5 Proven Tips to Boost Remote Developer Team Productivity

Remote Developer Teams: Productivity Tips That Actually Work

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Since COVID-19 hit, a lot of development roles have evolved from in-office jobs to fully remote or hybrid gigs. Latin America, in particular, has grown into a hotbed for scouting top-tier remote developer talents. Operating with a remote developer team comes with a lot of advantages, especially regarding flexibility. However, managing a remote development team comes with several unique challenges, especially regarding productivity.

If you’re a founder, CTO, or project manager struggling to keep your remote software engineers productive and aligned, here are 5 proven remote team management tips that actually work:

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#1. Hire the Right Remote Developers from Day One

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Here’s the truth: your remote developer team hiring decision already defines your team’s productivity curve from Day 1. If your remote developer team is built majorly around low-cost freelancers from generalist platforms, the implication is that you will spend a lot of time rewriting specs and making adjustments rather than actually shipping new products or features.

If you’re exploring remote developer team options that offer optimal productivity, especially in Latin America, we recommend focusing on senior developers who bring experience, initiative and strong communication skills to the table. However, this is just half of the formula. You will also need to align your hiring process to your company’s core values. This means looking out for elite, vetted remote development teams that are able to seamlessly integrate into your process. 

Here’s the deal: A remote developer team with top-notch expertise that gets your mission and vision will always outperform a similarly skilled team of developers just chasing the next ticket.

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#2. Prioritize Clear and Consistent Communication

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Remote teams succeed or fail based on communication quality. Strong communication keeps everyone aligned, reduces misunderstandings, and promotes accountability.

Here’s how to get it right:

• Choose the right tools: There are different high-quality communication tools on the market like Zoom, Notion, Slack, and so on. Pick the ones you want to use and stick to them.
• Conduct trainings and tutorials: Never assume that your remote developer team is familiar with the tools you prefer for your company. So it is always best to run short training sessions to bring everybody on the same page. This helps you ensure that you don’t experience productivity dips caused by a lack of “technical” competence.
• Invest in team bonding: Productivity is optimal when all team members are familiar with each other and there’s trust. This is because trust will always lead to better communication, which, in turn, improves work efficiency. Casual online hangouts or virtual gaming sessions are practical ways to boost team bonding for better communication. 

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#3. Set clear goals

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Remote teams thrive on clarity. If your remote developer team does not fully understand what you expect from them per time, productivity will suffer. Here’s a breakdown of what works:

• Define your goals: The first thing you need to do when starting any project is to clearly define what the goals are. Explain it as simple as possible to make sure everyone understands.
• Break the goals down: take each goal and break them into smaller actionable objectives. This helps your remote team make the connection between what the goal is and exactly how to get there.
• Assign specific tasks to people: Always make sure to assign specific tasks to specific team members. This helps you avoid problems of unclear ownership or responsibility. In addition, it also makes it a lot easier to identify team members who may be slacking off on their responsibilities.
• Set clear milestones: Per time, the team should always know what success at each stage looks like and within what timeframe it has to be achieved. That’s where setting milestones comes into play. One effective method for achieving this is sprint planning. 

Sprint planning is a key event in the Scrum framework (part of Agile methodology), where teams define specific goals for a short, time-boxed period (usually 1 to 2 weeks). 

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Tip: To get the most out of sprint planning, make sure to break each milestone down into actionable tasks. Next, assign the milestones to clear owners and include deadlines to keep momentum and accountability high.

Here’s one more tip: If you’re currently scaling, running a large team of remote developers, or running a lot of complex, interconnected processes, hire a project manager. Hiring an experienced project manager will help you boost organization and productivity significantly. Also, we recommend leveraging project management tools like Asana and Trello to further boost workflow structure and consequently, productivity.

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#4. Focus on Outcomes, Not Hours Worked

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Some founders and team leaders prefer a micromanagement approach to handling developer teams. This may work for in-person work situations but for remote developer teams, it could be a disaster. This is because you are likely essentially working with professionals across different time zones. As such, trying to force a strict 9-to-5 schedule will kill morale fast. 

Instead, trust your team to manage their day and hold them to quality of results instead of the number of hours spent on the job. That said, if you are hiring from Latin America, the time zone differences shouldn’t really be an issue. This is because one of the major advantages of hiring experts from the Latin American market is the timezone compatibility and overlap with U.S. and European teams, making real-time check-ins easy.

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#5. Establish a clear feedback loop

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Even high-performing teams need feedback and remote developer teams need it the more because that’s the only way they get to understand how well they are doing. There is no hard and fast rule to building a feedback loop but you should make sure it is accessible, consistent, and timely.

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Need a high-performing remote developer team? Deverr is here to help!

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Most productivity issues with their remote developer teams come down to misalignment, poor communication, and wrong team composition. That’s where Deverr comes in.

At Deverr, we help startups and scaleups build high-performing, boutique developer teams with elite Latin American engineers who know how to plug in fast, communicate clearly, and ship with confidence.

If you’re looking for senior talent that feels like your in-house team from day one, reach out to us and let’s talk.

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