August 18, 2020

Top 6 tips on managing the remote team of software developers

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Updated on 05.03.26

As the remote software development model becomes a worldwide trend, startups founders and large enterprises’ HRM departments test new management methods. If you don’t have much time for experiments, apply the best practices that have already shown their efficiency in real cases. Thanks to more than 10 years on the market of IT outstaffing, we know how to manage remote developers on your team. Today, we’ve asked MWDN experts, Vitalii Vystavnyi (Managing Partner) and Mykhaylo Merkulov (COO), to share their experience with you. Remote teams don’t fail because people are “far away”, they fail because expectations stay implicit. The new baseline is async-first clarity: written decisions, fewer meetings with better structure, and more transparency around ownership, timelines, and quality gates. The tips below stay the same, but this update changes how you apply them day to day.

1. Set clear rules for cooperation

Composing the job description is an art and it requires the professional help of experienced recruiters. When you’re about to manage a remote team of engineers you haven’t worked with before, you have to write down their job duties as precisely as possible. This will help you to avoid conflicts in the future.

2. Take care of the corporate culture

When you’re hiring remote team developers, make sure they agree with your working principles. Some product owners believe that their engineers are more efficient when they have to compete with each other. Some companies think that the corporate culture is about giving their developers the programming team names and that’s it. At MWDN, we think that to provide the best results, the gathering of people working on one project has to be a real team, who can trust each other, rely on each other, and share knowledge. Our practice has shown that this approach doesn’t only make our remote software engineers feel happier and more loyal to the company, it also dramatically increases their performance.One more thing that became non-negotiable: async communication hygiene. Document decisions in one place, keep updates in writing, and use short video/voice updates when context is hard to compress. This reduces meeting load without reducing alignment, and it’s especially effective when your team spans time zones.

3. Provide efficient communication

Some managers utilize everyday stand-ups, every-week retrospectives, and every-two-week one-on-ones, and these all in addition to obligatory planings and pre-planings. Not all companies that hire remote software engineers think that this amount of meetings is necessary for efficient work, and MWDN is among them. We believe that having an experienced manager able to guide a remote developers team and stop discussions that lead nowhere is more important for productive communication.

Tools for remote team collaboration

We have used multiple applications to manage our extended development team. Here is our list of the best tools that have shown their efficiency in practice.

Google Suit is the most convenient and easy to use tool that every company should work with. It includes Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Calendar.InVision is a popular collaborative tool. The productivity of your company will benefit from this prototyping tool if your remote software development team collaborates with designers. Another great advantage of InVision is that it is integrated with Atlassian Jira.

Zoom is on the peak of its popularity because of the pandemic but MWDN loved it even before video conferences became mainstream. For us, it is crucial to have face-to-face meetings when we hire developers online and our recruiters use Zoom for this purpose.Slack is our favorite communication tool. MatterMost and Team are also in top-3 corporate messengers that guarantee efficient communication and confidentiality to the companies.

GitHub is the most popular platform for collective software development and at the moment, a lot of medical software developer finds solutions on this recourse and this is one of reason to holds the first position on the market and in our hearts. At MWDN, we apply Jira and Confluence developed by the Atlassian corporation, but we also find Trello quite useful if your company uses the Kanban workflow.

Timezome.io is the tool to track the time your remote software developers have spent on the task or the project. Tracking time is necessary for further planning, retrospectives, and financial transparency of your project. 2025–2026 add-ons (optional, but common):

Loom (or similar) for async walkthroughs instead of meetings
Notion / Confluence as a single source of truth for decisions and onboarding
Miro / FigJam for whiteboarding when you need shared context fast
Google Meet / MS Teams if your org is already in that ecosystem

4. Invest in the professional growth of your developers

It’s not that easy to make remote software developers loyal to your project in the era of digital nomads. One of the methods to make your engineers part of your company is by investing in your team. To do so, you have to understand what your remote developer wants from your company. Regular one-on-one meetings will help you to understand the aspirations of your engineer. The competition for experienced engineers among IT companies is high and the developers need more than high salaries. When you hire software developers in Ukraine or in any other country, give your engineers the possibility to grow and improve their technical skills, invest in their education, and provide training on soft skills. In this case, you will receive a truly devoted team that will stay with you forever.

5. Provide constant feedback

Code review and refactoring should always be in the sprint scope, as they allow the team lead to provide feedback to every remote software developer. QA engineers also evaluate the developer’s work and you should maintain the high level of communication between the two departments. Remember, though, that the number of bug fixing tasks only demonstrates the level of the developer’s technical skills. To provide the proper feedback on all aspects of your coder’s work, apply one-on-one meetings. Give appraisal to your workers, never forget that proper evaluation is what every person needs. Provide constructive criticism and always add some positive feedback to it.To keep feedback actionable, tie it to outcomes: delivery predictability, quality metrics (escaped bugs, incident rate), and collaboration signals (handoff clarity, response time). Remote work makes “invisible work” easy to miss, so make expectations measurable.

6. Be prepared to trade off time or scope

Of course, the correspondence of the planned road map to the actual performance and the perfect coverage of the sprint scope is what all product owners crave. However, when managing software developers you should stay agile. Be ready to adjust to the changes in the world, in the project, in the company’s strategy, and in the level of your engineers’ productivity. Never forget that your developers are only humans and they might have their ups and downs.

Remote team and extended team: pros & cons

There are several ways how you can hire software remote teams. The most popular are outstaffing, outsourcing, and hiring individuals who will become your extended team. Choose outsourcing if you want to fully delegate your project to the dedicated team. Opt for outstaffing if you prefer to have more control over your remote developers. If you want to find a developer, manage his or her onboarding, and make your new specialist the part of your team, pay more attention to the extended team approach.With MWDN, you can choose the level of control over your team of dedicated software developers. We can hire and manage the specialists you need, provide efficient communication with your engineers, and guarantee financial transparency when it comes to accounting. Whatever help you need with software development, you will get it with MWDN.