Bogomil ShopovNot unlike the great zebras and lions of the wild, the “Suits” (Marketing, Sales, Creative) and “Geeks” (Dev, Ops, Infra) in an IT company often face misunderstandings. When highly-technical and less-technical employees in a fast-growing tech shop like ZeroTurnaround need to accomplish something jointly, good communication is clearly necessary, but it’s not a one-sided thing.
There is a symbiotic relationship at play; the Suits are at least partly responsible for propagating the Geeks’ natural habitat so that we can all work together in peace and take home a salary. The Geeks make the product and tell the Suits why it’s good. The Suits then turn this into revenue and we all have jobs. Yay!
So how does it work in a distributed work environment, where most direct communication occurs over Skype? In a company where people are working in different offices in different continents, communication becomes naturally less efficient. While technology has been responsible for making a successful distributed work environment possible, I’m continually noticing that, like anti-virus software, solutions to communication struggles are always a few steps behind the next emerging challenges.