October, 2013
Wednesday is no meeting day. Our team is geographically scattered from all around bay area. We understand if one doesn't want to come into the office every day due to the frustrating over-30-minute commute or one simply prefers to work from home. Wednesday is officially free from meetings so that we can work from home without missing anything happening in the office. WFH is really loose controlled, or rather, not controlled at HF. We can wfh any time with or without a reason as long as others are notified. Even so, most of us still come to the office almost every day.
Thursday is always an exciting day for us. We schedule marketing and sale updates, engineering demos, CEO Q&As in the afternoon. This is a great time for everyone to know what's going on with our customers, our sales, our product and anything about HF (ask CEO!). And bi-weekly, we have team outings right afterwards. We go to bars, have party at CEO's house, play poker, bowling, tennis - just relax and enjoy the time with others. I really enjoy Thursday since I see our product progress, learn valuable strategies from sales and marketing guys, get answers from an experienced entrepreneurs, and of course, have a great time with my lovely colleagues.
Tuesday is reporting day. Before lunch, we do standup within engineer team and bug-triage. It's a good time to let others know more officially what changes others should know about, what is blocked or is blocking others, and what help is needed. By the end, we randomly picks 2-3 people to share something that's awesome in the last week. This is a good way to keep us feel awesome and be awesome.
Monday and Friday have nothing officially special. But I do like the pace of our weekdays. Tuesdays and Thursdays are small target days, and the rest are relaxing while demanding. And I have bi-weekly one-on-one with JR on Thursdays which is not as stressing as it would be on Mondays or Tuesdays.
We have war room hour everyday at 1:30. War room is where we shout and fight discuss about undecided pieces of out product which were noted beforehand. While the two co-founders and two designers are always on site, anyone can put stuff on the agenda (we keep it in a Google doc) and join the discussion. And war room decisions usually end up in spec. This is super helpful because it helps unblock me when I am not sure about something. And keeping an agenda is helpful too because we can always go back and see what choices we looked into and what decisions we made before. I have experienced before when the team had standup everyday but product decisions were made behind engineers' back, and when questions were piled too much that the team spent a whole day going them over only to find out some development was not in the right direction, both became frustrating and hurt the team bit by bit. So yeah war room is great idea to me.
First day of work is fun. We have a tradition that the last hired employee will take care of the next one's first day "treatments". The basic task is to highfive strangers in prepared costumes along the way to and from lunch (on the house). We had dance challenge, puzzle challenge, act it out, truth or lie, costume photography, ... It's always a fun day to welcome a new HFer :).
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