The Remote Onboarding Diaries: Episode 1 - The Stagist Challenge

Embark on a new journey with us as we navigate the challenges of onboarding a remote intern. Your insights matter - join the discussion and become a part of this unfolding story

Hi, Remote Leader 👋

In a departure from our usual newsletter format, we're embarking on an exciting journey today! 

The Remote Internship Challenge

A dear reader of REMOTE.HOW Andrea Ciufo reached out with an intriguing request: he sought guidance for his first experience onboarding a remote intern.

Subject:
"Remote Internship, How To Organize It?"

Body:
"Hi Gabriele,
I am about to start with a guy for an internship in remote marketing, and I was wondering if you could mentor/coach us to understand if we are going in the right direction.
The guy will take care of some operational parts and other more strategic plans of marketing and merchandise for Papardò. The other question I wanted to ask you is how to organize tasks. I would use Trello, and, being two, I would not use Kanban/Agile techniques but simply daily check-ins.
What do you think?
We can eventually jump on a call about this in the next few days if you like.
Andrea "

We quickly jumped on a call and decided to document the upcoming journey in public in a new series called: "The Remote Onboarding Diaries."

Meet Andrea Ciufo

But first, let me introduce Andrea 😎
Andrea, a passionate Data Scientist based in London, specialised in Marketing Mix Modelling. He's also a lover of Jogging, Reading, Music, and Baking Bread.

He has two side businesses:

1. A fascinating blog named LovableData, where he mentors young data scientists and marketers

2. A beautiful beach resort together with his family called Papardò (in Gaeta - Italy).

The Scrumban Solution

Andrea's new intern will tackle various marketing activities in two areas - his data science mentoring and his family's beach resort. 
That's a broad range of work, from strategic to operational tasks.

To handle the complexity of the internship, we thought a mix of Scrum and Kanban might be ideal. For those unfamiliar with these concepts, here's a short explanation of Scrum, Kanban, and Scrumban.

The plan is first to create a backlog, identify the epics (a large body of work that can be broken down into smaller tasks or 'stories'), and then work in two-week cycles (sprints). This ensures we always have tangible outcomes for the business and doesn't overwhelm the intern with information.

So, the primary challenges ahead of us are:

1. Identifying the epics.

2. Creating the stories for each epic.

3. Deciding how to prioritize the epics.

Now it’s your turn!

Here's the rub - how do we decide which activities to perform in the first sprint once the backlog is set up? 
I invite you to take a moment, put yourself in my shoes, and ponder this.

Next week, I'll share my proposed solution (and a stumbling addition from Andrea 🥁) in the upcoming issue of REMOTE.HOW 

Feel free to hit reply and let me know your ideas.
I'll feature the most interesting ones in the next episode of this series.

Looking forward to hearing from you, and stay tuned for the next episode!

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That's all for this Saturday.
REMOTE.HOW - Become a Better Remote Leader in 2 mins/week.

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I wish you a great weekend!
Gabriele