I used to believe that you could only build a successful company in person. The first 6 months of remote were so hard that I thought our company might fail.

Now we're 100% remote and I can't imagine ever going back.

The big unlock? A new operating rhythm.

This post shares how we created a new operating rhythm and overcame some of the biggest challenges of building an effective remote company.

The problem with remote work

Mutiny wasn't always remote-first. The first few years we had a small office in San Francisco where the team would work daily. Then the pandemic hit. 

3 months into the pandemic I asked my team what was NOT working. 2 themes were consistent:

1. Our team felt isolated

2. Our team felt that the quality of our decisions went down

We ultimately pinpointed the root cause for both themes to a lack of connection and context.

Lack of connection led to feeling isolated from the team and the mission (both are crucial in an early-stage startup).

Lack of context led to misalignment and bad decisions.

In-person offices have a daily rhythm that remote work lacks

We tried everything and anything to fix it. Zoom happy hours, decision docs, virtual team building. Nothing was as good as in person.

Finally a light bulb went off!

Office culture had a daily rhythm. 

Every day, we ran into colleagues in-person and got connection and context. This tiny but consistent wave of energy made us belong and supported better decision making. In the new boxed-in zoom world, this daily rhythm was eliminated.

We needed a new rhythm.

One that generated the same amount of cumulative connection and context, but relied on less frequent in-person time. In other words - one BIG quarterly wave to replace lots of tiny daily waves.

The waves on the left represent the small but important waves that comes from daily interactions with colleagues at an in-person office. To replicate this with a remote team, we needed to create a big quarterly wave to replace lots of tiny waves.

Here's what we did to improve our remote work set up:

1. Established a quarterly operating rhythm

2. Added an in-person offsite as the seminal drumbeat in that rhythm

Below is a snapshot of what our operating rhythm looks like now. I'll break down the most important parts next.

Define quarterly OKRs

OKRs are company-wide initiatives, defined by an inspiring Objective and a Key Result to scope it.

Each quarter I create 4 OKRs with input from my executive team. Any more than 4 company-wide OKRs and you become unfocused. The point of these is to set ambitious (but achievable) goals that move the company forward.

The executive team brings these OKRs to the offsite. During our offsite, our team creates projects to hit the OKRs.

The result is everyone in the company knows exactly what they're working on for the next 90 days, how success will be measured, and how it ladders up to the company's highest priorities.

Here's an example OKR:

Create a consistent structure for offsites

Operating rhythms are valuable because they are repeatable. Our structure repeats quarterly, like a wave.

• Week 1: Offsite

• Week 4: Board meeting

• Week 7: Retrospective

• Week 9-12: Offsite planning

Offsite goals and agenda are always the same. This makes it easier to organize, but also makes the offsite a core part of our success, not a distraction.

I'll do a longer writeup about how we structure our offsite exactly, but here's a snapshot of the quarterly offsite agenda and goals:

Make the operational drumbeat powerful

Our operating rhythm has a drumbeat. That drumbeat is an in-person offsite.

Most offsites focus on presentations or discussions. The reasoning is: "hey, we're all together in a room! Let's spend our time together brainstorming on new ideas!"

We disagree with this.

Before arriving to the offsite all team members have context from the pre-reads that were built weeks before. This frees us the most time for in-person debates and FINAL decisions making, including OKRs and projects. 

80% business, 100% fun

Pure "kumbaya" offsites aren't energizing in my opinion.

Smart people want to understand the company's vision and priorities and engage in making it happen.

That being said, we setup the environment of the offsite to encourage fun. We rent cool spots, eat great food, and give teams time to strengthen their relationships in ways you can't get over video. 

What I've found is our team gets so pumped up from being around each other that they organically create the fun (e.g. music videos, collages, dance offs).

Align your board meeting to offsites

Offsites and board meetings require a lot of the same content: priorities, quarterly reflection, closing the books, updating financials.

We schedule our board meeting right after the offsite. This reduces board prep to ~10 hours.

Set weekly goals and execution

My biggest hack for driving execution after the offsite is to translate quarterly goals into weekly goals. e.g. 300 Opportunities/Qtr -> W1=12, W2=24, ... W12=300.

Review actual vs. goal dashboards and take action in weekly execution meetings.

Here's an example of a weekly dashboard showing actual vs. goal:

Course correct at mid quarter retroactive

No matter how hard we try, we always screw something up, usually by oversubscribing ourselves.

Retros help ensure our most important goals come to fruition by giving us a chance to remove lower priority projects or reallocate resources.

Mutiny is remote (and never looking back)

Our quarterly operating rhythm built around offsites has been a game changer.

We get the benefits of remote work (access to talent, live anywhere) without the trade-off of lost connection and context. Next, we're going to start layering on quarterly public launches and events. Stay tuned for that ;)

In summary:

• Isolation and poor quality decision making are frequent byproducts of going remote

• The root cause to both is missing context and connection

• Establish an operating rhythm that works for your business to overcome this

• Anchor the rhythm with an effective drumbeat

Interested in attending our next offsite? Want to see this operating cadence in action? Take a look at our career page for open roles.