Building Stripe’s Remote Hub: Scaling Distributed Teams

One year ago, Stripe created a remote engineering hub - a virtual office for remote engineers, coequal with its physical engineering offices. Aditya Mukerjee, the Remote Hub Site Lead, will share the lessons that Stripe has learned while building a globally distributed engineering team. Whether your team is working remotely temporarily due to COVID-19 or whether you are investing in remote work as a long-term strategy, the discoveries Stripe made along the way can set your team up for success in building high-quality software at scale and working effectively across geographical boundaries.

Transcript

1. Building Stripe’s Remote Hub: Scaling Distributed Teams @chimeracoder Aditya Mukerjee Systems Engineer & Remote Hub Site Lead Stripe
2. Why should remote work be our long-term strategy, instead of a short-term contingency? @chimeracoder How do we work effectively as remote teams?
3. @chimeracoder
4. The best practices for operating remotely at scale are the best practices for operating at scale, period. @chimeracoder
5. @chimeracoder
6. “We’ve thought about remote work, but it just leads to problems” @chimeracoder
7. @chimeracoder
8. (Note: please don’t swallow radioactive materials at home) @chimeracoder
9. Working at home during a pandemic is different from “working remotely” @chimeracoder
10. Remote Hub: Year 1 Goals 1. Expand the breadth of teams hiring remote engineers 2. Improve work experience for remote engineers 3. Recruit and hire more remote engineers @chimeracoder
11. Data & Methods @chimeracoder Goals Hypotheses Results
12. Goal #1: Expand the breadth of teams hiring remote engineers @chimeracoder
13. Hypothesis: Managers and teams are more comfortable shifting to remote work when they feel there is an established path @chimeracoder
14. Data: Collate a guide of the common practices already used by teams working remotely @chimeracoder Data: Adopt these practices as a team as a prerequisite to opening up to remote work
15. Result: Nobody wants to feel like a guinea pig, but everyone wants to try something new @chimeracoder
16. Goal #2: Improve work experience for remote engineers @chimeracoder
17. Hypothesis: A remote landing team can help cement your team’s culture @chimeracoder
18. @chimeracoder Data: 3-month pilot of San Francisco engineers working from home
19. Hypothesis #2: Being distributed remotely is not that different from being distributed across offices in different cities @chimeracoder
20. Data: Video calls are not a barrier if everyone is calling in separately @chimeracoder Data: Adopt asynchronous tools for code review, project management, product development
21. Data: On-call rotation that are well-scoped and sufficiently documented can be covered remotely @chimeracoder
22. Result: Building a remote hub means building great remote teams @chimeracoder Result: The best engineering workflows create discoverable records Result: Remote work is a forcing function for good engineering practices
23. Goal #3: Recruit and hire more remote engineers @chimeracoder
24. Hypothesis: Most engineering roles can be hired remotely, as long as the team and manager are committed to it @chimeracoder
25. @chimeracoder Data: We codified and simplified requirements for working remotely
26. Result: By the end of 2019, Stripe had nearly 200 remote engineers in roles across the company @chimeracoder Result: As of today, all Stripe engineers are working remotely
27. @chimeracoder Result: Being set up for remote work at a small scale meant we were prepared to scale it up rapidly when needed
28. Summary of Findings • Remote work is a forcing function for good engineering practices • If an engineering role can’t be done remotely, ask yourselves why? • Be methodical and rigorous. Identify and amplify what’s already working. • Working at home during a pandemic is different from “working remotely” @chimeracoder
29. Thank you! Aditya Mukerjee @chimeracoder https://github.com/ChimeraCoder