I’m a Product Manager at Mural, where I lead their Enterprise Identity team.

We work on features to streamline the authentication and authorization process for our enterprise customers (e.g. Single sign-on, Provisioning/Deprovisioning, Two factor authentication, session management).

How big is it?‍

11 people: Product Manager, Product Designer, Engineering Manager, Tech Lead, QA, and 6 Developers.

Where are your teammates located?

All over the world! San Francisco, Seattle, Argentina, Morocco, Poland and Ukraine. 

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

We work on features to streamline the authentication and authorization process for our enterprise customers (e.g. Single sign-on, Provisioning/Deprovisioning, Two factor authentication, session management).

1. Over-communication - we are not just a remote team, but also a global team. Things can easily get lost in translation and over zoom calls. Being super explicit is the key to making sure everyone is aligned.
2. Cameras ON during zoom calls and regular touch points - talking to an ‘empty’ screen is the worst. It’s good to see each other's faces and have that eye to eye contact.
3. Carving out ‘fun-time’ - we take a couple minutes of standup to chat about non-work related things and have separate fun zoom team meetings at the end of every sprint. It's important to get to know each other on another level to build trust within the team. 
4. Having the right tools to be a remote team - we use slack and I cannot imagine working without it. It’s an easy way to asynchronously connect and update one another. We also have a lot of ‘fun’ slack channels (for book clubs or about other topics like biking, dogs, cats etc.). We also use loom videos, atlassian suite, confluent and, of course, MURAL ;)

Staying connected and showing your team you care. Having time to ask about people’s hobbies or family. We also have a #kudos slack channel at MURAL where we recognize people’s contributions.

Scheduling meetings across time zones. We basically only have one hour overlap. My 8am in San Francisco is 6pm for two of my developers in Ukraine. We have to do a lot of communication asynchronously.

Every sprint we schedule a ‘fun’ team activity. MURAL also organizes amazing virtual company off-sites! See here the one they did in 2020.

Yes! Last time, we played Pictionary using skribbl. We’re always on the lookout for more games.

Every retro we start with a ‘check-in’. We switch it up but have tried many icebreakers in this blog post.

• MURAL helps with brainstorming and online visual collaboration. We use it for everything: for all Agile process meetings to customer call presentation walk-throughs. 
• Loom helps with capturing quick videos and sharing asynchronous
• Slack is our go-to communication tool

For product specifically: I have been doing the Reforge course - amazing people and materials with actionable frameworks.  ‍

For being a remote facilitator/leader: MURAL put together this amazing free e-book with lots of tips.