How Veracity Protocol works with teams across timezones

Working with two different time zones can be a blessing or a curse. For us here at Veracity Protocol, we’ve set up tons of internal practices to help us navigate and communicate as efficiently as possible.

By having our teams based in both Czechia and in the US, we’ll share our first-hand experiences and routines on how we handle things — along with sharing some very “whoa” culture shocks that we’ve all encountered along the way.

Jan’s golden rule

As Jan, our Head of Product, puts it, “The golden rule for any remote team is to over-communicate because a lot of context can be lost when information are transferred. To make this easier, we also have templates for projects, project to-do lists, user testing sessions and more. Accompanied by video calls of the whole team, this works pretty well for us so far. Our second rule would probably be creating a sense of closeness.”

When it comes to our tools, we like to use as little as possible and have everything in one place — Slack (for everyday communication), Notion (our info hub, project & task management workspace), and Google Hangouts (for our video calls).

So how do we handle remote teams?

TLDR — the gist of it:

• We sync via video conference calls; each sub-team at least once or twice a week
• We always update our shared docs and projects to make sure everyone’s working with the latest version
• We are sending an internal weekly newsletter, highlighting what went down for the week while shining a spotlight on a team member to get to know them a bit more

When it comes to working with remote teams, Jan shares the breakdown on our main kinds of syncs:

1/ Individual Syncs
Making sure that our shared docs are always up to date. While one person works on a document offline, another person could be working on the same document online. Our goal is to make sure we’re always working and sharing the most up-to-date version and to let the team know.

All our main projects are listed in Notion with its own project diary — or history. The diary contains the stream of events that happened on the project from the first contact with the client to the last update sent. Everything is recorded. This way, anyone can have up-to-date info pretty much at any time.

2/ All-team Syncs
Our most important sync has to be our daily 10-minute standups — one all-inclusive video conference call for our Prague, Brno and New York teams. This is the chance for each of us to quickly share what we’re working on, update each other and ask for help. We adopted this format after discussing this with our friends at Productboard, cheers!

Video is mandatory so we feel closer to each other. Jokes are not mandatory, but you know, we try our best in such a short amount of time — especially when Albert is present, as Jan says.

3/ Dev Syncs
Our development team has a standup every Monday morning and a check-in every Wednesday. In the future, we’ll probably add in a weekly wrap-up call on Fridays on top of our project post-mortems — which turned out to be incredibly helpful. We try to keep standups to a minimum to let our devs focus.

4/ Business Syncs
Our business team has its own weekly sync and the rest is ad-hoc — mostly around new projects and with clients.

Our internal newsletter is also something we’ve recently started doing. Every Monday, we send it out to bridge the gap between our teams in Prague, Brno, NY and for those working externally. Here we share highlights from the past week, introduce our team members, share inspiration (articles, videos, music, etc…) and some great custom-made memes made the Albert the Great himself.

Why we love it

It’s like we’re a non-stop hub. While those of us in Prague are wrapping things up, those based in New York are briefed up to speed and are just getting started. There are a good four hours of overlap for us to work together. The process repeats daily and we find it to be extremely efficient.

Cultural diversity and how we see it

“The biggest difference has got to be the level of directness. One culture is really direct and to the point without putting much effort into being polite or wording things softly. The other is the complete opposite — where the emphasis is more about being polite and indirectly beating around the bush when it comes to feedback or criticism. I think it’s important that both sides are aware of this to be able to work together, overcome it and communicate in a clear and professional way.”
— Jakub, CEO, Prague team

“The one cultural difference I’ve noticed when it comes to clients is that the CZ team members sometimes “push” clients more directly whereas I think sometimes you need to be more subtle. On the people front, the issue is more about different business backgrounds than about cultural backgrounds.”
— Mike, US Business Development & Partnerships, NY team

“I find Czechs to be naturally tech-savvy and practical about finding quick and effective solutions, which is why our Dev team is here. On the other hand, people from the US are naturally better at sales with a great pro-client approach. They’re really good at starting and maintaining relationships. And did I also mention our non-existent language barrier? We all speak English. So again, the cultural differences are our advantage here.”
— Jan, Head of Product, Prague team

“The level of comedy and fun spirits really made an impact on me. Work for me used to be very serious and focused, but here whenever I talk to the guys in Prague, it’s always high-spirited, helpful and a great time. This, to me, brings out this culture of openness in the company and it becomes a place we can share and be ourselves. It’s a really cool place to work but to also have fun. But, of course, sometimes the time difference is a pain.
–– Harrison, Project Manager & Business Intel, NY team

Key takeaways

For some, working with different timezones can be a total pain. For us, it works in our favor. Especially with the set up of our routines and syncs, it makes it easy for our entire team to stay updated, informed and in touch while also having a great time and experiencing how other cultures think and work.

About Veracity Protocol

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Veracity Protocol brings a new security standard to combat counterfeits and fraud by fingerprinting physical objects — bridging the physical and digital world. We use computer vision and machine learning to create an immutable digital fingerprint of any physical object based on its unique material structure.

Anyone can then verify the authenticity in (sub)seconds with a smartphone or regular industrial camera as no proprietary hardware is required.

See our demo video and presentation for more information.