Divan Vice President: how I work as a product director on a complete remote
Hey. My name is Maxim Vinnikov, I am Vice President of Product Management at Aurea Software. In the same company that Slava Kulakov works for, familiar to many from history , as he became a freelancer, receiving $ 200,000 a year. Questions and comments on that post continue to go so far, so today, by my own example, I’ll tell you what work itself is on a daily basis, for which such fees are paid - and I will try to answer questions on the subject alive.
[update] Live answered the questions that appeared in the comments for the day:
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According to Aurea and ESW Capital standards, each employee must work 40 hours per calendar week. I, based on my position and physical abilities, adhere to the schedule 5/2. My main working window is in the range from 14:00 to 19:00, which is a total of 5 hours a day. Another 3 hours a day are refined when it is more convenient for me: one day I can work late in the evening, the other I start in the morning to free myself early.
Since the team is 100% decentralized and we have no offices, then all interaction between employees goes online. I, as a VP (and this is a managerial position), are involved in various workflows of many people more than the average developer. This is also worth considering.
In general, my working day has a fairly simple and stable structure; any person in one degree or another standardizes his day and makes adjustments to the usual course of events only as needed. But it doesn’t matter whether you are in a company as a VP or are a line engineer, there are workers in the team work, they are meetings. As if sometimes it would not be desirable, the rally is not a military commissar, you do not run from it. For planning communication and, in particular, for all workers, we do not reinvent the wheel and use the Google calendar. Meetings are planned according to the Google calendar of the employee / employees with further notification (via mail or, for example, in Skype). As you can guess, this activity takes place precisely in the framework of the “main” working window during the day. “Basic”, because the format of my work implies the need to adapt to colleagues, to have working time with them. In this case, individual tasks that do not require the participation of other people, I solve when it is convenient for me.
Such a schedule can only be called partially flexible, but you need to understand that there are restrictions imposed by my position: VP cannot ignore the conversations or meetings assigned to him. To answer the question, what exactly do I do, I will give the schedule of one of my Thursdays:
According to the above schedule, it can be seen that it takes considerable time to interact with different people, and a little more time with its own boss. There are a total of 24 people in my submission (14 of whom report to me directly), plus contacts with neighboring directions are superimposed on this figure. Because of this, somehow constantly moving various rallies at will does not work out, because in this case, the schedules of all others interested in working with me will go. In general, in this regard, life is greatly facilitated by the simplicity of the Google calendar, in which you can clearly see who and when is free.
In terms of organizing meetings and calls, a rather short hierarchical chain within the company with the possibility of both vertical and diagonal communication is very much saving. Even in a nightmare, I cannot dream that I will have to knock on my supervisor so that he knocks on the head of a neighboring direction in order to coordinate my conversation with his subordinate. I just find the right person (no matter, higher or lower along the hierarchy) and communicate with him directly, which is reflected in the calendar. This simplicity saves just a monstrous amount of time and nerves.
It will be sly to say that meetings take up all my time and the working day begins with them. Of course, the day begins with acup of Nescafe Gold reading the mail, and then everything else. But in general, it is obvious that if you have two calls - one at 14:30 and the second at 18:00, then it is easier to work between them, the gap is too small. According to my own observations, most of my work activity, taking into account individual tasks, takes place in the window between 12:00 and 20:00. At the same time, I believe that “the cat is more alive than dead”, that is, my schedule is flexible enough to comfortably organize my own offline activity and personal life. If necessary, in the morning, I can take the time for myself or my family, take a walk with my child, solve some pressing issues, while the rest of the city sits at workplaces.
As has already become clear, my weekly work activity, like any other of our employees, revolves around the value at 40 hours. Apart from the “light” side, the ability to plan one’s own time is also “dark”: a person must be able to plan his day / week qualitatively and be highly self-organized so that this plan can be followed later.
