Member-only story
Switching to a remote manager
How I’m adjusting to this new world.
git merge
In the last four weeks, I’ve made a transition from having my line manager based in the same office, which has been a situation I’ve been used to for all of my professional life, to having them be remote. In my case this has happened because of the merger of Brandwatch and Crimson Hexagon. The CTO of the combined company is now based in Boston, and I’m in Brighton, England.
I have a VP Engineering role, which, silly job title aside, means that I have a division of the Engineering department reporting to me, focussed around building our Analytics and Audiences applications. We have other divisions of Engineering focussed around our infrastructure and compute, our data platform and the Vizia product. At the time of writing, I have 38 people in my division.
I’ve been fortunate to have always had the CTO in the same office over the recent years. As the company has continued to grow at a fairly fast pace, I’ve had local support. Ideas, thoughts, gripes: they’ve been there in the same place or on the same timezone.
There have been a number of benefits to having the leader of the department co-located:
- My staff have been able to get to know him easily. We’re all just around most days. This makes…
