 Usually the mechanisms that exist in the office will not translate well into the remote work culture and you're going to need to come up with alternatives that might not exactly look like what you had in the office. And even things which are hidden, like a typical example is the water cooler, right? Like the water cooler where you bump into people. Well, that doesn't exist anymore and you're going to have to be more explicit about creating these opportunities to connect. Hello and welcome to the GitLab weekly web series on remote work. We are very happy today to have Gonzalo Silva, the CTO of Duist joining us to talk about remote work, autonomy, best practices, and everything that goes along with leading a remote team. How long have you been working remotely? Well, that's a good question. I've been working remotely at Duist officially for, it's coming up, nine years. But I was freelancing before I joined Duist and I worked with clients from all around the world. So technically it's been a bit longer than that. But working in a remote company, working remotely day in, day out, yeah, it's about nine years now. Wow. And so you were working as a freelancer before, were you engineering? Yes, I was programming. Yeah. And then you went into the CTO role, sort of stepping up? Yeah, it's been a bit of a ride. So the story there is Duist actually hired me as a freelancer initially to build their Android app, which I did. But I had a lot of fun, they had a lot of fun. And when I mean dates, it wasn't mostly a mere, just a mere. It was a really great relationship when we decided to kind of like formalize it. And I joined Duist as an Android developer. And then a few years later, as the teams were starting to grow, I started leading the team as head of Android. And then a few years later again, I moved up to the CTO role when we were looking to find a bit more consolidation around our engineering. Our teams were very split, very functional. And we needed someone to kind of like be the glue between the teams. So and it's been four years now since I've been in the CTO role at Duist. I think that's one of those stories that is sort of unique to remote culture. I think the ability to be that flexible in your path and to go toward your best abilities is something that we see more often in remote. I think that I see a lot more, you know, developers moving up through those roles than I think I would in traditional corporate culture where people are more like they're on a path and they know exactly what steps going to go forward. It's a startup thing too, I think. Yeah, I think remote work really enables some aspects to the way we work that are harder in a traditional co-located office sense. So for example, we really value autonomy and independence. So, you know, there's really a lot of value in remote work where you can bring your ideas to the table in a proactive manner and find your space in your voice, which I think in an office, I mean, it's definitely possible, maybe not as easy to do. And this is something I personally leveraged and it's something we really try to foster across all of Duist, transparency, autonomy, independence. It's also, I think, something new people might struggle with initially because there's very little hand holding, at least within our culture. Of course, when people join Duist, we have processes in place to make sure they ramp up and they feel supported as they are being onboarded. But we really try to be quick, to quickly move to a place where people feel the extreme autonomy and independence that we try to foster across the board. Yeah, absolutely. It's a culture of sort of aggressive permissiveness, of inclusivity. Exactly. Yeah, that's exactly it. Yeah. So okay, so tell me about Duist. What is Duist exactly? What do you do? So at Duist, we create two products, one which most people probably have heard of to Duist and another which is less known, Tuist. And our internal slogan is that we're trying to create the workplace of the future. And we just happen to build the tools for it. So we think a lot about productivity. That's what Duist tries to solve. Individual productivity, especially, but also team productivity. And we think a lot about communication. And that's what Tuist tries to solve in a very specific way, actually, which is specific to our culture, but especially relevant for remote work, which is we try to work asynchronously as much as possible. We are very skeptical about synchronous processes, things like meetings. We don't do them very often. So we really wanted a tool that enabled us to communicate asynchronously in a long form, thoughtful manner. There was not a lot of focus on this on the market a few years ago. So we created Tuist. And that's basically our focus right now, productivity and communication. Excellent. Yeah, that really aligns with, you know, our approach at GoodLab as well. Async and open communication are huge elements for facilitating really strong remote work processes, especially across time zones and in a global context. And I think that, you know, one thing that you mentioned as we were sort of preparing for this is being egalitarian and developing a culture that allows employees to do their best work. Does that include, you know, employees across different cultures? Yeah, absolutely. That applies to everybody on the team. So we mentioned autonomy and independence, something we really also like to think about is ownership. So we don't have a lot of structure