Last year, when the COVID-19 pandemic started, we were faced with an unprecedented situation as our teams suddenly began working remotely from home. With so many aspects of our lives impacted, both personally and professionally, many of us had to rethink how we could still work efficiently on our teams. In this new situation, the team I manage at Yelp quickly got together and redefined what we call “Team Ground Rules.” These ground rules set clearer expectations, especially for communicating and interacting in a virtual environment. Today, these changes continue to help us work effectively and efficiently as a team. During this talk, I will go into detail about the importance of team ground rules, how we implemented them, and how they helped us during the pandemic.

Speaker: Payman Maghsoudian, San Francisco

Bio: Payman is an engineering manager at Yelp, leading a multi-functional team responsible for building consumer contribution features such as Write-A-Review, and Photo Upload flows on Yelp. He has several years of experience building software products in different domains such as eCommerce, real estate, telecommunications, finance, and payment industries. In addition to his interest in leadership and management, Payman is passionate about collaborative software development processes such as Agile and Lean.