Management | Bhavin Gandhi's Blog

Tips for Effective Big Room Planning and Alignment Sessions

In today’s complex business landscape, cross-functional collaboration is vital for delivering valuable programs and products, whether in start-ups, small businesses, or large organizations. Technical Program Managers (TPgMs) play a crucial role in ensuring smooth operations within these collaborations. One of the key practices they employ is conducting Big Room planning or alignment sessions to execute strategic programs. In this blog, I’ll share some valuable recommendations to make these sessions more effective.

Clear Agenda: Begin by setting a clear agenda for the meeting. Surprisingly, 67% of meetings lack a well-defined agenda. Providing context through a meeting invite with a clear agenda is crucial. This enables attendees to come prepared, leading to a more productive discussion.

Timing Considerations: With teams spanning different time zones, it’s essential to choose a time that accommodates most key stakeholders. If finding a suitable time for everyone proves challenging, consider working individually with those unable to attend and find alternatives, such as sending delegates to represent them.

Single Threaded Leaders (STLs): Prior to the session, identify domain owners and communicate their roles and responsibilities. Designating Single Threaded Leaders for each function ensures clear accountability and presence of the right leaders for decision-making.

Do Your Homework: To avoid getting derailed during the meeting, it’s crucial to be well-prepared. Invest time in envisioning the discussion and collecting necessary data beforehand. Engage with relevant leaders to obtain high-level estimates or information required for the session.

Focus on the Outcome: Keep the meeting focused on outcomes rather than outputs. As a technical program manager, steer discussions towards the broader objectives. Should conversations veer towards minutiae, encourage participants to address those matters separately.

Summarize and Send Meeting Notes: To conclude the session, summarize key points and action items before ending the call. Taking notes during the meeting is crucial for this step. Afterward, send out comprehensive meeting notes to all participants. This fosters clarity on objectives and action items, allows for upward reporting, and promotes unified understanding among team members.

Conducting effective Big Room planning and alignment sessions requires careful planning, facilitation, and attention to detail. As a technical program manager, your role is to orchestrate these meetings to maximize collaboration and drive successful outcomes.

I hope these tips prove helpful for your future sessions and enable you to achieve greater efficiency and alignment within your cross-functional teams. Feel free to share your thoughts and experiences in the comments below. Happy planning!

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Posted by Bhavin Gandhi on July 26, 2023 in 21st Century, Leadership, Management, Startup, Virtual Team

Tags: #BigRoomPlanning, #BusinessCollaboration, #BusinessProductivity, #CollaborativeWork, #CrossFunctionalCollaboration, #EffectiveCommunication, #EffectiveMeetings, #LeadershipSkills, #MeetingNotes, #MeetingPreparation, #MeetingProductivity, #OutcomeDriven, #projectmanagement, #StrategicPrograms, #TeamAlignment, #TechnicalProgramManagers

The Importance of Program Management for Start-ups: Driving Success and Scalability

10 Jul

In the fast-paced and budget-conscious world of start-ups, many founders prioritize immediate product development and customer-centric improvements over establishing a program management structure within their organization. While this approach may work for some, it’s crucial to recognize the immense value that program management can bring to start-ups. From streamlining operations and fostering focus to connecting cross-functional teams and managing dependencies, program management plays a vital role in driving the success and scalability of start-ups. In this blog, we will explore several key ways in which program management can benefit your start-up.

Helping you with focus: Start-up founders are often driven by their passion for their products and the impact they can create. However, maintaining focus amidst competing priorities can be challenging. This is where program management proves invaluable. By acting as a thought partner, program managers help founders direct their efforts towards areas that truly matter. Whether it’s defining growth strategies, aligning cross-functional leaders, or focusing on outcomes instead of outputs, program management ensures that everyone is working towards common goals.

