May 25, 2021 by Payman Maghsoudian

Talk Summary: 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

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.

Moderator: Manasi Goel

Manasi is an engineering manager on the Services Leads team. During her journey with Yelp she has moved from intern to backend engineer to engineering manager. She currently works on building leads products for our local services businesses. Manasi is especially passionate about creating a fair and inclusive workplace and is grateful to be at a company like Yelp that prioritizes diversity, inclusion and belonging. One of the ways she helps these efforts at Yelp is by being a program lead in the women's ERG, Awesome Women in Engineering.

About Yelping From Home:

Yelp’s mission is to connect people with great local businesses, and two of the teams working behind the scenes to make that happen are our five star engineering and product teams.

Playing an active role in our community is a value that we have strongly prioritized over the years. Typically we would invite you to come to Yelp’s HQ to network, grab a slice of ‘za, and learn about the technology and culture behind Yelp. With stay-at-home orders across the globe, Yelp (like many of you) has had no choice but to adapt to these changes. We understand that this is a strange and challenging time for many, so we’d like to invite you to join us as we navigate this new normal for the tech community together.

To stay connected, create space for folks to collaborate and share some of the things Yelp has been working on, we are launching our very own virtual tech talk series. This series of talks will feature Yelpers from engineering and product and will focus on themes such as career development, technical skills, workplace challenges and Yelp’s response to COVID-19.