This helps a lot of activity tracker WorkSmart. To make it clearer, in a nutshell I will explain how this tracker works. WorkSmart is an internal time tracking tool used by almost all people working for ESW Capital group companies (including Aurea, where I work or Crossover, which posts this publication in the blog). After switching on, the tracker starts tracking activity, collects statistics, and can also take screenshots of the screen for your manager and webcam photos. By the way, about photos: this tool is used not everywhere and not always, everything depends on the specific company and its management. Much more important, how exactly the tracker considers time.
Each of my working hours is divided into 6 equal time cards of 10 minutes, which record the activity at the computer. Within one time card, the tracker records which applications were used, how much time I spent in a particular application, makes screenshots and photos from a webcam, if this feature is enabled. This data is used to generate my personal statistics of productivity and distribution of working time between different applications and types of working activity, for example - how much in a week I “spent” in the mail and how much in JIRA. Also, these data are, of course, used to control the good faith of a remote employee, for example, if the manager has suspicions of trying to cheat and deceive the tracker. But the main purpose of the tracker and the entire WorkSmart program is still not control, but the employee’s “immersion” into the company's work environment.
At the same time, the following positive things should be noted:
A special feature of the managerial position in the companies of the ESW Capital group is that it’s not just that they don’t expect from you, and they don’t really recommend it. For the same reason, managers, unlike developers, are not paid for processing. Therefore, it is in my interest to avoid going beyond the agreed timeframe and to solve all urgent tasks exclusively during the forty-hour business. Whatever the model Dev-Factory would look like, but you have to work far from it “from here and to the fence”. Recycling most often occurs in two cases:
Production necessity - a concept familiar to all. This type of processing is typical for developers and is consistent with the manager. Often, all overtime processing at 40 hours is paid at full rate. A very important nuance lies in the fact that the developer can always refuse from overtime. Well, actually, maybe a person left for a weekend kayaking or taiga, or maybe just tired and wants to rest - this is not our business. If the manager receives a refusal on the offer to work overtime, he cannot change it in some way with methods other than persuasion.
This Crossover probably differs significantly from other companies: if you refuse to work overtime, even if the “party demands”, there will be no consequences for the employee, in any case, neither I at Aurea, nor the director of Crossover in Russia, Vladimir Yeronin, can remember such situations. In general, overtime is only voluntary and by mutual agreement of the parties. But you should always remember that overtime is consistent only with the manager and you should not confuse overtime with knocking out of the schedule (provided that it was drawn up adequately and fairly).
The second situation with the purchase of companies already beats the level of managers SEM, VP and above. In such a situation, Slava Kulakov recently visited and, perhaps, he will gather his thoughts and tell you himself how much this increases the load. According to the tracker, I work an average of 42 hours a week. This is more than normal, and I can turn off the tracker when I reach 40 hours and forget about work until Monday, but also postponing for tomorrow what can and should be “eaten” today is not in my character. I worked as hard as possible for the past year and a half at the current position of 47 hours, and it was an emergency week, but what to do. As a manager, these extra 7 hours were not paid for me, but the example given is definitely not the norm, and this happened to me only once.
In general, the idea that a person should work for exactly 40 hours and no longer carries mutual benefits: the company cannot overload with tasks except for some exceptional cases, and the worker, in turn, has to keep within the allotted time, after which he turns off the tracker and Work is postponed until the beginning of the next calendar week.
I often get asked if I don’t feel like an aquarium fish that I’m following with a tracker. I will not say that such work is suitable for everyone, and I will not agitate for the widespread introduction - just like any system, the tracker is not perfect. In general, different preferences and opinions - this is normal. Someone hates trackers, someone - openspaces, in which you can sneak up from behind and look over your shoulder. And it could be anyone: from the boss to the annoying colleague. But if we compare the tracker and open space, then in the case of the first one it is guaranteed that access to the data other than the employee is available only to direct management, who will not begin to talk about a conditional smoking room that a person watched on YouTube during the lunch break. More precisely, the manager does not even know: the tracker does not capture information when working time is turned off.