Connecting the dots: During the hyper-growth phase of a start-up, the work culture may appear chaotic with various teams forming rapidly and contributing to business growth. However, without proper coordination, teams can end up working in isolation, causing delays and inefficiencies. During that time, program management can step in as the glue that connects these cross-functional teams, ensuring smooth operations and effective collaboration. By bridging communication gaps and facilitating information flow, program managers can enable teams to work cohesively towards shared objectives.

Dependency management: As start-ups scale, dependencies between different domains within the business become more complex. Timely delivery of critical components can heavily rely on the execution of interconnected tasks. In these times, program managers can help the team by identifying and managing these dependencies. By collaborating with cross-functional leaders and aligning priorities based on business impact, they can facilitate efficient execution of initiatives, reducing turnaround times and enabling sustained growth.

Standardizing workflows: Efficiency is paramount for start-ups aiming to scale rapidly. One of the key roles that program managers can play in a start-up environment is in standardizing workflows and establishing practices that drive efficiency gains. Whether it’s implementing agile methodologies, coaching teams on best practices, or facilitating collaboration across departments, program managers can help start-ups speak a common language. This standardization fosters better coordination, enhances productivity, and enables seamless scaling of teams.

Recognizing the benefits: While the aforementioned benefits highlight the value of program management for start-ups, the scope of its impact extends beyond these aspects. Program managers can help execute critical cross-functional initiatives, provide prioritization frameworks, and support organizational growth. If you’re unsure about the benefits, it’s advisable to seek advice from industry leaders before making a decision. Embracing program management could be a game-changer for your start-up’s success.

For start-ups seeking to navigate the challenges of growth, program management is not a luxury but a necessity. It enables founders to stay focused, promotes effective collaboration, manages dependencies, and standardizes workflows. By embracing program management, start-ups can drive their success, achieve scalability, and make significant strides in their respective industries. So, if you’re a start-up founder, take a moment to consider the immense benefits that program management can bring to your organization. Don’t hesitate to explore this invaluable resource and give your start-up the best chance to thrive.

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Posted by Bhavin Gandhi on July 10, 2023 in 21st Century, Leadership, Management, small business, Startup

Tags: #agilemethodology, #businessimpact, #businessstrategy, #collaboration, #efficiency, #programmanagement, #projectmanagement, #ResourceEfficiency, #startupgrowth, #StartupSuccess, #teamwork

Driving Success: How TPMs Help Resolve Dependencies Between Teams

08 Mar

In today’s fast-paced and competitive business environment, cross-functional teams are becoming increasingly common as companies seek to innovate and stay ahead. However, with multiple teams working on various projects, dependencies between them can be a significant challenge, resulting in delays, miscommunication, and even project failures. Technical Program Managers (TPMs) can play a crucial role in resolving dependencies between cross-functional teams. This blog post will explore how TPMs can help facilitate effective communication, collaboration, and coordination between teams to ensure that programs are delivered on time and achieve organizational goals.

Facilitating communication: TPMs coordinate communication between teams, identify gaps, and ensure that everyone is on the same page. Regular meetings or stand-ups can be set up where teams provide dependency updates, identify roadblocks or dependencies, and prioritize tasks. These sessions can be used to share progress reports, discuss risks and mitigation strategies, and align on timelines and deliverables.

Identifying dependencies: TPMs often have a high-level view of all the programs executed within the organization. Thus, they can identify dependencies between teams and track their status to ensure they are being addressed in a timely manner before they become a blocker for achieving the company’s objectives.

Prioritizing and tracking dependencies: TPMs have a deep understanding of intra-team and inter-team dynamics, given the cross-functional nature of their role. Thus, TPMs can manage inter and intra team dependencies to ensure that one team’s work is not blocked by the lack of progress on the part of another team. They can prioritize the work of different teams based on their impact on dependencies and the company’s objectives, and identify and mitigate risks associated with dependencies across different teams.

Building relationships and trust: TPMs can help build relationships and trust between cross-functional teams to ensure they can work effectively, particularly when dealing with dependencies. This can be achieved by sharing information, being transparent, conducting joint brainstorming sessions, breaking down silos, defining ownership, setting clear expectations, and strengthening personal relationships by driving offsite events.

