Duo Security - Product Manager for Authentication.

How big is it?

2 Teams with 8-10 engineers each, including Project Manager, Engineering Manager, and individual ICs.

Where are teammates located?

Primarily Ann Arbor, Michigan and Austin, Texas but folks are distributed across SF/Houston.

What does your team do?

We are responsible for the core authentication portion of the Duo product.

Motivated teammates who are willing to put themselves out there and ask for help if it’s needed. At Duo our company values are:

1. Engineer the Business 
2. Learn Together
3. Be Kinder than Necessary
4. Build for the Future

Cisco/Duo have a variety of ways that are company mandated. These include days off with our Day for Me program and a Connected Recognition program to send monetary gifts to folks.

Finally, all team meetings start with 5 minutes of appreciations. This has gone a long way to make sure people feel appreciated and is said out loud. Internally in slack we also have a custom of ++ which accrues karma.

As the organization has grown in a completely remote environment, it's been difficult to build the personal relationships that are critical to move things along when the processes haven’t caught to meet the needs of our size.

Additionally, finding out who is the right person has been really difficult as much of the churn the organization goes through isn’t visible until you go to ping someone on slack only to find their account deactivated.

Happy hours and game nights although both have dropped off. People are doing unofficial in-person retreats but it's difficult.

We have monthly company wide talks which have a rotating presence from different parts of the organization. When we were in-office these had very high attendance because lunch was catered.

We played a lot of: https://skribbl.io/ earlier in the pandemic.

We usually we ask people to share their name, where they're currently living, and a fun fact.

Recently I’ve been following pretty much all of Shreyas Doshi's recommendations on Twitter.