Remote Working For Product Organisations – Amir Salihefendić on The Product Experience

For obvious reasons, most of us are currently working from home, along with teams that are also all remote. Even if you’ve worked from home before, even if you’ve done it under tough conditions, this is different. Amir Salihefendić should know. As the founder and CEO of Doist (makers of Todoist and Twist), his company has been all-remote since day one. He joined us to share what he’s learned about working with remote teams, some great advice on how to communicate, hire and onboard, and why this is different, even for his firm.
Quote of the Episode
We always try to make general tools that can be used by anybody. I think creating a generic tool is much harder than doing a specific one for a niche, but that’s something that excites us because we really want to operate on a global level and really have a global impact with the tools that we create.
Listen if you’d like to learn more about

* How to do remote working well
* Building generic products
* Management and task applications
* Being organised

Links mentioned in this episode

* Follow Amir on Twitter and LinkedIn
* Doist
* Todoist
* Twist
* Employee handbooks for Gitlab and Basecamp
* Kim Scott’s book,  Radical Candor


Hosts
The Product Experience is hosted by Lily Smith and Randy Silver.
Lily enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. Lily has spent 13 years in the tech industry working mainly with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She has worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank in Bristol, the Product Managers’ meetup with regular events and talks on Product now with 800+ members and growing. Now the Product Director at Symec, Lily also runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.
A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy has been working as an interactive producer and product manager across the US and UK for nearly 20 years. After launching Amazon’s music stores in the US and UK, Randy has worked with museums and arts groups, online education, media and entertainment, retail and financial services. He’s held Head of Product roles at HSBC and Sainsbury’s, where he also directed their 100+-person product community. Now a trainer, Discovery and Leadership consultant, he’s spoken at Mind the Product Engage (Hamburg and Manchester), the Business of Software, Turing Festival, a number of ProductTanks (London, Zurich, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Oxford, and Brighton… so far!) and at conferences across the US and Europe.

Music
Our theme music is from Hamburg-based Pau,