around ownership. We have ideas, we plan to implement them, but we really give ownership to the people working on that idea to figure out what that really means. So we really try to make sure that the way we work is cross functional, that there's never a top down approach to work. And we actually nowadays prefer to work with unspecified ideas than specified ideas so that we can, you know, assemble a group of cross functional people across the globe to work on something and then just give them full authority and ownership on whatever they're building. Now, of course, we're usually trying to solve a specific problem, right? There's usually a user complaint or there's an aspect to our product that from user interviews we know it's not great. So there is a premise, but how the solution looks like it's really up to the people actually building that solution. That's fascinating and it sounds challenging at the same time to set up a work environment where you allow that much creativity and flexibility and autonomy. So how do you actually enforce systems that lead to results? Okay, that's a good question. I guess, you know, this all starts with hiring because we probe a lot for this autonomy type of person because you know, there is a profile where this works better, although we truly believe we can mentor and coach people into thriving in this environment. But we don't enforce this except for just, you know, walking the walk. So, you know, there's this problem statement. We make that very clear. We talk about it. And then we just like, you know, we come up to the group of people that's going to work on it. And it's just like, you know, figure it out, ping whoever you need to ping about whatever you need. Otherwise, good luck. That's just how we try to, you know, walk the walk in terms of making sure that people have ownership over the work that they are doing. But I admit, this can be, there can be a bit of friction, especially in the beginning, especially for people coming from the typical office culture, or people who were in teams where previously there was a lot of micromanagement. That's not something that we do at all. And actually, we're really happy that remote work makes it really difficult to micromanage people. It's just the wrong way of managing a team. And we have some struggles, but I think through documentation, we document a lot of the, you know, we document the way we do things and why we approach things in that specific way. And as part of our onboarding, people read these documents, they comment on them, they challenge ideas, we have this healthy discussion around all of these concepts. So it's kind of like most people know what to expect. And then it's just by leading by example, they look around and they see how people behave and how they act. And we have this very osmosis based culture where we really try to, you know, embody the values we write about. That's very well thought out. And it's clear that this comes from some time practicing these values. And I think that, you know, at GitLab, we've run into a lot of challenges around how do you implement remote work and maintain a culture that's results focused. And we've come up with a lot of the same sort of responses. It does have to be autonomous. It does have to be very well documented. You mentioned micromanagement and not being able to micromanage. What are some other of the elements of remote work that people are surprised by when they come from a co-located environment? I think one thing that's very surprising to people is that usually the mechanisms that exist in the office will not translate well into the remote work culture. And you're going to need to come up with alternatives that might not exactly look like what you had in the office. And even things which are hidden, like a typical example is the water cooler, right? Like the water cooler where you bump into people. Well, that doesn't exist anymore. And you're going to have to be more explicit about creating these opportunities to connect people. And another thing is, you know, the high bandwidth communication, high bandwidth real-time communication that's typical in an office. It becomes very hard to find that in a remote environment. So what is the alternative? How do you ensure you have a high quality communication going around? I think there is a tendency to think about alternatives in a very linear way, right? So what is the version of the water cooler? What is the version of the meeting room? And I think there's a lot more to it than that. It's more about, you know, what are the goals of the, like, what is the goal of the water cooler conversations, right? It's to connect people. It's to bring up a sense of belonging. It's to put a face behind, you know, the speech or the text in the case of remote work. So how can you do that when you work remotely? There's many ways you can approach this, right? Like, we have a few we do informal hangouts every once in a while. We have yearly retreats. The whole company gets together. We have yearly team retreats where specific teams get together as well. But these are a lot more explicit than just, you know, getting a water cooler and putting it in the corner of the office. And it's a bit of the same for meetings. I mean, technology is amazing and I'm always surprised by how much advancement we've seen in video conferencing technology, but it's not exactly the same as sitting around the table, right? There's always, it's just not the