Improving transparency: TPMs can provide the necessary transparency to the team to drive efficiency in resolving dependencies. They can communicate deadlines to the right stakeholders to adjust plans accordingly and use tools like JIRA, Asana, Microsoft Project, Wiki, and collaboration platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams to facilitate communication through shared dashboards and/or weekly reports.

In summary, TPMs play a vital role in managing dependencies between teams by facilitating effective communication, tracking and prioritizing work, building relationships, and improving transparency. They ensure that teams work together effectively and that all dependencies are identified and addressed in a timely manner to ensure program success.

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Posted by Bhavin Gandhi on March 8, 2023 in Leadership, Management, small business

Tags: #collaboration, #communication, #crossfunctionalteams, #dependencies, #efficiency, #innovation, #interdisciplinary, #leadership, #organizationalgoals, #productivity, #programmanagement, #projectmanagement, #teamwork, #timemanagement, #TPM

How to increase the velocity of your Agile Teams?

15 May

A year ago, I got an opportunity to lead an agile team for the Electronic Table Games vertical at IGT. This team was made up of very smart individuals, who put IGT’s name in the electronic table game’s market space within just couple of years. IGT was an underdog in this market, but this team’s hard work and dedication had allowed IGT to bring two successful titles to the market. Even though this team was successful in making this vertical profitable over time, their velocity was not sufficient to keep up with the already competitive market pressure. Thus, I was called to help the team.

Over the year, I have made many tweaks to this already successful team. And hence, I would like to share some of success stories from my experience that have worked for us. I am hoping that you could use these pointers to increase the velocity of your own agile team.

Co-locate your team: After joining the team, I quickly realize that the team could improve their face-to-face communication. Even though the engineering team talked to each other daily, the communication between the QA and Product Management team was infrequent and rare due to their physical proximity to the engineering team. Thus, we went ahead and relocated all of our QA and Product Management resources with the engineering team. This change promoted the face to face communication between the teams and improved our velocity by reducing communication time between the developers and the QA engineers. Obviously, this change was challenging, given my team was located all over the US. But we were lucky to have multiple clusters of the team where more than 4 people were together in the same building. Thus, co-location was practical and beneficial in our case.

Reuse common components: At IGT, we were creating different games, and hence, all the developers were making customized software for each game. Even though we were required to make customized interfaces for each game, given the vertical that we work in, I looked for some common components that we could reuse. To my surprise, I was able to find many communication APIs and other architectural components that were common between each game titles. By making some minor modifications to those components, we were able to reuse them for other games that we were making. Thus, I believe that you should invest some time during your Sprint to look for common software components, which you can reuse to significantly decrease effort spent on building the same functionality. Developing a strong process around this mentality will help you in decreasing product development time.

Increase test automation: You might argue that this is compulsory for increasing the velocity of any software product team, but you would be surprised to see how many agile teams follow this practice. Since the focus of any agile team is on delivering minimum viable products, they often underestimate the investment that they need to make in testing. Thus, most of their testers perform some basic manual tests before releasing the product. In our case, we were able to increase our automation test footprint by providing engineering tools to our testers and investing heavily in test automation as compared to the manual testing. As a result of this change, we were able to improve the quality of our games and expand our testing footprint, which in turn increased our velocity.

Do you agree with my recommendations? Do you have any other ideas through which we can improve the velocity of our Agile Teams?

Thanks – Bhavin Gandhi

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Posted by Bhavin Gandhi on May 15, 2020 in 21st Century, Leadership, Management, technology

Tags: Agile Teams, Co-location, Innovate faster, Scrum Teams, Software Development, Velocity

How to become better at listening?

