The tools and tactics that make up Tango’s Remote Playbook

Onboarding

1. Bios and user manuals. New hires select their spirit animal and answer fun questions (i.e. Where would you go in a zombie apocalypse?) during our weekly All Hands. On a more practical note, they also define how they prefer to receive feedback and where they need support (e.g. organization, articulating thoughts).
2. Dogfooding. Everyone starts by providing 10 pieces of feedback on the current product. Not only does this give us a fresh perspective, it’s an easy way to communicate what’s in progress and who owns which parts of the product.

1. Rippling handles our documents, device management, and payroll. Their PEO-model allows us to seamlessly integrate new states into our payroll run.
2. Macro provides a handy checklist for new hires to complete tasks and give visibility to their manager as they make progress.

Collaboration

1. Slack norms. Our favorites include “Thread, don’t spread” and “Provide context.” These principles provide guardrails on what otherwise becomes an unwieldy product.
2. Hackathon. We dedicate three-day sprints to exploring unplanned, unique ideas for the product. This gives us a chance to pick our heads up and get creative.

1. Tango allows us to answer how-to questions quickly and outline new releases of the product. Bonus: it makes for exceptional dogfooding.
2. Slack huddles reduce Zoom fatigue and are an easy alternative to struggling through a misinterpreted, written back-and-forth.

Alignment

1. All Hands. This weekly, full-team gathering provides the best medium to talk through goals, customer feedback, and key issues we need to solve. We also like to make it fun (see more below).
2. Launch runbooks. Tactically, we use runbooks as checklists that dictate what we are and are not doing ahead of a major milestone. These are sacred documents that keep everyone on the same page.

1. Posthog is our event-tracking and feature flag tool that gives us real-time feedback on user activity. We strategize user feedback efforts by segmenting customer journeys.
2. Coda templates help us run our sprint retrospectives so that every team member has a voice and we arrive at a clear understanding of what was achieved.

Accountability

1. SOWs. Start of Weeks, or SOWs, are individually submitted updates that highlight achievements, upcoming priorities, blockers, and kudos.
2. Culture survey. Our semi-annual survey helps team leads identify improvement areas and facilitates open conversation so we can continue to do our best work.

1. Linear is the fastest, most intuitive way for our engineering team to stay in the loop on progress and new issues. Hate JIRA? Try Linear.
2. Typeform has two use cases at Tango: (1) surveying new and existing users and (2) sourcing updates from the team (SOWs, Culture survey) to populate in a Slack channel.

Recognition

1. Mango snacks. We allow team members to give unlimited Mango-centric gifts (hot sauce, beverages, fruit) to support their peers. Melissa’s Produce is the best!
2. Core value spotlights. During All Hands, we open the floor for team members to call out awesome displays of our core values in the past week.

1. Snackpass gives teams the ability to ship snacks that are typically found in an office. The best part? Every employee gets to pick out their favorite snacks.
2. Swagup provides design, production, shipping, and storage services for bulk swag orders. Swagup makes sure you love your designs and never have to think about logistics.

Team Building

1. Hot seat. Every week during All Hands, one team member sits in the Tango Hot Seat and answers three random questions. This forum is an opportunity to continue to learn about each other.
2. Team offsite. In August 2021, we began holding regular team offsites to new cities. We kicked off in Denver, where we hiked, ate, and made big plans for the product.

1. BarNone Games offers hosted, virtual trivia for teams of any size. We thrive on healthy competition!
2. Airbnb Experiences complements the competitive nature of our team with unique events like painting classes or knife skills training. Thankfully, we still have all our fingers.