same. The bandwidth is just not the same. And so, you know, transitioning, for example, for async, it's a huge fundamental shift in the way we communicate. And it's a way that does might not make a lot of sense within an office or at least it's not obvious. It makes sense. It's just not obvious. Well, for remote work, there's a lot of advantages in doing things in that way. And that is a big departure from the office, typical approach. So I really think that's the usually the typical struggle. It's when people look at the office and they think about the things that work. And they try to translate this into the remote environment. And they try to map things one to one. And I really don't think that works well. And there's not a lot of literature on this. We have dozens and dozens of books written about how to make offices work. We don't have a lot of books written about how to make remote work. So in many ways, I feel like we and you guys and a lot of other great companies are a bit pioneers in the sense of figuring things out and documenting them. Absolutely. It is documenting an entirely new way of practicing. And sometimes it sounds like an exaggeration to say that. But, you know, once you get into it, you really do have to rethink every single element of how we work together. So what about for people who are new to your team? How do you get them up to speed? What's your onboarding approach? Yeah. So actually, the thing I think the thing we do that's the most important or made the most difference as we were learning the ropes, we made a lot of mistakes over the years, obviously, was having a dedicated mentor. Because if you think about that culture that I described before of strong independence and autonomy and, you know, asynchronous working asynchronously, if you drop in a team that works like this, you're going to feel very isolated. You're going to feel very abandoned, because people are just, you know, doing deep work most of the time in their corner. So there are a lot of opportunities to communicate, but most of them are not real time. They are not synchronous. So there is this. It's not a great feeling, I think, to be onboarded like this. So something we tried a few years ago and we stuck to it is having a dedicated mentor for people. So when you join the team, there is a person whose responsibility is to kind of like onboard you properly. So they will be available in real time for the first few months to discuss anything you need to brainstorm projects with you to kind of like make the expectations clearer whenever they're not. And this kind of like early hand holding while people are setting up, getting used to remote work, reading up on the documentation and, you know, getting their feet wet on projects and the way we work has been instrumental to making the bridge. The bridge between how people used to work and how we work. So that's definitely the one thing that has been the most instrumental. But of course, there's a few others. We talk a lot and document a lot about the focus on async and autonomy. These things sometimes don't come naturally. And for example, there's a lot of folks who expect a lot of direction from their team leads. We don't have much of that here. So we kind of like expect people to have a plan themselves and execute on it, obviously. And then it's also a matter of getting people up to speed on the opportunities to connect with others, right? Because we also don't want to go all the way into async. We need to connect with each other. We need to make sure we have empathy. We can empathize with the other people behind the screen. And that really requires face-to-face. There is no way around it. It's the best way to do it. So we have all of these other processes. While we are onboarding for people, for example, I know in the onboarding project, there is a task to ping, I actually don't know how many, but let's say five, ping five random people in the company and talk to them about any, you know, any topic at all. It doesn't need to be work-related at all. And some really interesting conversations spark from this, you know, not really spontaneous, but mimicking a spontaneous approach to communicating and getting people onboarded. Yeah, I think there's actually something interesting in that last point. There is an awkwardness to the sort of cold-calling people that you work with and setting up a casual conversation because it's forced, you know, and you have to sort of get through that awkwardness and just say, you know, I need to connect with somebody. I need to make some personal connections here. I'm going to be vulnerable. I'm going to make small talk. We might talk about the weather. Okay, you know, and in the end, I'll know somebody else that I can reach out to later when I have a question. Yeah, exactly. Breaking that ice is super important, but, you know, luckily, that's not new to remote work, I guess. When you join a new team in an office, it's also a bit awkward when you join and you don't know the faces and how to spark conversation. I would actually argue it's maybe less awkward when working remotely because you're in control, you know. So it's not like you're bumping to anybody. You're going to have to open the chat room or you have to schedule the meeting or, and, you know, one of these, but you're in control. You're in control of when you're ready to talk to the stranger. You know, you're in full control of when this happens and how it happens. So in that way, I just