Search posts, tags, users, and pages
How do you collaborate between your Paris and SF offices? Is it hard?
Harder than expected /o\ We try to think async-first :) So: all news/feedback/comment that would impact more people than the ones you're currently working with should be via email, GitHub issues, Asana task or Trello card. Don't consider whiteboards /o\
We collaborate a lot with Slack. We are 40ish people and have 151 channels!
We also have a weekly meeting with all the team, SF & Paris, to synchronise everyone on important mater: Hirings, new products/features, business, and so on.
It can be hard, but we make it work. The folks in Paris tend to work pretty late, and us San Franciscans work pretty early. As somebody on the sales team, we take calls with people all over the world, so we try to be available whenever we’re needed.
Or Slack, or Google Drive, or a lot of others SaaS tools we're using :). Mostly, we try to make sure all important information is written somewhere and not only discussed physically on one side of the ocean.
We also do weekly 30mn meetings (via video) with the whole team to keep everyone in sync of what is happening in the company.
It has its challenges, but it also has its benefits, too. I’ve spent equal time in each office and you can definitely get a feel for small differences between the two.
The SF office was only started within the past year, so it’s much smaller than the Paris office. (We’re growing all the time so I don’t know the exact numbers, but it’s something like 35 in Paris and 10 in SF.) All of our devs are in Paris, while many of our business and marketing people, including our CEO and CFO, are based in SF.
We use Slack and video conferencing liberally. We also use other tools for collaboration like Asana, Google Docs, Github, etc. One of our core values is transparency, so making sure we share information across all offices is really important.
One of the big challenges is what we do in SF after Paris has signed off for the night. Since we currently have all of our devs in Paris, we request at least one dev cycle through SF at all times. That way we can answer support questions quickly at all hours.
We have corporate apartments in SF and Paris a walking distance from the offices, so there is a lot of travel between the two. This gives the team a great opportunity to get to know each other in person and share the cultures between the two.
That’s the challenges, but the benefits are great, too: we can draw on the cultures and the talents of France and Europe as well as the United States. It makes for a very refreshing company culture.
It is hard because you can easily feel the disconnection between the two offices.
What we ask our people is to maximize the opportunities for collaboration between the two offices. Right now the SF office is a lot about HR, culture, marketing while the Paris office is about engineering.
Since we have a blog: https://blog.algolia.com/ we leverage this as a opportunity to collaborate between engineers and marketing team.
A very important part to me is traveling. We ask every employee to travel at least to the other office, SF or Paris. This is working very well because as soon as you travel to the other office, you can feel and experiment a direct link with people.
To ease this process, we have corporate apartments in both cities, near the office.
One thing that has not been mentioned yet: the culture. We really value ownership a lot and that’s enabling us to make decisions without have to refer to each other all the time. We trust people to make the best decisions and to make sure they can do so, we are very transparent about basically everything that’s happening and prefer to over-communicate than keep things to ourselves. We also encourage everyone at the company to travel to the other office at least once a year. We have usually between 2 and 5 people from Paris in SF at any time, for example :) That’s helping a lot and makes sure everyone can get to know each other! Oh and we only speak English, including in the French office where we have currently 5 non-native French speaking employees \o/
We also always have a huge travel budget plus a corporate flat in Paris and SF. Everyone in the team go to the remote office on a regular basis