Building a team is challenging: a group of people won’t just spontaneously come together and tackle a set of goals. And working remotely usually introduces new layers of complication and chaos.

Gad Salner has been a software engineer and manager in startups for over 15 years, but this year was forced to get creative when he joined a new startup at the peak of COVID-19 stay-at-home orders. Building a team remotely, he quickly learned, introduces a unique set of challenges.

In this talk, Gad outlines how to build a winning engineering team and overcome remote-work challenges such as communication, engagement, development velocity, cultural gaps, and more. He explains the importance of calibrating your team’s efforts and processes, emphasizes the importance of high-trust communication and curating the right cultural and technical framework for your team.

What’s in it for me?

1. Cross-team calibration: How to map and share the team’s challenges and gaps
2. Building a team: a comprehensive plan for remotely building a team
3. Untethered: Taking advantage of remote-work to strengthen a cross-border engineering culture

Overview

1: How to calibrate your team
How to get clear on your team’s mission, it’s challenges, goals, processes, and individual responsibilities.
How to best resolve difficult complex situations, as a manager or developer
Empower your team! Be their stepping stone to a career jump
Examples
2: Building a team remotely
Bringing everybody closer together and communicating culture remotely
How to think outside the box when it comes to team culture
Creating a feed-forward cycle of improvement for your team
Developing a team framework that works remotely for everyone
Examples
3: Embrace change
How to take advantage of the opportunities that come with working remotely
Take advantage of “the new normal” to strengthen your team’s bond
Examples

Gad Salner is a Group Manager at Melio, where he leads the development of their client facing payment solution. With over 15 years of experience in development, Gad is an enthusiastic and innovative team player with a background in engineering, management, and architecture. He has a strong track record of leading product development in startups. His devotion to driving projects forward, creating a winning team culture and building awesome products has been his passion since the beginning.

Gad is also one of the creators of [Kaduregel Shefel](https://forward.com/culture/398295/how-a-cult-israeli-tv-show-about-soccer-swept-europe-kinda/), a project capturing Israel’s cultural diversity through amateur football. The project produces [exhibitions](https://www.theguardian.com/football/gallery/2015/aug/04/jewish-arab-football-diversity-co-existence-in-pictures), videos and events which they show around the world, and interact with the large community gathered around it.

Gad attributes his unique blend of management methodologies to lessons learned at many different startups over the last 15 years, most recently at WeWork, and from Kaduregel Shefel, where he ran a global cultural project. He had no idea just how incredibly useful this set of tools would be during a global pandemic. But c’est la vie!