think maybe it's a little bit better, but I'm just, you know, I am biased. So yeah. So this question is not on our list, but I'm curious how that works between engineering people versus, you know, marketing people or HR. There's, you know, there's a specific personality type that's in engineering. How does it work bringing engineering people into remote work and setting up these sort of casual chats and communication practices? That's a good question. So I'm not sure I'm not sure I fully agree with the stereotype thinking, although I will say engineers are definitely quick to be more dismissive about these opportunities to connect. We don't force anybody to do anything. So that's kind of like rule number one. For example, the informal hangouts that I mentioned before, we schedule them every two months, but they are fully optional. If you say yes to the calendar event, you'll be placed in a random group and I'm happy that 70 to 80% of people every round say yes. So they seem to be quite nice. But we never point out that somebody is not engaging. And actually, I have a kind of an extreme example and something I really love about remote work and Duist. Duist is employee number two. His name is David and he's a supporter and I have never met him. I have never seen him. I have never been on a call with him. I have never heard his voice. So he has, I don't know why and I don't care, but he wants to do things remotely all the time via text, via twists, via anything else. And it's been almost nine years and my oldest colleague I have never met them. And that's fine. I mean, that's the brilliant thing about remote work in my opinion. So the way we handle these differences between people, it's really to not try to handle them or at least not forcefully. So we really want these opportunities to connect, to be enticing, even to the most skeptical types. So if they are not, we will generally just think about ways to improve the initiatives themselves and not push people into trying them out. If that makes sense. It does make sense. Absolutely. And I love that there's that freedom to not show up visibly and to still be a complete participant and a total professional and able to execute your work and be part of a team, but to set boundaries around what you're comfortable with. Yeah, I mean, I think it's key for these things to be driven by intrinsic motivation. And so of course you have a lot of control over the context in which these things happen. You can make things more interesting, you can make them more enticing, but ultimately forcing people to do things is not a scalable way. It's not a way to scale a team or a company. That is very interesting because actually GitLab is very interested in forcing functions. And that's one of our key principles. So we'll have a little bit of a disagreement there. We'll see how it shakes out in a few years. Yeah, for sure. And I mean, the world is big enough for both approaches. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so let's let's get to something a little more serious, which is the pandemic. We've been going through this for a few months. And I want to know how this pandemic has changed the team culture at Duist. So actually, when I think about this, I am inclined to say nothing has changed at all, but that's actually not true. The thing the changes, though, are a lot are very subtle, I think. So for one, there is this general acknowledgement from the whole team that I mean, we're not working remotely as before, we're working from home during a pandemic, there is a difference. And we try to acknowledge this and talk about it. And also, there's a lot of management around expectations. So we are generally a very ambitious team, we have big plans, and we like to talk about them and push for things and be optimistic in general. While now we're actually trying to scale things down, we have scaled things down, in a sense of, you know, it's pretty much a completely a best effort basis to things that we do. So our expectations are extremely toned down. We have done things like making our cycles longer, we work in cycles, we have moved them from one month to one month and a half, just and the workload is roughly the same. And even then, there's no expectation that we actually hit the goals. So I would say nothing has changed much in the way we are working. But the expectations and ambitions are more in line with the ongoing situation, because even for, even though none of, nobody at Duist so far, and hopefully it will still be the case in a few months, has been affected by COVID directly, or indirectly through their families and friends. The truth is, it's very hard to focus and be optimistic and be positive and do your best work when you are locked at home with the news always kind of like, you know, pushing the numbers. We're in the millions now and it's growing in some places and it's, people talk about waves and further lockdowns. It's, there's a lot of anxiety and stress around this topic. So even though it might not affect you directly, it will definitely affect you indirectly. So we just try to be upfront about not expecting people to manage this. They just like have to, you know, we have to live through this and take things slow and one step at a time. Yeah, well said, well said. And I think, you know, we are experiencing something similar. The first reaction was not to know exactly what to do. And I think what we're learning is that the work is the same. It's the