This is important part of our team members and vendors onboarding process, we try to explain here how we work, why we work that way and how to make it as unobtrusive and efficiently seamless as possible.

B2storefront is distributed remote team that works on projects for Clients located in multiple timezones who sell their products worldwide.

Understand type of projects

We work on crucial core business components of our Clients - Their Storefront.

They trust us to improve their most important key asset -Front End which exposed to their own end customerswho are located all over the world themselves.Release loop for features is focused on delivering updates constantly and fast to keep up with required velocity for Client's marketing team that is constantly run different experiments and initiatives.

Our goal is to release updates in a stable manner without giving up the quality and speed of delivery when customers need them most: End of the week

Understand communication

Our Environment is highly distributed by default, as a team distributed across the timezones while working for Clients from Europe, New Zealand and the United States, which effectively results in a continuous loop of both delivering finished work as well as gathering feedback and requirements.

How we communicate with Client:

We have a Client facing Slack channel that allow us to give direct responses to Client's requests
We have a daily progress updates sent to Client every day
We have weekly iterations that have 2 deployments throughout the cycle mid-sprint and end of the sprint release
We have hotfixes that can go to production quickly
Client adding their requests through Client-facing Trello Board that then being pushed into internal Jira environment where we can decompose communicate freely and work on their requests

Given that it is really high paced environment by itself to start with and having the workloop being around the clock on top of it, the most crucial pillar to focus on is: Save Time

by allowing other teammates more effectively test your workIf it’s a bug and you fixed it record and throw a link to a loom screencast videoIf it’s a new page put a URL to it so it can be easily reachedif it’s a markup of a new section attach screenshots from your QA to allow quick assessment/design review
If it’s a bug and you fixed it record and throw a link to a loom screencast video
If it’s a new page put a URL to it so it can be easily reached
if it’s a markup of a new section attach screenshots from your QA to allow quick assessment/design review
by providing necessary context on situation that brought you to be blocked on your task to reduce the guesswork and unnecessary ping-pong of suggested ways to unstack.
by documenting your approach in a specific implemented feature to give a context upfront for CTO who will be doing code review
by giving a comprehensive heads up in case you stuck in a task explaining what is going on (screenshots/screencasts via Loom/text in the Jira Comment) reach out on the project channel and move further to the next task in line
by giving a headsup in the project channel why you decided to tackle an off-cycle task aside of the priority line again to save time on the guesswork and clarifications
by providing meaningful estimates to the tasks and making sure you have enough information and understanding to not be blocked 15 minutes after starting the work on it

that brings following important requirements on the Communication inside of the team:

JIRA is the single source of truth

That means if you got a task read it's description, make sure that it's clear for you what the most immediate next step should be and you have full capability to perform that step and potentially as much steps moving forward as possible.

everything that happened with the task throughout its lifetime should be possible to be obtained at 1 central place - JIRA task

Example: You are working on integration of Klaviyo that add new users to a specific list upon their sign up in the system, do you have access to Klaviyo to validate that feature you worked on your local instance is actually completed?

Make sure you understand how you will deliver results for this task? Is that a feature that can be accessed via URL? Would it require to be logged in? How QA will be able to test the specific scope of this task properly? Attach a screenshot, provide a link, record a screencast loom video to explain edge cases that are not covered or specifics of that issue.

Working with the source code

Work on a task happens inside dedicated branch that is forked from staging or uat or master branches.Commit often don’t wait when task is finished commits should happen every 2-3h, commits should have JIRA task ID and meaningful commit message and go to the specific branch created from JIRA itself. Finished the work on the task create a pull request to staging so it can be reviewed.

Finished your day?

Push your changes to repository.
Give an update on your current task progress,
Take a quick look at the queue of the tasks ahead, give a heads up in the channel if there is not enough queued in the pipeline for following days.

Work situations

My local instance suddenly stopped building

This can be caused by your code same as by changes that are coming from the CMS or eCommerce backend that we use on that project. It happens and it's unavoidable so save time by taking a look on the alerts channel on slack, project channel and potentially comment that problematic query.

I can't estimate task, issue can be either super easy and quick or become a pandora box resulting in a black hole of time.

That's fine, give a heads up in comments, start work, reassess the situation after 2h of coding if you didn't closed the task in that time you should be deep enough to be able to split the task or at least separate the portion of work that is clear and proceed with estimating that portion by creating separate task, and leaving notes in the original one on what is your best guess for the implementation of outstanding portion.

Master your toolbox

Slack

Slack Inbox 0 - Silence all notifications from slack except those that use your mention. For those which you were mentioned on in the project channelyou are expected to react at your earliest convenience

Taking off?

Change status to let others know when you plan to be back.

Ending your day

give a heads up to people who reached out to you on Slack or in the channels, check that there are no outstanding messages which requires your attention or teammates who wait for your reply.

Approaching National Holiday

give a heads up in the channel beginning the week, so work can be planned accordingly.

Saw a message

add eyes emoji, confirming something? use checkmark, replying to something use Threads, want to bump something up reply in thread checking the checkbox that sends the message also to the channel to bring it up for others attention if needed.

Got some important insights on Slack related to work that you doing?

Throw an update to Jira task,either as screenshot of specific message or writing down in comments what was decided and pasting link to that place in slack channel.

Communication in remote environment

If you got into tensions with somebody please remember that communication is lacking the tone and your opponent read it in tone he/she assumes. There is no way to convey an intonation either its half-tone openness or conversely categorical. Your voice is in the head of person who reads your words. that's why communication in remote environment is so exhausting and requires bigger attention and effort.