Visual thinking is one of the most valuable parts of the creative process. It helps you think: drawing makes you get specific with your ideas and see them in new ways, so you can continue to iterate. Visual thinking frees up mental energy, offloading some memory into external displays and taking advantage of the human capacity to recognize patterns.
From the beginning, we have aimed to help distributed teams work as if they were sitting in the same room. Through our journey, we discovered that the whiteboard was at the center of a lot of team ceremonies—a place where people would gather around, share their ideas, express themselves and solve big challenges. We called our product RealtimeBoard—this name was direct and defined a brand-new category of collaboration tools which help teams to align around a shared vision in real time.
Onboarding new people at a company can be a challenge. As a leader, you need to create a process that gives a new hire the ability to understand your team’s unique workflow and goals, and also ensure that they are fully equipped to start working and secure their first wins. These few months are so critical for a new employee, and they can be especially hard if you are working in a remote team.
To build best-in-class teams, win the competition, and, ultimately, create the next big thing, organizations are hiring talent from all across the world, making teams increasingly distributed. Some companies open hubs in booming cities to attract professionals from the region. Others, many of them leading tech companies like Automattic, Buffer, and InVision‚ prefer to create fully distributed teams, allowing their employees to work from anywhere.
Working in a remote team can be very challenging, especially if you’re trying to schedule a meeting with someone in a different time zone. As a distributed organization of 150+ people working from Europe, the United States and Australia, we know first-hand how painful this scheduling process can get, but we also understand that real-time communication is critical when you are building the next big thing.