people who are challenging, who are different and who need more space and more time. So I agree with that approach of just adding more time on to deadlines and on to cycles. Yeah, I mean, and that's a brilliant observation. The context, the people that change, yeah, the people change, the context changes, the people, the work, yeah, it's just everyday work. Yeah, but it's people are the biggest piece of the puzzle, though. So yeah. So as part of this whole process, we've seen a lot of companies around the world going remote, and then many of them considering staying remote in some form, having some of their employees work, telework, work remotely, work from home, however you want to put it. So what's a struggle that companies may not see coming as they move into this environment? So something that immediately comes to mind is something we already discussed, the mapping of one to one of office processes to remote work. So with that out of the way, we can actually focus on the number two, which I think will be very dangerous and will happen maybe closer to the end of the year, maybe next year, which is after the pandemic is over or at least under control, even though a lot of companies will embrace remote work, they will be tempted to go back to the office, even if in a partial manner, right, like become remote hybrid. And I have not seen hybrid teams work successfully in the long term. And I feel that happens a lot because you create first and second class citizens within a company, and actually creating a remote hybrid company, I would argue it's harder than creating a remote only company, because it requires a lot of discipline around the way you communicate, around the way you document those communications and the decisions, and around the transparency you employ in everything you do, and about making sure that even if you're co-located, you're still embracing remote friendly practices. For example, if you're in a meeting, each person should be in their own computer, in their own room, preferably, and not having a group behind one camera and then everybody else alone. So I think that phase will be very complicated because there will be this temptation, especially from leadership, and I'm sad to say this, but it's something that already is already happening in the valley, as far as I know, where leadership is in the office, just the rest of the company isn't. And it's going to be very hard to create a culture where people feel part of, really part of the mission, because they won't be, unless you make things really transparent and make sure that everybody's looked in equally. And that is very, very hard to do. And I don't think it's going to be obvious to companies that this is happening until a few months in they will start hearing from people that they feel left out, that they are frustrated and, or even worse, start losing some of their key people. So yeah, I mean, it's definitely something to keep an eye out for and something I don't think will be immediately obvious to people transitioning partially back into the office. Well said. And I think it's challenging too, because there's no clear answer for what people will need. It's something that each company, I think we'll have to determine on its own and even on an individual basis from employee to employee. So for some context background, we run polls on our social media now and then asking people about remote work. And we did a poll a couple of weeks ago, where we asked people on LinkedIn and on Twitter, if you could ask for one thing to make your remote work life better right now, what would it be? And it was about a 50-50 split. About half of people said they need a piece of gear or equipment, something that physically they can add to their setup to make work life better. And the other half said, mental or emotional support. So it's completely different depending on your environment, depending on what you have available, depending on your team, and being able to predict that is not really possible at this point. Yeah. I mean, as we discussed, the rule book is being written, right? So it's something we all need to figure out how to make work. And it's actually, I think, one of the key things that was missing from remote work. And I guess it's still missing, but people because of the pandemic are more open to it, which is, I guess, especially in tech, when you think about the big cause and what makes people really ambitious, none of them are really remote. So remote needs a big winner, I think, to start writing the rule books. And because, for example, we are figuring out what remote can look like at 80 people. But that's as far as our experience goes. Maybe next year, 100 people. And I'm sure you guys have gone through all of these same steps and are still figuring out how to scale the next bit. So when you think about offices, you have all of so many books with so many best practices that have been refined across countries, across continents, with so many samples to learn from. I really think this, we don't know that much. So it really boils down to that. We don't know what we're doing. We're just trying to innovate and do the best we can. Yeah. And I mean, that's basically it. Yeah, absolutely. We're at, we just hit 1300 team members at GitLab. And I still think we are very much figuring it out as we go and iterating and developing on our best practices at every moment and at every turn. It's still a process of discovery. And I think it will be for a long