Team Meeting Norms

1:1s

1:1s with your manager or lead will be set at the agreed upon cadence. For some that will be weekly, for others they may elect to do so less frequently. We consider this 1:1 a sacred space that each member of CS gets to use with their manager how they choose. Each manager can put their own spin on these to ensure that folks to whom they are primarily responsible get the most out of it.

Career Development

Every member of CS works with their manager on a quarterly basis (after their initial 90 day milestone) to discuss Career Development. Each manager pushes the folks to whom they are primarily responsible to think through their plans and helps them identify who else in the organization/beyond can help support them to get to where they want to go.

It is very likely that other managers on the team may be brought in to support someone’s career roadmap as a secondary coach with a speciality in some area relevant to that member of the team.

Getting help

If an application engineer needs help, they have the following avenues:

If it’s technical, they post in #customer-support-internal to get help from their fellow application engineers
If it’s about how to handle a particular situation, they should go to their manager. If their manager is not online, they can either create a post in #customer-support-internal and @ mention @cs-leadership for another manager online to help and either work in that thread or request that whomever is going to help DM them if they need to chat privately,

We want to have a global team where folks can work anywhere in the world. We never want that to mean someone has to wait to get the help that they need.

Team meetings

For both weekly planning/retros and ad-hoc team meetings, each manager or lead will facilitate a session on Wednesday at 15:00 UTC and 21:00 UTC. The application engineers in attendance at each session will change monthly based on what works best for each application engineer that month. Each application engineer has one option that always aligns with their working hours, and a second option that either aligns or lets them flex slightly if they want to easily experience another facilitation style.

Each week, the agenda will have some items that every manager will cover to ensure alignment across the entire team, and they will have space to put their spin on it to keep this synchronous time interesting and engaging.

Team announcements/initiatives

Whenever there is an announcement that will impact the entire team, the leadership team will default to asynchronous communication and any member of the leadership team may take responsibility for the communication in #customer-support-internal. Where the announcement benefits from synchronous communication, the leadership team will decide whether it’s something that is best shared in the weekly planning/retro or during 1:1s.

Whenever there is an initiative that requires the entire team, one member of the leadership team will take responsibility and determine how we will facilitate, involve everyone. This could look different with each initiative, but whichever member of the leadership team takes responsibility, they will ensure to facilitate the initiative with healthy change management practices.

The idea here is that any member of the leadership team may share/solicit important information to/from the entire team, not just a CSE’s direct manager.

Group projects

For team initiatives, various application engineers will need to collaborate together in various group formations. Folks can work with folks across the entire team and will never be limited just to the folks who report to the same manager.

We will continue to have several optional ways for the team to engage socially:

Asynchronously in our #cs-social channel
Synchronously 1:1 via the random #weekly #customer-support-weekly pairing donut app pairing
Synchronously on Friday via two afternoon/end of day social sessions that are scheduled at 15:00 UTC and 21:00 UTC. Everyone is invited as optional and whoever shows up for the session gets to decide how they want to enjoy each other’s company.
Asynchronously and/or synchronously during quarterly virtual events (until we are able to move to consistent in-person)