#Studio one 3 kickass how to#

Our founder and CEO, Peldi Guilizzoni, shows a lot of confidence and trust in us. But I don’t think that’s really been a problem for us at all. Before I started working here I used to imagine that it would drive a boss crazy worrying that everyone was “pulling their weight” when they weren’t in the office. But we’re realizing that, as we grow, you don’t always need to know what everyone else is working on. And it’s often hard to know exactly what other teams are working on. We sometimes feel disconnected, especially on a personal level. ‍ Being a distributed team, what are some of the challenges you face?Īll the usual stuff, I would guess. It’s not actually that hard to enforce in reality because there are usually only about 25% of our Italian employees in the office at any one time. If there is a meeting that happens in person that’s relevant to others, the notes are written up and put on our wiki. All decisions happen there, rather than via in person discussions. In practice that means that our chat rooms and our wiki are our primary means of communication. In short, it means that even when people are in our only office in Italy (where about half of our employees live), they work as if they are working from home. ‍ I’m hearing often that Balsamiq is “optimized for working from home.” What does it mean exactly? we have three people in Illinois and six on the West Coast. Eleven live within commuting distance of our only office in Bologna, Italy.

‍ How many people currently work at Balsamiq and where around the globe are you guys distributed? I write and record most of our tutorials, I write blog posts, and I co-curate our Balsamiq Champions blog, about the cool things that our customers do. I focus mainly on the basics of UX, since many of our customers aren’t experienced UX designers. I’ve worked as a UX designer for many years, so a lot of my job is connecting with our community of users, which include UX designers, developers, product managers, and entrepreneurs. ‍ What does your role at Balsamiq entail? As an introvert, I sensed that working remotely would suit me, but it definitely helped that nearly everyone else at Balsamiq is also remote. I’d had one six-month remote gig earlier and I loved how productive I was at home, but often felt out of the loop because all the other employees were on-site. I knew a lot about the Balsamiq culture from their blog before I started working here, so that definitely helped my transition to working remotely.

#Studio one 3 kickass how to#

I’ve been a UX designer for over 10 years and came to Balsamiq to help educate our customers about user experience best practices and how to make the most of our tool. I am a long-time Balsamiq Mockups user and fan.

‍ Leon, can you briefly introduce yourself? What was your path to Balsamiq and remote work? Surf Office caught up with their UX designer and writer Leon Barnard to find out what makes Balsamiq a great remote oriented organization. Nowadays more than 20 people are part of this distributed company where vacation is mandatory and team retreats lead to a special kind of jet lag. Starting as a bootstrapped business in 2008, Balsamiq has always placed transparency and trust high.