What I am for: I never had the sensation of being in an aquarium, and I got used to the tracker almost immediately, without a period of some painful adaptation. Perhaps it depends on each individual person, but rather quickly I stopped thinking about the fact that someone could control my work or express some complaints about efficiency. In general, if you are a conscientious employee and fulfill your goals and objectives, then the manager rarely has a desire to use the functions of “control” from the tracker - everyone already has enough things to do :) So if you go to work with us and not try cheater, the tracker should not scare you at all.
For me personally, such a regulated system in terms of load distribution is extremely convenient: I can talk with my wife, take a walk with my one and a half year old child, solve some domestic issues, or take my family to the sea when I feel like it, but not when I can take a vacation. And, of course, I do not stand in endless traffic jams in Moscow or I do not shake in a subway car three hours a day. In my eyes, coupled with the size of the salary and the local corporate culture, these advantages outweigh all the disadvantages. Would I change my current job to a similar position in the office of a company with a 50% increase in salary? No, I would not change it.
How to work with a laptop on your lap all day and not burn yourself, and other important questions about the life of a remote worker- in my stream today at 19 o'clock
Thank you all for the questions, the broadcast took place. Unfortunately, there were quite a few online viewers, so instead of a live chat, it turned out to be a podcast. See the result on the Crossover Russia channel on Youtube, share your impressions and ask for more!
[update] Live answered the questions that appeared in the comments for the day:
')
According to Aurea and ESW Capital standards, each employee must work 40 hours per calendar week. I, based on my position and physical abilities, adhere to the schedule 5/2. My main working window is in the range from 14:00 to 19:00, which is a total of 5 hours a day. Another 3 hours a day are refined when it is more convenient for me: one day I can work late in the evening, the other I start in the morning to free myself early.
Since the team is 100% decentralized and we have no offices, then all interaction between employees goes online. I, as a VP (and this is a managerial position), are involved in various workflows of many people more than the average developer. This is also worth considering.
In general, my working day has a fairly simple and stable structure; any person in one degree or another standardizes his day and makes adjustments to the usual course of events only as needed. But it doesn’t matter whether you are in a company as a VP or are a line engineer, there are workers in the team work, they are meetings. As if sometimes it would not be desirable, the rally is not a military commissar, you do not run from it. For planning communication and, in particular, for all workers, we do not reinvent the wheel and use the Google calendar. Meetings are planned according to the Google calendar of the employee / employees with further notification (via mail or, for example, in Skype). As you can guess, this activity takes place precisely in the framework of the “main” working window during the day. “Basic”, because the format of my work implies the need to adapt to colleagues, to have working time with them. In this case, individual tasks that do not require the participation of other people, I solve when it is convenient for me.
Such a schedule can only be called partially flexible, but you need to understand that there are restrictions imposed by my position: VP cannot ignore the conversations or meetings assigned to him. To answer the question, what exactly do I do, I will give the schedule of one of my Thursdays:
- 9:00 - 11:30 - woke up, sank in bed, jumped up, because the son again pulled the dog's food out of the bowl, ate breakfast, took a little walk with the family.
- 11:30 - 12:30 - phoned the engineering team, discussed the list of "orders" (read "front of work") for the second quarter.
- 12:30 - 13:30 - do personal tasks.
- 13:30 - 14:30 - a rally with one of the products of the Chief Architect, SEM and Product Managers. Engineering suggested the idea of ​​refactoring, it was necessary to discuss what should be done according to the standard process for this change to fall into the Roadmap.
- 14:30 - 15:00 - 30 minutes of Skype and mail.
- 15:00 - 16:00 - meeting with the L2 product management team, discussing what specifications we will write in the second quarter.
- 16:00 - 16:30 - here I was supposed to start dinner, but the rally was delayed ...
- 16:30 - 17:00 - managed to have lunch, cheers! : D
- 17:00 - 17:30 - rally with L3 and L2 managers of one of the products - a difficult situation with the "order", discussed what we will leave and what we will throw out from the second quarter.
