Jori Lallo on working effectively across different timezones

Lead Time Chats: Season 4, Episode 3 Takeaways

In this episode of Lead Time Chats, Jean Hsu, VP of Engineering at Range, chats with Jori Lallo, co-founder of Linear, about working effectively across different timezones.

Jori and Jean discuss:

  • How to divide projects and work across timezones to reduce overhead
  • Unexpected ways to connect socially while working on a distributed team
  • Benefits of spanning vastly different timezones (no overnight on-call!)
  • Figuring out how to spend async/sync time effectively

Additional Resources

Takeaways from Jori

Respecting work-life balance keeps everyone happy

“It's strange trying to minimize the Transatlantic collaboration, because we care a lot about work-life balance and a lot of people in the team have young children and want to spend time with family. We're pretty far from the traditional San Francisco 20 year old culture. We're a little older now. We do really respect people's free time, no working over the weekends and so forth. We try to minimize the time that we spend together.”

In-person meetup frequency takes many factors into consideration

“Of course it's been challenging. During the pandemic, we tried to have the company-wide offsite now once or twice, and have to postpone things due to the situation and especially with being co-located now in three continents actually, because we have one person in South America. Luckily we're getting together finally next month in Europe. But even before that, now we try to do a little bit more continent-wide meetups or team-wide meetups so if we don't gather everyone together at the same time, but it's also a little bit easier when it comes to logistics just to do a local, smaller meetup.”

Incorporate fun activities for virtual team bonding

“A lot of the people in the team like baking and cooking. During the pandemic, the great British bake-off was a favorite. We started doing monthly bake-offs with the team. So everyone's getting together at the same time. We decide a recipe or someone hosts a recipe, and everyone gets their ingredients ahead of time, and then we cook at the same time, because it's easy. Often it's easier for some people - it's end of the day, other's it's beginning of the day or something in between, so we spend two, three hours cooking and chatting about the recipe and how you're going about it, then how people are succeeding or not always succeeding.”

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About Lead Time Chats

Listen in on unscripted conversations between Jean Hsu, VP of Engineering at Range and other leaders in tech to help you make remote teamwork a little bit less challenging.

Lead Time Chats is brought to you by Range. Range helps remote teams work better together — with asynchronous check-ins, integrated team-building, fewer and more effective meetings, and easy goal-tracking. When you run your team with Range, you’ll always know what’s going on — without having to be in back-to-back meetings.

Checking-in with Range creates more focus time for heads-down work, all while feeling a deeper sense of connection and belonging with your team.

To learn more about Range, you can check it out here (https://www.range.co/).

Season 4 Episodes

» Episode 1: Najeeb Khan on Fostering Belonging on Remote Teams

» Episode 2: Hong Quan on Hiring for Remote Teams

Season 3 Episodes

» Episode 1: Jen Kim on how startups can hire better

» Episode 2: Kate Heddleston on managing burnout on your team

» Episode 3: Jessie Duan on the Chief of Staff to CTO role

» Episode 4: Dan Na on pushing through friction

» Episode 5: Pat Kua on flavors of tech leadership

» Episode 6: Anna Sulkina on Endurance Sports and Software Engineering

Season 2 Episodes

» Episode 1: Camille Fournier on making boring plans

» Episode 2: Tess Rinearson on early career engineering managers

» Episode 3: Kim Scott on building for systemic justice

» Episode 4: Sumeet Arora on moving on from a big company

» Episode 5: Rachael Stedman on IC manager work

» Episode 6: Chris Bee on Behaviors of Effective Eng Leaders

» Episode 7: Lynne Tye on the Engineering Hiring Landscape

» Episode 8: Beau Lebens on Distributed Team Meetups

» Episode 9: Indrajit Khare on Getting Acquired by Google

» Episode 10: Jack Danger on Technical Debt

» Episode 11: Sarah Milstein on Successful Remote and Hybrid Teams

Season 1 Episodes

» Episode 1: Will Larson on the path of the senior engineer

» Episode 2: Duretti Hirpa on mentoring junior and mid-level engineers

» Episode 3: Cate Huston on working with an external coach

» Episode 4: Juan Pablo Buriticá on common eng manager mistakes

» Episode 5: Gergely Orosz on the decision to go into management

» Episode 6: Lara Hogan on leading effectively in a pandemic

» Episode 7: Kaya Thomas on common early career engineer challenges

» Episode 8: Uma Chingunde on starting a VPE role in a pandemic

» Episode 9: Katie Wilde on supporting your team's mental health

» Episode 10: Akhil Gupta on navigating uncertainty in new roles

» Episode 11: Harper Reed on giving everyone a voice in team meetings

» Episode 12: Marc Hedlund on sponsorship

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S4 E3: Jori Lallo on Working Effectively Across Different Timezones
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