Team Meeting Norms
1:1s
Every member of CS has a regular weekly 1:1 with the manager to whom they report. We consider this 1:1 a sacred space that each member of CS gets to use with their manager how they choose. Each manager can put their own spin on these to ensure that folks to whom they are primarily responsible get the most out of it.
Career roadmapping/support
Every member of CS works with their manager to start creating their personal career roadmap when they reach their 90 day milestone. The practice starts the same for everyone, answering a series of questions that touch on and go beyond typical career questions. Each manager pushes the folks to whom they are primarily responsible to think through their plans and helps them identify who else in the organization/beyond can help support them to get to where they want to go.
It is very likely that other managers on the team may be brought in to support someone’s career roadmap as a secondary coach with a speciality in some area relevant to that member of the team.
Getting help
If an application engineer needs help, they have the following avenues:
- If it’s technical, they post in #customer-support-internal to get help from their fellow application engineers
- If it’s about how to handle a particular situation, they should go to their manager. If their manager is not online, they can either create a post in #customer-support-internal and @ mention @cs-leadership for another manager online to help and either work in that thread or request that whomever is going to help DM them if they need to chat privately,
We want to have a global team where folks can work anywhere in the world. We never want that to mean someone has to wait to get the help that they need.
Team meetings
For both weekly planning/retros and ad-hoc team meetings, each manager will facilitate a session on Wednesday at and . The application engineers in attendance at each session will change monthly based on what works best for each application engineer that month. Each application engineer has one option that always aligns with their working hours, and a second option that either aligns or lets them flex slightly if they want to easily experience another facilitation style.
At the end of each month, everyone participates in a quick Slack vote on which times will work for them in the coming month. Based on this, which application engineers participate in what time is identified randomly and each manager adjusts the invite for which they are responsible to reflect the correct participants for that month.
This model will let folks continue to work with and bond with folks across the team and not be limited just to those who report to the same manager.
Each manager can put their own spin on the planning/retro they facilitate. Each week, the agenda will have some items that every manager will cover to ensure alignment across the entire team, and they will have space to put their spin on it to keep this synchronous time interesting and engaging.
If any all-team wide ad hoc meetings are also needed, this same model will be used, where the managers each facilitate a session and participants opt into which times work and are randomly identified for one of the sessions that works for them.
Aimee will attend as-needed and when needed, will attend all sessions.
Team announcements/initiatives
Whenever there is an announcement that will impact the entire team, the leadership team will default to asynchronous communication and any member of the leadership team may take responsibility for the communication in #customer-support-internal. Where the announcement benefits from synchronous communication, the leadership team will decide whether it’s something that is best shared in the weekly planning/retro or during 1:1s.
Whenever there is an initiative that requires the entire team, one member of the leadership team will take responsibility and determine how we will facilitate, involve everyone. This could look different with each initiative, but whichever member of the leadership team takes responsibility, they will ensure to facilitate the initiative with healthy change management practices.
The idea here is that any member of the leadership team may share/solicit important information to/from the entire team, not just a CSE’s direct manager.
Group projects
For team initiatives, various application engineers will need to collaborate together in various group formations. Folks can work with folks across the entire team and will never be limited just to the folks who report to the same manager.
Social gatherings
We will continue to have several optional ways for the team to engage socially:
- Asynchronously in our #cs-social channel
- Synchronously 1:1 via the random #weekly #customer-support-weekly pairing donut app pairing
- Synchronously on Friday via two afternoon/end of day social sessions that are scheduled at and . Everyone is invited as optional and whoever shows up for the session gets to decide how they want to enjoy each other’s company.
- Asynchronously and/or synchronously during quarterly virtual events (until we are able to move to consistent in-person)
Quarterly check-ins
Every quarter, Aimee will check-in with each member of the team to catch-up, see how things are going, gather perspectives, and validate the team is headed and/or operating the way we want.
Performance management
Everyone only has one manager and that manager is the individual responsible for any performance management that is necessary. At no point is this org structure meant to make it so that anyone feels like they have multiple managers. While any leader may offer positive feedback, only someone’s direct manager or a peer will offer constructive feedback unless the situation is so dire that another leader must do so (this would be very, very rare). There may be times when someone and their manager agree to involve another leader in soliciting feedback (for example, during the 360 review process) and that is entirely acceptable.