time. And I'm sure the GitLab two years ago probably didn't look exactly like it does today. So things are constantly changing and improving. And at least they are for us. We are definitely very different from what we were two years ago. And we expect to be very different two years from now. Now, with all of that said, with those qualifiers, if you could tell leaders about one thing that they could implement to create a more holistic, better remote focused culture for their teams, what's one thing that you would recommend? I would definitely recommend something you guys are experts at, which is document everything, make it accessible and transparent. Creating this culture of documentation can be really, really a great way to bridge the gap between people, between what people are thinking, what they are doing, and how they are thinking about things as they do them. It really promotes transparency and overall an open system where people are part of the process. Documentation, it's a lot of work, but it's very, very important. And I would argue you will have more context, a lot more context. If you have strong documentation culture, then if you just spend all of your time in an office with all of your teammates. So, it's really enlightening how great it can be. Absolutely. And I think we try very hard to practice that here as well. It is always a challenge. But in the end, it avoids hearsay. It avoids exclusivity of information. And it's a great way to have transparency across a distributed team. And it's also about respect. I think if you write about the way you do things, about the way you reason about them, then you don't have to bump into situations where awkward steps in or you struggle to explain something to somebody because you've done it many times before. You owe it to yourself and your teammates to make those decisions public in a way that's accessible to them. And definitely you need ways to make them challengeable. So, this is key as well. Having also a culture where... And I also like that you guys talk about this, having very small toes. So, you never step on anyone's toes because everybody has very small toes. This is also key. But documenting everything, not to make it strict or official, but to make it transparent and accessible, is really, really great way to scale. At least from our experience. And it's obviously from yours as well. Absolutely. Excellent. All right. Well, this brings me to our final question, which is we're hoping for some good news. Tell me something good that you've seen or heard this week. So, this is a tough one because everything... As I was thinking about this, there were many things I didn't want to leave out. And at the same time, none of them seemed like super revolutionary and insightful. So, I kind of like to speak my favorites. And this year, I was listening to a podcast on the investor's field guide with Toby Luc, the Shopify CEO. And there is a quote in that podcast that I really, really love, which is he says that there's two kinds of good processes. Processes that make things that were impossible, possible. And processes that make things 10 times easier. And then there's all of the other kinds of processes. So, I think this is super relevant to a lot of teams and also for us because we're at a point, I guess around 80 people where process is becoming a more central piece of our puzzle about how we do things. And we have some friction to this because, you know, we've started from one person to people, three people. So, we kind of like, it's easy to look back and say, why didn't we need any of this when we were 20 people? Well, we need it now. And so, there is a point here where I want to make sure I'm not tapping in too much into my own survivorship bias. And I don't want to create too much friction on my ends towards process when it is truly needed. But I do think Toby framed my general thinking. And so, since Shopify, I think has like 5,000 people now. It's good to know it's this kind of thinking still scales, at least up until then. So, yeah, I mean, process that makes something possible that wasn't before, or that makes something substantially easier to do, makes perfect sense. Everything else, I would recommend that people are skeptical about it. It's a good quote. And it's a good podcast. I love that. That is going to stick with me this week. Thank you for sharing it. I really mean that. Awesome. Awesome to hear. Excellent. Well, that wraps up all of our questions. But I want to ask if there's anything else that you wanted to share or bring to this conversation. We have a little bit of time. Anything else you wanted to say? Yeah, there is, we have a blog called Ambition and Balance, where the whole team contributes to it. And we also have a lot of guest writers, including from GitLab in some of our articles. I would definitely recommend people check it out, especially if they're interested in working remotely, because we try to write about the things we experience and the things we find important in that blog. We really, really make it into a top priority for us, and to share what we learn and what we know. So, there's probably something there for everybody. And hopefully, there's something in there for you too. I'm sure there is. Excellent. Thanks for sharing that. And with that, I'll say thank you and we'll wrap up our interview. So, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. It was great. Yeah, it was great to chat with you too. Thank you.