WWCode×Mercari Online Event: Tips on Managing Engineering Teams Remotely #MercariDays

Last week, Mercari held an online event in collaboration with Women Who Code (WWCode) Tokyo, a non-profit organization dedicated to inspiring women to excel in technology careers. The theme of this event was “Managing teams remotely,” and it aimed to highlight the work of female engineers in leadership roles and share their insight into managing teams in a remote environment, and to inform, support and empower women who are, or considering becoming an engineering manager.

Tutti Quintella, Manager of Mercari D&I team and Co-director of WWCode Tokyo giving a welcome speech

In this event we had three amazing speakers: Mercari engineering manager Snehal Shinde, Lena Morita, software engineer at Automattic and director of Women Who Code Tokyo, and Maria Fernanda, who is currently a Software Engineering Manager at iFood. Although the three speakers are from different global organizations, like many of us, they have been working from home. In today’s #MercariDays article I would like to introduce some of the tips we have learned from these three.

Snehal Shinde, Mercari Engineering Manager

Snehal Shinde, Mercari Engineering Manager

People-first approach in uncertain times

Snehal is an engineering manager for Mercari, and she has been leading her team remotely for the past couple of months as the company shifted to a remote work style in response to COVID-19. In her talk, Snehal explained the importance of a people-first approach in times of uncertainty by providing a simple “to do” and “not to do” list for engineering managers in order to resolve team and individual issues.

Lena Morita, Engineer at Automattic, and Director of Women Who Code Tokyo

Lena Morita, Engineer at Automattic, and Director of Women Who Code Tokyo

Scalable communication in a distributed organization

Lena is a software engineer for Automattic, a globally distributed company. From her experience, she explained the importance of “Scalable Communication” in order to establish a work style that is unconstrained by geography or time zone, by explaining the benefits of a low-context communication style.

Maria Fernanda, Software Engineering Manager at iFood

Maria Fernanda, Software Engineering Manager at iFood

Challenges and tips on managing an engineering team remotely

Our final speaker, Maria Fernanda, is currently a Software Engineering Manager at iFood, a Brazilian foodtech and market leader in food delivery in Brazil. For the past year, she has led a team of eight developers with four of them working remotely. In her talk she explained about the challenges of remote work and explained her solutions, such as taking advantage of in-person communication by using video calls and using different communication tools for synchronous and asynchronous communication.

Although it is obviously difficult to hold in-person events during these troubling times, we are very lucky to be able to engage with the community online, and to hear from these amazing women in tech.
If you are interested in future events with us please check our event pages:
Make sure to join the WWCode Tokyo meetup group
Join the Mercari Dev meetup group to find out more about our events
See you next time for more #MercariDays!