How to Work Effectively With a Dedicated Team: Interview with Eric Typaldos - Co-Founder and CTO at Hive

To work effectively with a dedicated team for software development you need certain organizational skills. There is no better way to learn about working with remote teams than to ask those who do it successfully.

In this interview, our client Eric Typaldos - Co-Founder and CTO at Hive shares practical tips for managing a remote team.

With $28M investments and counting, Hive is a leading productivity platform for both small companies and big organizations, helping teams at top companies like Starbucks, Pinterest, and even the US Government work faster together.

It combines all the necessary features for project management and communication, so you don’t have to be torn between different tools.

Here are the tastiest ones:

• Flexible project organization (Gantt chart, Kanban board, calendar, and table)
• Action cards and lists
• Chat
• Over 1,000 integrations with the tools you use (Salesforce, Hubspot, Google Drive, Dropbox, Slack just to name some)
• Analytics
• Predictive alerts that notify you about any declines in your team productivity
• Task importing from Asana, Trello, and Basecamp

Our dedicated team has been working with Hive for more than 8 years already. During this period, we’ve become an integral part of their corporate culture.

You may read more about our collaboration with Hive Team on Project Management Software development following the link.

Thank you, Eric, for sharing your experience!

What criteria are the most important for you when choosing a remote team?

Working successfully with remote teams is all about communication. Communication is like oxygen for both sides - without it, it’s hard for remote teams to fully understand the context of their work and why what they do is so important. We’ve been fortunate to have a remote team who feels the same way about communication.

What are the best ways to stay on the same page with development team and remove communication barriers?

Working across time zones and physical spaces is always a challenge when it comes to communication, especially with the rise of “synchronous” communication like real-time chat. We use Hive to get both synchronous and asynchronous communication so that both teams have a structured place to write out their thoughts in long-form and in the context of a specific item they’re working on.

What are the main advantages of working with remote development team?

Once you hit a good rhythm, you start to realize there are tons of benefits. Something that’s huge for me is the fact that remote development teams can work without distractions from the business side for long periods of time. I think it’s easy for them to hit flow and really dig into a problem without being pulled in 5 different directions.

What challenges have you faced during cooperation with remote dedicated team? How did you overcome them?

I think in the past we didn’t do a good enough job at providing context for the remote team. We often failed to articulate why they were building certain things or shared success of large & exciting clients who use what the team built. We’ve started to bring the team into more meetings where they can get insight into this and understand just how much of an impact their work has.

How do you control the efficiency of a dedicated team?

We use Hive and Analytics to measure the team’s velocity, story completion to feedback ratio, ability to deliver things on time, and more. We adjust certain parts of the process based on these metrics, but recently we’ve hit an extremely efficient flow.

What are the best ways to make a remote development team feel a part of your company’s culture?

I think it’s important to share news about commercial success with the team, bring them into monthly all-hands meetings, and eventually (if at all possible!) visit each others offices.

How do you think it is possible to achieve a fruitful cooperation between in-house and remote teams and to grow your business?

I think communication is at the core of success in this type of relationship. It’s also important to make sure both sides are not isolated in the work they do - promoting shared work across offices helps to strengthen this relationship.

If you plan to hire app developers, think about how you can treat them as the part of your company culture. When you both work on the same mission and communicate with each other tightly, the results will be forthcoming.