Setting expectations with your team and co-workers is a critical step in building productive, long-term relationships with each of them. This can be a difficult process even when you are all fortunate enough to be working in the same office or building, but what about when your organization is geographically distributed across multiple countries and time zones?

Fuze is a heavily distributed company and my product team alone is scattered across four countries and six different time zones. I’m constantly searching for new ways to improve transparency, set expectations, and increase collaboration between our product managers. I read this great article over at SoapboxHQ, “How to Set Expectations With Your Team“, that describes the concept of a manager “readme” file, and was inspired by the concept and some of the follow-up stories I read about managers building their own.

I took a stab at building my own readme file and have been testing it with the two new product managers that we hired in November. The feedback has been extremely positive and they each gave me some more items to include. I’ve posted the entire deck below and would love to hear any feedback on it, or ways that you think you could use this in your organization.

Happy New Year!

Link: Michael Affronti README (Google Slides)

See all the slides here: Michael Affronti README (Google Slides)