Monday 3-2-1 – offsites, no-code agencies, buddies 💡

Edition #7

Luca Rossi

Jul 18, 2022

Hey, Luca here 👋 welcome to the Monday 3-2-1 ✨

Every Monday I send an email like this with 3 short ideas about:

🎽 Engineering Management
🔨 Technical Strategy
🎒 Hiring & Onboarding

I also send an original article every Thursday, like the last one:

The Best of Refactoring

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1) 🎽 Offsites are amazing for remote teams

Offsites / retreats used to be niche initiatives.

Up to a couple of years ago, offsites would be usually dedicated to executive teams, while those for the full company were pretty rare.

Of course, the pandemic changed everything, and retreats are now a vital habit of distributed teams to allow people spend quality time together.

Forward-looking companies like Buffer and Zapier have been organizing them for years, while the rest of us are catching up just now. In fact, demand is soared.

Here are two great articles you can check out about why and how to organize retreats:

📑 Eight tips on running a great team offsite
📑 How Buffer organizes company retreats

More tips about fostering good relationships in remote teams 👇

Refactoring

Building Relationships in a Remote Team 🤗

When I talk with people about the switch to remote, the #1 drawback they mention is the lack of human connection with co-workers. Creating meaningful relationships at work is important. Relationships make us happier, create a sense of belonging, and, ultimately, make us more productive too…

a year ago · 17 likes · 2 comments · Luca Rossi

2) 🔨 No-code agencies

Before no-code roles become popular within companies, there might be an intermediate stage where no-code agencies flourish.

No-code agencies are able to deliver full, good-looking applications in just a couple of months, at a fraction of the price of regular ones.

I feel agencies have a better shot than individual roles right now, because:

🎯 They can better articulate the value — now that we are still early.

⏱️ They require less time than hiring someone for the same job.

Delivering a no/low-code product with an agency might be the gateway drug that introduces no-code within the company. Later on, employees could be trained on Bubble, Webflow, or whatever tool is used, to be able to maintain applications built this way.

The two most recommended agencies (no affiliation) on my radar are:

Airdev — mostly working with Bubble
8020 — mostly working with Webflow

3) 🎒 Buddies make onboarding better

Some call them buddies, Wework calls them Onboarding Champions, Robinhood calls them Onboarding Mentors. The point is simple: having someone accountable for the onboarding process of a new hire.

This is opposed to the common strategy of having the training done by multiple people, each in their own domain. A dedicated person to run everything, instead, has several advantages:

👑 Go-to person — new hires don’t know how the company works and who is responsible for what. It is reassuring to have someone to reach out to for any issue or question, without having to figure it out by themselves.
✨ Cover the intangibles — the onboarding is also made of cultural and personal moments, like meeting and greeting co-workers, or having lunch together. Buddies make sure these moments happen and don’t fall through the cracks.
🌱 Growth opportunity — people are generally happy to mentor new hires. You can consider it part of their growth, and also a rite of passage among engineers — a sign that you are now a full, trusted part of the team.

The buddy / onboarding manager doesn’t necessarily need to be the same person as the new hire’s manager. It might be even helpful to separate these roles and have people who are appointed to onboarding duties.