Teleport is a truly distributed team - we have full time employees in Tallinn, Munich, Paris and Cambridge, more help from Tartu and a roaming co-founder who was most recently spotted in Canada. Having the entire team in the same room is a rare luxury for us - letting our people live where they want is part of our DNA and we have to turn to some awesome remote teamwork tools to make sure our communications don't break down because of async channels and differences in time zones.
The main conditions we choose our tools by are:
- Easy accessibility for everyone - all team members should be able to access, edit and have a say on most of what we do. We go for transparency first - there has to be a clear reason why anything is not made public by default.
- Information storage and location - the more details we can add, the better - this makes the chance of misunderstanding each other a lot smaller. Important information must be easy to find and backtrack at any time.
For our daily chats and conversations we use Fleep. Creating both one-on-one and group conversations is easy and what is probably most important for us is that vital moments, messages and files are extremely easy to find at any time - in addition to a powerful search tool there is an option to pin important messages and every conversation has a file drawer for easy access later on. Nifty features like seeing every group member's personal reading horizon help a lot when working across 10 time zone hours.
We have a lot of video meetings on a regular basis - we enjoy seeing each other’s pretty faces as often as we can, plus, combining a video call with shared work spaces (such as Google Docs) makes for a great way to get things done. As a large part of our team has Skype roots, then that original video calling software still has a special place in our hearts, but especially in group situations we reach for Google+ Hangouts. It is somewhat annoying to switch around, but after the first decade, the market for perfect, reliable, group- and sharing-friendly video products still doesn't have a clear winner, so we keep changing it up.
Asana is where we keep track of our product backlog and task management. There’s a super handy team calendar that gives everyone an instant overview of all our important deadlines, and the simple yet versatile option of creating projects and tasks gives you the liberty to decide how exactly you organize your work and ultimately means that all of our to-do is easy to find and remember for everyone involved.
For collaboratively editing text files, spreadsheets and slides, we’ve gone with quite a simple option - Google Drive. All of Teleport’s essential documents are stored in one big shared drive that everyone in the team can access and edit at any time.
Our design team uses inVision, a powerful design prototyping tool, for sharing design mockups and click-through prototypes so everyone in the team can get a good early idea of what our product is going to look like and iterate on it fast.
For all of our code we rely on GitHub, which we have integrated with CircleCI to enable us to rapidly test and deploy our codebase on every push to central repository.
To monitor the quality of our services we use Rollbar for full stack error monitoring and Pingdom to measure our performance and uptime. All of the mentioned tools we have integrated with Fleep to keep everyone in our team informed.
With all this hard work we’re doing, there needs to be a way to keep an eye on the effect it has on our metrics. Our favourites are Ducksboard, which lets us gather, visualize and share the data that keeps on coming, and on a more granular side, we turn to Heap Analytics and Google Analytics.
MailChimp helps us get monthly newsletters and any other important information straight to our subscribers. (Pro tip: if you also want to get the latest on what Teleport is up to, you can sign up for the subscription list here.)
Everyone in Team Teleport likes to help out with whatever they can, and social media is not an exception - Buffer is the stuff when it comes to social media management - we have several managers on our channels and create a posting schedule based on suggestions from the whole team plus Buffer itself, which gives us suggestions on what to post based on our history.
And last, but definitely not least, we use our very own remote working tools as well - Teleport Sundial helps us keep an eye on our team members' locations and timezones for easier coordination, and Teleport Flock is the best option for finding, budgeting and booking a remote team's next get together.
You can find a condensed list of the above also in this ProductHunt collection by Sten, but there are a lot more different tools out there. Didn’t find quite what you were looking for? Check out this much longer list of tools for remote teams on Product Hunt.
What are your team’s go-to work management tools? Do you use something we didn’t mention that you can’t imagine your day without? Let us know!
