on creating apps

During the last six months we are building DrinkControl app, it is more than clear that our productivity really suffers from distance in time and space. Happy Moments is team of four people. Two of us are living in Buenos Aires (Argentina), another two- in Riga (Latvia). That means 5 hours time difference in addition to 12 thousand kilometers.

For example, when i’m going to sleep, Arts (my partner in Buenos Aires) has just came into his productivity mood. When I need a quick answer to easy question, he is not online. When he’s simply having bad onda (wave) I cannot punch him in back and make it working other way. And so on.

If you are sitting together in one kitchen you constantly push each other forward, solve problems quickly, brainstorm and agree on solutions much more quickly when relying on online tools with huge time lags. My wild guess is that we have lost about 4-6 weeks (it means 1/6-1/4 total) of our pace because of being distributed.

I know that someone can point me to 37signals. Yes, i’m reading Signal vs Voice as well but look- they have practiced distributed teams for long, long time (it would be interesting how long did it take to work out collaboration “protocol” that really works for them), they have company culture built to solve this (taking on board only people with excellent writing skills), they even have created their own bundle of tools (for solving their communication challenges) now known as their core business.

During the last year we have tried various tools to compensate our distance and improve our collaboration. There is what more or less worked for us so far:

1) Gmail & chat (also a bit Google Calendar, Google Docs) - Google chat is heavily used in one-to-one communication as well as for our weekly chat-up progress/planning meetings.

2) Yammer - for sharing ideas, information or discussing (e.g. design decisions). We have used Google Wave initially for this and were quite upset when Google decided to abandon it.

3) Pivotal Tracker - our ultimate and one project management tool. Every app is separate project and every feature or piece of work is user story. 

4) Internal Wiki (based on Trac) is used for new app ideas, storing documents/attachments/research results and links (still there is some confusions, what should go to Yammer and what should be published in wiki).

It would be great to have feedback from people with similar setup- how do you overcome distance and made it working? What tools are you using and how?