called donut and each new Shogie always has a designated buddy throughout their first 90 days.
• We also use the donut tool for random pairing of employees so they can connect and get closer in a casual setting.
• I regularly track the performance and growth of our people and celebrate their accomplishments via promotions.
• We have #x-taqueria channel where everyone gets up to 5 tacos to give away to others who’ve helped them in any form during the day. It’s one of my favorite channels both to watch all the good work and also personally acknowledge good deeds that come to my attention.

Remote-first is the best thing to happen to software engineering since sliced bread :) It just combines all the ingredients needed for success, productivity and engagement for software engineers.

I would love for us all to get together IRL 2-4 times a year so we can reinforce the bonding through team-building activities. That’s been hard to do since the pandemic, especially since our teams are spread across 20+ countries with various travel restrictions.

Each squad has their own set of activities. At the engineering department level, we do:

• Monthly lightning talks to showcase technical accomplishments
• Quarterly engineering all-hands

‍

At the company level, we do:

• Monthly all-hands
• Yearly in-person retreats (pre-pandemic)
• Yearly virtual offsites (post-pandemic)

• ‍Skribble: Online Pictionary‍
• Codenames: The online version of the board game, pretty fun and quick to learn‍
• Jackbox Games: Lots of fun games to  play remotely

The first two (Skribble and Codenames) are most popular among our engineering squads.

Each cycle, a squad member volunteers to think of the icebreaker question and facilitate. And they ask that question during a sprint planning or another sprint cadence meeting.

Some of the fun questions are around peoples' non-professional interests like favorite movies, personal mottos, travel, favorite foods, innovations we take for granted, winning the lottery, etc.

I shared a few in an earlier section, but the ones that are top of mind are:

1. HeyTaco - slack app to show gratitude via daily tacos
2. Donut - slack app for on boarding and random casual pairing
3. Fellow App - for effective meetings
4. Clockwise - to preserve focus time
5. EasyRetro - for capturing our sprint retros and for simple polling / prioritization

I am in the process of writing a long-form blog article on this topic and will share with you as soon as it is published. Here’s my top 5 go-to resources in the meanwhile:

• First Round Review blog : Fabulous long-form content for engineering leaders and entrepreneurs
• An Elegant Puzzle by Will Larson: A great resource for engineering organizational design
• Leadership & Self-Deception by The Arbinger Institute: The best book in the world if you want to start your journey of self-discovery
• StaffEng Podcast: Practice advice from humble engineers who progressed beyond the career level to Staff level software engineers and beyond‍
• CTO Connection Podcast: Peter Bell and team bring together amazing engineering leaders to share their journeys at orgs of every size in short < 30 minutes podcast episodes.