07 Mar

Coaching your line managers I can’t help but think about one of the meetings that I had a month back. During this meeting, I had to work with my team to create a road map of all the projects that we were going to do after few structural changes that had happened in our organization. It should have been a simple meeting. I should have presented company’s objectives for the next fiscal year to my team and then I should have allowed them to provide their input to create a road map which works for the team to achieve our objectives. It was a very simple task.

Unfortunately, I was unable to get the right answers from my team during that meeting. I am not sure what I was doing wrong at the time, as that meeting was not that productive and I was unable to get anything done. That incident got me thinking about the bigger question. Do I always ask right questions? If I do, then why am I not getting right answers? What am I missing here? What can I do to improve that process? After some analysis and introspection, I have realized that I was not listening to my team while I presented them with our objectives. And hence, I have come up with few practical tips and tricks through which I had improved my listening skills that I would like to share it with you here.

Be patient: In the past, I often fell into the trap of asking bunch of questions, all at once, so I don’t miss anything. Or worst, when someone is speaking, I actively tried to ask them my question right there and then, when they are talking, so that I can clarify things in the heat of the moment. Though this kind of a one-sided question dump had worked for me in the past in some situations, it didn’t provide most of my peers enough time to think and respond. Even though I was getting answers to my questions through this approach, often times I was not getting the right answer or an informative one. And hence, I tried to be patient with my questions during this last month. I also did my research beforehand, and found out what kind of answers I was looking for before asking those questions. I invested some time in noting down my questions while someone is speaking, so that I don’t forget what I wanted to ask, and at the same time I don’t interrupt my peers in between where they lose their train of thoughts. I tried to keep a pen and paper handy or used my OneNote on my phone to jot down any questions that I had, while someone else was speaking. This was one of the most practical thing I could do while listening to others and at the same time making sure that I remember my pointers to discuss.

Let silence speak: Other than being patient during meetings, I have also conducted various other experiments at my work within this past month. One of them being – using silence to speak for itself. When I was in a meeting, I often used silence as a tool to communicate when it was my time to ask questions. It was definitely a game changer for me. When I remained silent for few seconds before responding, everyone’s attention was at me before I even started speaking, and they were listening, yes, they were. I also used silence while asking questions to others. I would ask a question and then take a pause for a while. That approach did wonders for me, as it gave an opportunity to the responder to prepare their response before speaking. Obviously, it took a while before I got used to this practice, but this technique proved to be very helpful. If you want to try this technique then please make the pause long enough for the answerer to think but not too long so it becomes awkward. And while the answerer is preparing for his/her answers, try keeping eye contact, stand still, and try to feel comfortable while you wait. I am sure that you will get responses from people who hardly even spoke in the meeting. Just try it and let me know.

I am hoping that you all learn from my experiences and become better at listening. If you have any other ways through which we can be a good listener then please feel free to share it through your comments here. I would really appreciate your feedback.

Thanks – Bhavin Gandhi

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Posted by Bhavin Gandhi on March 7, 2018 in 21st Century, Leadership, Management

Tags: 21st century, Get right answers, Leadership, Listening, Management, Practical ways to listen, Use patience, Use silence

How to change your organization to innovate faster?

05 Jun

First of all, I would like to thank you all for such an overwhelming response to my last blog. I haven’t yet responded to all of your emails and personal messages, but I will respond to them within next few days.

While going through your messages, I have also realized one thing, most of you are not happy with just innovating at a restricted budget, but you are looking to innovate at a faster pace than before. With the technology and the world moving faster each day, I can definitely understand your sentiment. Thus, in this blogpost, I will provide you with some strategies through which you can increase the speed of your innovation at your workplace.

Eliminate hierarchy: Large organizations often find it hard to respond to new market opportunities and change quickly due to the hierarchical burden that comes with these organizations. Thus, if it is possible, we should create smaller R&D teams in our organization which has its own budget and, who can work independently within this organization. If you don’t have that liberty to independently manage the R&D team, then you should at least keep it simple. Try to keep the product cycle small, and perform frequent inspection. Purpose of these inspections shouldn’t be profit based, just yet, but it should be a checking point to make sure that the research is headed in the right direction.

