Developers were crunched for time and had to account for those changes as they went. New changes had to be decided upon and communicated to the whole team at the last minute. Turns out we also needed a product designer (Portugal) to incorporate the illustrations into the page and developers (from Taiwan, Russia, Austria, Greece) for each platform, who could identify platform-specific constraints in the design phase.Ĭoordination was chaos. Since the project was built around illustrations, I assumed that I only needed to work with our illustrator, Yin, from Taiwan. We were creating new screens to help people celebrate when they reach Todoist Zero (no more tasks for the day). One of my biggest failures in managing a project came from not gathering the appropriate team to complete one of my squads. Nothing slows a squad down like adding people midway. Taking the time to formally assemble your squad has two purposes:įirst, it ensures that the teammates who are needed to complete a project are included in the work from the beginning. Assemble your squadįirst and foremost you need to get the right mix of skills and input to complete the project. Learn how the best distributed companies manage big projects in our online handbook, Remote Projects 101: The Remote Guide to Project Management! See the strategies that companies like Hotjar, Clearbit, UiPath, and Help Scout use to take ideas for inception to execution. Keeping the project on track and handling common roadblocks.Organizing tasks and communication with Todoist and Twist.Kicking things off with a spec and a meeting.We don’t have all the answers yet, but here are some of the lessons we’ve learnt so far: When project management isn’t your whole job, how do you keep it from taking over your whole day? How can project management be adapted to a remote team setting where the majority of communication happens asynchronously?
Is it possible to effectively manage a project in a lightweight way without getting bogged down with complicated methodologies and GANTT charts? Since starting to work in squads, we’ve had to ask ourselves what we want project management to look like on our team: To make matters worse, we don’t do well with bureaucratic processes… It’s just not in our team’s DNA. The only problem is that none of us have a project management background. We found that a key factor in a project’s success was having a meticulous squad leader who takes responsibility for coordinating and moving a project forward. Each squad is a temporary, cross-functional team that works toward a specific goal for one 6-week cycle (a time frame we borrowed from Basecamp).Īt the beginning, some squads worked well and delivered on time.
We started experimenting with a system we call Doist Objectives - DOs for short - centered on project-based squads (a concept we adapted from Spotify’s product teams). When you’re a team of 90+ working from 33 different countries, things start to fall apart quickly. When you’re a team of 20, that can work (more or less). In fact, up until recent years we didn’t have any kind of formalized project management system. We don’t have full-time project managers at Doist.
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