- 17:30 - 18:00 - meeting with the new VP Product Management, he told what changes will be in the next team, the "services" which we use and in which he is now VP.
- 18:00 - 18:30 - Skype, mail.
- 18:30 - 19:00 - a weekly 1: 1 rally with the manager of my team of technical writers.
- 19:00 - 20:00 - getting ready for the weekly 1: 1, already with my boss.
- 20:00 - 21:00 - spent an hour with the head, I reported on the status, discussed several important issues for me, discussed his questions.
- 21:00 - 22:30 - a little rest, a difficult day, stayed with my son for a bit, helped put him to sleep.
- 22:30 - 24:00 - a little time for independent work. Reflected in Jira and other project tracking tools decisions taken during the day. I took a couple of tasks from my personal backlog.
- 0:00 - 0:15 - a traditional walk with the dog and the spa.
According to the above schedule, it can be seen that it takes considerable time to interact with different people, and a little more time with its own boss. There are a total of 24 people in my submission (14 of whom report to me directly), plus contacts with neighboring directions are superimposed on this figure. Because of this, somehow constantly moving various rallies at will does not work out, because in this case, the schedules of all others interested in working with me will go. In general, in this regard, life is greatly facilitated by the simplicity of the Google calendar, in which you can clearly see who and when is free.
In terms of organizing meetings and calls, a rather short hierarchical chain within the company with the possibility of both vertical and diagonal communication is very much saving. Even in a nightmare, I cannot dream that I will have to knock on my supervisor so that he knocks on the head of a neighboring direction in order to coordinate my conversation with his subordinate. I just find the right person (no matter, higher or lower along the hierarchy) and communicate with him directly, which is reflected in the calendar. This simplicity saves just a monstrous amount of time and nerves.
It will be sly to say that meetings take up all my time and the working day begins with them. Of course, the day begins with a
Self-control and effectiveness
As has already become clear, my weekly work activity, like any other of our employees, revolves around the value at 40 hours. Apart from the “light” side, the ability to plan one’s own time is also “dark”: a person must be able to plan his day / week qualitatively and be highly self-organized so that this plan can be followed later.
This helps a lot of activity tracker WorkSmart. To make it clearer, in a nutshell I will explain how this tracker works. WorkSmart is an internal time tracking tool used by almost all people working for ESW Capital group companies (including Aurea, where I work or Crossover, which posts this publication in the blog). After switching on, the tracker starts tracking activity, collects statistics, and can also take screenshots of the screen for your manager and webcam photos. By the way, about photos: this tool is used not everywhere and not always, everything depends on the specific company and its management. Much more important, how exactly the tracker considers time.
Each of my working hours is divided into 6 equal time cards of 10 minutes, which record the activity at the computer. Within one time card, the tracker records which applications were used, how much time I spent in a particular application, makes screenshots and photos from a webcam, if this feature is enabled. This data is used to generate my personal statistics of productivity and distribution of working time between different applications and types of working activity, for example - how much in a week I “spent” in the mail and how much in JIRA. Also, these data are, of course, used to control the good faith of a remote employee, for example, if the manager has suspicions of trying to cheat and deceive the tracker. But the main purpose of the tracker and the entire WorkSmart program is still not control, but the employee’s “immersion” into the company's work environment.
At the same time, the following positive things should be noted:
- tracker statistics are available to the employee himself and you can evaluate your performance;
- you always know how much time you have left to solve the tasks;
- tracker disciplines;
- the tracker allows you not to recycle a lot of time, as for example it is customary in many Russian companies.
A special feature of the managerial position in the companies of the ESW Capital group is that it’s not just that they don’t expect from you, and they don’t really recommend it. For the same reason, managers, unlike developers, are not paid for processing. Therefore, it is in my interest to avoid going beyond the agreed timeframe and to solve all urgent tasks exclusively during the forty-hour business. Whatever the model Dev-Factory would look like, but you have to work far from it “from here and to the fence”. Recycling most often occurs in two cases:
- This is coordinated with the manager overtime, which is caused by production needs.