Change incentive system: From Microsoft to Google, we always hire R&D personnel from science-oriented background, and hence, their interests lie in technology, not in markets. These employees, being from technical background, are not trained to engage their customers in the decision making process. Thus, if we want to change this culture of “obsolete innovation”, then we have to start by changing the incentive system, itself. If we use stock options to align the work of our technical staff with the firm’s financial performance, then they will be able to understand the business environment in which your organization does business, and they are more likely to innovate things that help your business.

Create new roles: Changing the incentive system alone wouldn’t help you to change the culture of the entire organization. In order to kick start this organization-wide change, you need to create some new roles within the organization to focus explicitly on customer engagement. This can be done with either existing or new personnel who are placed in important positions within R&D where they can effect change. You can also build new, multi-skilled teams to help change existing practices within R&D. This might involve building teams with both marketing and technical skills to reduce traditional barriers between R&D, sales and customers. It may not even be necessary for all R&D personnel to change or take on a more customer-focused role. Just having one in five in an R&D team being more customer-focused might be enough.

I have seen this strategy work for many small businesses, and I am sure that it can work for you too, if implemented correctly. Please provide your feedback on this blogpost through your comments. Thanks – Bhavin Gandhi

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Posted by Bhavin Gandhi on June 5, 2016 in 21st Century, Leadership, Management, small business

Tags: Increase innovation speed, Innovate faster, Innovation catalyst, Leadership of tomorrow, Organizational change

How to innovate with less resources?

18 May

Regardless of what kind of business you run, small or large, you always have to keep on innovating, otherwise your business will become irrelevant in no time. But when times are tough and when you don’t have much money to spend, how do you still keep your commitment to innovate more? Thus, through this blogpost, I am going to provide you with few suggestions using which you can innovate on a tight budget.

Involve customers throughout: Your customers are your best critique. Thus, you should involve them throughout the product life cycle. Rather than wasting your money on getting the second-hand market data or hiring focus groups, you must engage directly with your customers in their natural settings. Involve your existing customers with your R&D teams to unearth new or unmet needs. Interact with users in new market segments by actively involving customers in new product design processes, as well as tracking customers’ use of the product after purchase. The focus on customer needs will enable R&D to replace its costly and scattershot approach to product development with more efficient, user-focused investment.

Seek cheaper solutions: Too often, we reinvent the wheel and end up with too complex of a product for our customers. Customers, however, are more likely to be impressed by products that solve their problems than by mere technological prowess. When you have unlimited resources at your disposal, it is easier to go overboard with your R&D efforts. But when you have very limited funds, you should be guided first and foremost by your customer insight, and produce easy-to-use offerings that may lack bells and whistles but are good enough, especially if they come at a lower price. This approach will not only help you to bring your products faster into your markets, but it will also help you in getting the faster feedback for your products in real time.

Use of crowdsourcing: If you are on a tighter budget, you should definitely look for crowdsourcing your R&D efforts. Obviously, you can’t crowd source everything due to your intellectual property rights and other concerns, but you can crowd source plausible product ideas and gauge their initial public reactions. Ideas that garner sufficient support can be then packaged with supporting data and sent to the relevant managers, who in turn signal their view of its potential to executives responsible for taking such ideas forward. You can also use social media networks, where customers reveal and share their preferences to yield a wealth of market insights at lower costs.

I hope, my blog can help you innovate new things for your business within a restricted budget. If you know any other ways through which we can innovate with less resources, then please feel free to share it here through your comments. Thanks – Bhavin Gandhi

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Posted by Bhavin Gandhi on May 18, 2016 in 21st Century, Leadership, Management

Tags: Crowdsourcing, Innovate cheaply, Innovate for less, Leadership of tomorrow, Pragmatic innovation, Think smarter

Schedule the best virtual meeting by following these rules

05 May

In my last blog, I have talked about some ways through which you can schedule a perfect virtual meeting. Thus, I will continue my discussion in this blog, and provide you with some more tips to make your next virtual meeting perfect.

