Episode #49: Wade Minter and Andrew Berkowitz of TeamSnap

Wade Minter and Andrew Berkowitz, of Teamsnap, chat about their company’s need for not so many formalized meetings, why all distributed workers and teams should dabble in improvisation, and being the right candidate to gain remote work.

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Show Notes:

Teamsnap.com
andrewberkowitz.com
@andrewberkowitz
@minter

00:45 – Wade Minter and Andrew Berkowitz Introduction

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• Andrew Berkowitz: Vice President of Product Management at TeamSnap and one of the original four founders of the company
• Wade Minter: Director of Engineering, manages technical operations, contractor with TeamSnap since the beginning

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01:51 – What is TeamSnap?

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• Mobile application on Android and iOS
• Manages recreational youth or competitive sports teams
• Roster, schedule, messaging

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02:17 – Location

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• Based in Boulder, CO
• Andrew is in Portland, OR
• Wade is in Raleigh, NC
• Rest of team in Austin, TX, Baltimore, MD, Washington, D.C., etc.

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02:52 – History of TeamSnap

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• Doorway to leave the web design world
• Half the team is design and development
• Half is non-technical, i.e. customer support

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05:13 – A day in the life

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• Campfire is the primary communication tool
• Github is used on the technical side

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06:46 – Meetings

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• 1 scheduled company meeting per week
• 1 scheduled developers-only meeting per week
• Development style is very “montessorial”
• If people need help, they ask
• Don’t need a ton of formalized stand up meetings
• Ad hoc conversations

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10:00 – Challenges

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• Building a sense of community
• Preventing people from overworking

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11:54 – Identifying people who work well remotely

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• Improvisational backgrounds

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13:30 – Improv

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• Skills help with interpersonal communication
• Intellectual component
• Listening skills
• Be opinionated and have a voice
• Big ideas & tiny ego
• Building on prospective

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23:46 – Flexibility in work/life balance

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• Knowing when to unplug
• Preferred schedules
• Multiple time zones
• Dev at their desk for 18-20 hours/day
• Product coverage

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26:02 – How to find remote work and be the right candidate

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• Personal connections
• Job boards
• Local tech meetups
• Coworking facilities
• Don’t look for job postings, reach out to the company you want to work for
• Listen to Wide Teams podcasts

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