- When working with a newly acquired company in which the processes are not yet established (ESW Capital is a group of companies that buys other organizations and optimizes their processes and expenses for profitability).
Production necessity - a concept familiar to all. This type of processing is typical for developers and is consistent with the manager. Often, all overtime processing at 40 hours is paid at full rate. A very important nuance lies in the fact that the developer can always refuse from overtime. Well, actually, maybe a person left for a weekend kayaking or taiga, or maybe just tired and wants to rest - this is not our business. If the manager receives a refusal on the offer to work overtime, he cannot change it in some way with methods other than persuasion.
This Crossover probably differs significantly from other companies: if you refuse to work overtime, even if the “party demands”, there will be no consequences for the employee, in any case, neither I at Aurea, nor the director of Crossover in Russia, Vladimir Yeronin, can remember such situations. In general, overtime is only voluntary and by mutual agreement of the parties. But you should always remember that overtime is consistent only with the manager and you should not confuse overtime with knocking out of the schedule (provided that it was drawn up adequately and fairly).
The second situation with the purchase of companies already beats the level of managers SEM, VP and above. In such a situation, Slava Kulakov recently visited and, perhaps, he will gather his thoughts and tell you himself how much this increases the load. According to the tracker, I work an average of 42 hours a week. This is more than normal, and I can turn off the tracker when I reach 40 hours and forget about work until Monday, but also postponing for tomorrow what can and should be “eaten” today is not in my character. I worked as hard as possible for the past year and a half at the current position of 47 hours, and it was an emergency week, but what to do. As a manager, these extra 7 hours were not paid for me, but the example given is definitely not the norm, and this happened to me only once.
In general, the idea that a person should work for exactly 40 hours and no longer carries mutual benefits: the company cannot overload with tasks except for some exceptional cases, and the worker, in turn, has to keep within the allotted time, after which he turns off the tracker and Work is postponed until the beginning of the next calendar week.
Aquarium Fish Syndrome
I often get asked if I don’t feel like an aquarium fish that I’m following with a tracker. I will not say that such work is suitable for everyone, and I will not agitate for the widespread introduction - just like any system, the tracker is not perfect. In general, different preferences and opinions - this is normal. Someone hates trackers, someone - openspaces, in which you can sneak up from behind and look over your shoulder. And it could be anyone: from the boss to the annoying colleague. But if we compare the tracker and open space, then in the case of the first one it is guaranteed that access to the data other than the employee is available only to direct management, who will not begin to talk about a conditional smoking room that a person watched on YouTube during the lunch break. More precisely, the manager does not even know: the tracker does not capture information when working time is turned off.
What I am for: I never had the sensation of being in an aquarium, and I got used to the tracker almost immediately, without a period of some painful adaptation. Perhaps it depends on each individual person, but rather quickly I stopped thinking about the fact that someone could control my work or express some complaints about efficiency. In general, if you are a conscientious employee and fulfill your goals and objectives, then the manager rarely has a desire to use the functions of “control” from the tracker - everyone already has enough things to do :) So if you go to work with us and not try cheater, the tracker should not scare you at all.
For me personally, such a regulated system in terms of load distribution is extremely convenient: I can talk with my wife, take a walk with my one and a half year old child, solve some domestic issues, or take my family to the sea when I feel like it, but not when I can take a vacation. And, of course, I do not stand in endless traffic jams in Moscow or I do not shake in a subway car three hours a day. In my eyes, coupled with the size of the salary and the local corporate culture, these advantages outweigh all the disadvantages. Would I change my current job to a similar position in the office of a company with a 50% increase in salary? No, I would not change it.
How to work with a laptop on your lap all day and not burn yourself, and other important questions about the life of a remote worker
Thank you all for the questions, the broadcast took place. Unfortunately, there were quite a few online viewers, so instead of a live chat, it turned out to be a podcast. See the result on the Crossover Russia channel on Youtube, share your impressions and ask for more!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/353196/
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