The challenges of managing a remote team
Nobody warns you that the hardest part is not the time zones. It is that the small corrections stop happening.
Fluid has never had a head office. People are in Norway, Malta, Spain and Cyprus, plus one engineer in Togo — which, to the surprise of anyone who checks a map before a clock, is the easiest of the five to share a working day with. I did not set out to build a distributed company. It happened because the person I wanted was in the wrong city, four times in a row.
Six years in, I can say the time zones are the easy part. You solve those with a calendar and some discipline about overlap. What is hard is subtler, and it took me most of those six years to name it.
The corrections stop happening
In an office, a piece of work gets nudged perhaps a dozen times before anyone calls it finished. Someone glances at a screen on the way past. Two people disagree about a label while the kettle boils. None of it is a meeting. None of it is recorded. It is the mechanism by which a company stays roughly aligned without anyone deciding to align it.
Remote deletes all of that, and replaces it with nothing. The work is fine, then it is finished, and only then does anybody senior look at it. The failure mode is not that people do bad work. It is that somebody does two weeks of good work in a direction we abandoned in a call they were not on.
We lost most of a quarter that way once, building a reconciliation view for a merchant segment we had already decided to stop serving. Nobody was negligent. The decision simply never reached the person building it, because there was no corridor for it to travel down.
Written by default, and meaning it
Everyone says write things down. Fewer people say what it costs. Writing a decision down properly takes about four times as long as saying it, and the person who has to do it is usually the busiest person in the conversation. If you do not force it, it silently does not happen.
What worked for us was narrowing the scope until it was survivable. We do not document everything. We document decisions — what we chose, what we rejected, and the thing we believed at the time that made us choose it. That last part is the one people skip and the only one that ages well. Six months later, nobody needs to know what we decided; they need to know whether the reason still holds.
The second habit is duller. Every piece of work has one named owner, written down, and it is a person rather than a team. Shared ownership works in a room, because the ambiguity gets resolved by someone shrugging and picking it up. Over a distance, shared ownership means nobody is uncomfortable enough to act.
Hiring changes shape
The trait that matters most is not seniority or self-motivation, which is what job adverts say. It is whether someone raises their hand early. Remote punishes the instinct to go away, work hard, and come back with something finished. It rewards the slightly annoying person who says on day two that the brief does not quite make sense.
I have hired brilliant people who could not do this, and it was miserable for them. They were not underperforming. They were operating a working style that the environment silently taxed.
Onboarding is where it shows first. In an office a new joiner absorbs a company by proximity — who defers to whom, which rules are real. Remotely, none of that transmits. We now assume a new person learns nothing by osmosis and put it all in writing, which is tedious and has been worth more than any process we have.
The thing I would tell myself six years ago is that remote is not an office with the walls removed. It is a different medium, and the parts of management that were free in a building now cost something. Either you pay that cost deliberately, in writing and in structure, or you pay it later in rework.
We still meet in person twice a year, and it is worth every euro. Not for the work — the work is better done alone, and everyone knows it. For the thing underneath the work, which is people finding out that the person on the other end of a terse message is not being terse at all.