Allow extra time: If you are scheduling a virtual meeting for the first time, then please schedule some extra time for dealing with the technical challenges that you might face during the meeting startup. Use this extra time to work out glitches that often occur with new technology. Over time, when your team members are familiar with login or startup procedures, you can then reduce the meeting duration by the amount of time that you might have otherwise spent on connection issues. If you have a new member joining your team, then you should arrange a trial meeting to check connections and ensure that the new member is up to speed before a larger group meeting.

Provide more lead time: The lead time required for virtual meetings might be longer than for in-person meetings, since in addition to the virtual space, you need to ensure that all participants have the necessary information about the meeting before they join in. It is your responsibility, as an organizer of the meeting, to ensure that every team member understands the goals of the meeting and has sufficient time in order to prepare for it. After all, if critical decision makers or technical experts are not prepared in the meeting due to short notice given to them, then you will end up scheduling a second meeting for the same agenda.

Provide detailed information: If you are going to organize a virtual meeting with multiple people joining in from multiple locations and through multiple means of communication (phone, video, etc.), then you need to be more detailed in your meeting requests. Meeting agenda should at least specify this information: name and contact information of the person calling the meeting, meeting purpose, meeting start time and expected duration, names of invited attendees, meeting location including connection information, phone numbers, URLs, connection passwords or login IDs, or any other information attendees need in order to participate, and list of the topics to be discussed and time limits for each topic. If you do your homework in creating your meeting agenda beforehand, then you won’t have many issues during the meeting itself.

Invite limited people: Virtual meetings are often encountered with various challenges from time differences to technology difficulties, and hence, you shouldn’t try to complicate things by inviting people who are not needed in the meeting. Make sure that you have everyone in the meeting who needs to be there, but don’t over crowd the meeting with the people who are not needed there. By inviting limited people in the meeting, you will be able to keep everyone focused on the task at hand, and there will be less of a chance for any confusion due to people talking over each other on the phone or video conference.

This is the end of my two part blog about scheduling a perfect virtual meeting. I hope, these advises can help you in scheduling your ideal meetings. If you have any recommendations from your side, then please feel free to share it here through your comments. Thanks – Bhavin Gandhi

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Posted by Bhavin Gandhi on May 5, 2016 in 21st Century, Leadership, Management, technology, Virtual Team

Tags: Remote team meetings, Schedule conference calls, Schedule virtual meeting, Virtual meetings, Virtual Team, Work remotely

How to schedule a perfect virtual meeting?

21 Apr

Other day, I was attending this virtual meeting, and within 5 minutes in the meeting, I realized that some of the key stakeholders wouldn’t be able to make this meeting due to their time zone difference. Within 10 minutes into the meeting, I also realized that other participants were not well prepared, and we might have to convene some other day to discuss these same action items.

Obviously, scheduling a perfect in-person meeting also requires some level of preparation, but to schedule a perfect virtual meeting is a challenge in itself. You don’t just need to make sure that the meeting agenda is well defined and thought out, but you also need to handle logistics challenges imposed by difference in time zones and technology limitations. Thus, in this blog, I will provide you with few tips through which you can schedule your perfect virtual meeting.

Be agenda ready: Whether your meeting is virtual or in person, you should always have a well-defined agenda for your meeting, which should be clearly stated in the meeting request itself. If, for whatever reason, you can’t explicitly mention your agenda in the meeting request, you should send out an email to all the participants with this information beforehand. This approach will not only help your participants to set some basic expectations about the output of this meeting, but it will also help you to make sure that your participants are prepared beforehand with the desired information, so that they can respond to your questions and come up to some kind of an agreement.

