Working Remotely

Tidepool is a highly distributed team, and we embrace remote work. We currently have team members living across the U.S. and in other countries worldwide. While working remotely can be a challenge, we do our best to make it effective. Here are some of the things we do:

All-Hands Meeting every other week

We hold All-Hands meetings. During each meeting, we talk about the highlights since the previous All-Hands.

Show & Tell Meetings

On some Thursdays, we hold a 1-hour meeting where we do demos and show work in progress to the rest of the team.

Slack and other collaboration tools

We have both internal and external Slack instances for communication:

Internal: tidepoolteam.slack.com - for communication with other Tidepool team members.
External: tidepoolorg.slack.com - for communication with our users and the open source community.

Almost all Slack conversations happens in public Slack channels where the whole team can see it. You may not subscribe to or pay attention to every channel, but conversations that happen in public channels are searchable and readable by the whole team, so when someone wants to know how we decided on some course of action, Slack gives them a place to look back at the conversation. Not every ping or question needs to be public (there’s a very good use case for direct messages), but when in doubt, we err on the side of posting publicly.

We also use G-Suite, Jira, Confluence, Monday.com, and GitHub, to keep track of our work.

In-Person Onsites

We try and get together twice per year in person for a whole week to work, reflect on the past 6-9 months, strategize and plan the next 6-9 months. Sometimes we do our onsites in rented houses, and other times we do them in a hotel. Besides reconnecting as a team, we aim to come out of the onsites re-energized, inspired, and aligned. We always work in something fun like hiking, biking, or kayaking. Past locations have included California: Santa Cruz, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, and Fall River Mills and Utah: Park City.

Since the Coronavirus Pandemic happened, our In-person Onsites have been virtual.

Time-zone Sensitivity

This is challenging given how distributed we are. In general, there is only one hour in the day when everyone is awake. We try to schedule meetings in a way that is sensitive to participants’ locales. Employees may occasionally need to meet in the evening or at night in order to make this possible.

These two blog posts summarize the remote work experience at Tidepool: