Jori Lallo on Working Effectively Across Different Timezones

Lead Time Chats: Season 4, Episode 3 Takeaways

Jori Lallo on Working Effectively Across Different Timezones

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

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.”

Additional Resources