This is the 46th in a series of business tips from industry leaders that Enterprise Times has interviewed. Enterprise Times recently spoke with Chen Salomon, Director of Engineering at monday.com, about why monday.com chose London to expand its engineering team and its approach to R&D with its builders’ teams.
With engineers based in Israel, Poland and now London. I asked Salomon for a tip on how to manage geographically dispersed engineering workforces.
Salomon replied, “It goes to the company values, and I think it really helps in this case. First of all, we’re very transparent. That really helps. The key is what I call the communication calls, because at the end of the day, we’re all engineers. If we’re talking and looking at a code level, it’s easy. When it gets complex, we want to keep everyone aligned towards the goal. The core of my role is to keep everyone aligned. Think about it as a group of vectors. We have really good vectors that if we keep everyone looking in the same way, we’ll achieve greater success.
“The idea is, how can we communicate better? It’s a lot about creating the right messages and communicating them clearly, to set the right expectation. We’re investing a lot of face time. How can we have some face-to-face time? How can we sit together? I’m flying to Israel, people are visiting each other in order to create this personal connection. In terms of managing global teams, I think those are the keys. How can we communicate clearly, and create alignment on our goals?
“If I need to add one more thing, it is not to be too highly aligned. It’s also to keep the right mix between this and loosely coupled, to be able to work independently. If, by the end of the day, I as a developer, am waiting for someone in Israel to approve my work, or waiting for someone from the UK to help me with the product spec, that’s pretty frustrating.”