Keep time in mind: Whenever you are scheduling a virtual meeting, you need to always be aware of different time zones from which your attendees will attend this meeting. After all, you won’t be attending a meeting at 3am in the morning, unless it is very important, right? Same goes for your meeting attendees. They are not going to put an extra effort to attend your meeting at 3am in the morning, just because it is convenient for you. Thus, before scheduling the meeting search for your attendee’s time zones and schedule the meeting at appropriate time.

Share the pain: Sometimes, due to the vast time difference between two virtual teams, it is impossible to schedule these meetings within the regular working hours (8am to 5pm) of both the teams. And hence, it is very important to share the inconvenience across your team rather than always have the same person/team meeting before breakfast or late in the evening. If you have to schedule regular meetings across multiple time zones, then you should rotate the pain across the board by changing the team each week that has to stay late to attend the meeting.

I hope, this blog can help you in scheduling a perfect virtual meeting for your team. In my next blog, I will provide you with some more insight into how to schedule your virtual meetings better, but in the meanwhile if you have any recommendations from your side, then please feel free to share it here through your comments. Thanks – Bhavin Gandhi

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Posted by Bhavin Gandhi on April 21, 2016 in 21st Century, Leadership, Management, technology, Virtual Team

Tags: 21st Century Management, Management of tomorrow, Online meetings, Perfect virtual meeting, Remote team meetings, Schedule conference calls, Schedule meeting

What should you look for when hiring someone in your virtual team?

06 Apr

Virtual Teams are slightly different from your normal teams, and hence, they require slightly different skill-sets from your team members. Working in a virtual team is not for everyone, only certain types of individual can perform well in a totally remote team. They should be highly motivated, enthusiastic, and flexible. Thus, it becomes very important to hire someone who can work effectively with minimal supervision than hiring someone who is familiar with a particular toolset. And hence, I would like to provide you with some tips through which you can assess the personal qualities and the tools experience of a candidate during his/her interview.

Technology competence: If you are hiring someone who can work remotely, then you need to make sure that she is comfortable with technology. You can perform a simple test during the interview itself to gauge the competence of the candidate with technology. Just set up the interview using the technologies that you would use when working with the team, such as VoIP, web cams, email, instant messaging, and so on. It will quickly become apparent how comfortable the candidates are with working with the technology and how they handle it when things go wrong.

Self-accountability: Here is where the behavioral and scenario-based questions come into play. You should ask very specific questions which can help you understand how the candidate reacts to a big problem and how she holds herself accountable for the work that she does. You can ask questions such as… How do you organize your workspace? How do you plan your day? How do you keep up with the office when you are traveling for work? How do you manage distractions when working from home/office? What types of distractions are the most difficult for you to overcome? Etc. With these questions, you are trying to find out if the candidate can work on their own, or will they require hand holding to perform their basic tasks. After all, working in remote team is no joke.

Ability to work remotely: Once the candidate answers your questions, ask more detailed questions that examine the candidate’s motivations and behaviors. It is very important to find out how comfortable is the candidate with working remotely. Ask specific examples about the time when the candidate has worked remotely. Tell them to elaborate on their experience. For example: How was your experience working remotely? Was it positive or negative? What did you not like about that experience? What organization techniques have you implemented to identify your priorities? When working virtually, how do you establish a rapport with teammates you have never met? By asking these questions, you are trying to figure out if the candidate is comfortable working remotely, and how she will fit in your remote work culture.

Synergy with your team: As with any hiring decision, skills alone are not enough to ensure that a candidate will be successful on your team. The candidates must also possess personality and character traits that fit with the other team members. If you have a choice between someone who is knowledgeable but obviously difficult and someone who is less experienced but enthusiastic, consider choosing the less-experienced-but-enthusiastic person. You will likely have far fewer personnel issues, and may get someone who will build team synergy.

I hope, my blog can help you find the right candidate for your virtual team. If you know any other ways through which we can improve the hiring process for a virtual team member, then please feel free to share it here. Thanks – Bhavin Gandhi