Discord: when gamers run projects fully remote

It's now been a week since we shifted "to the day after…" Looking back on a week where we jumped headfirst into full remote.

In this context of global crisis and deep uncertainty, at Bluecoders we tried to break the problem down into three challenges that were absolutely critical to the survival of our business.

#1 Our three major challenges for the period

The first challenge for us was managing the health risk, which by the hour was becoming an increasingly tangible reality in the daily lives of the French. The government took on this topic for us by ordering lockdown — we just had to comply.

We also had to keep our day-to-day going, continuing to help our partners move forward "no matter what," to pursue their strategic hires, and to support them so they could keep going during this complicated period.

We also had to learn — and this had to happen in a very short time — how to work as a team that had been thrown into full remote very abruptly. Today, that's the challenge we've chosen to focus on.

#2 Tech recruiting adapts!

What methodology did we put in place? The one closest to part of our DNA: geek culture and the "gaming spirit."

When you think about it, what community, if not gamers, has been gathering for 15 years now, fully remote, to deliver complex projects through a simple and effective communication tool?

One thing is for sure: it's the gamers on our product team who paved the way — the rest of the team just had to follow their lead.

So thanks to the Discord tool, and for the past week, we've been organized like an MMORPG guild. (Not to be confused with "Meuh Porgue" 😂)

Discord has existed since 2015 and reinvented the way gamers meet online, particularly thanks to voice chat quality that was way ahead of many other tools.

Thanks to this platform, and in a logic of recreating a daily routine we were all particularly attached to, we recreated our "virtual" offices as faithfully as possible, with voice channels with particularly well-designed UX.

#3 Managing the team in full remote

So we have a Manager Room available, which for the moment looks like a crisis room, work spaces by department, meeting rooms, rooms for moving recruiting processes forward with our partners, a room for the gamers (well deserved) who animate the team's downtime with online games, a cafeteria where colleagues can meet during lunch break… we even pushed the realism (and the vice) by creating a room dedicated to those who want to take a smoke break.

Monday morning at 10am, the first day of full remote, the entire team was connected and standing together to fight this completely unprecedented challenge.

The second day, we did conf calls with our clients who didn't know Discord and were onboarded in minutes. They loved the interface and were blown away by how easily they could share their screens — and therefore their technical issues — in a very concrete way.

We can see that startups, by their very nature steeped in tech culture, very easily knew how to adapt to this fully digital way of working. They are clearly already used to remote, and the digitization of their daily life is ultimately just a logical follow-up… and almost inevitable in light of the environmental challenges we face in the short, medium, and long term.

This must also be, for companies that haven't yet fully crossed over into all-digital, a wonderful opportunity to catch up a bit thanks to particularly user-friendly and accessible tools.

The challenge of full remote is gradually turning into a best practice. It makes us more agile, more efficient, and more productive, particularly thanks to this disconcertingly simple tool. Now, another complication is starting to emerge: how do we maintain and sustain this beautiful surge of motivation over time?