IC RemoteU Curriculum Overview
This curriculum’s goal is to teach you to be an elite remote worker which means that you can become the top performer of any team in the factory within a week. As you work your way through this curriculum, you will be working on a real team which provides the perfect opportunity for you to implement what you are learning.
At the end of the week, you will be evaluated based on your real performance relative to your team and the quality of your deliverables. There are five main things you need to do in order to become an elite remote worker. The following overview will briefly touch on them, and each future chapter will describe the framework, instruct you on what to do, and provide you with positive and negative examples.
1. Ignore most of the current advice on remote work
Remote work is a budding new field and lots of companies are throwing their hat into the ring with advice. Since most companies you’ll read from have been doing remote work for a few years only and have just a few hundred remote workers, the advice is mostly garbage. Trilogy embraced remote work over a decade ago and have over 4,000 full time remote workers. We will teach you how to identify which voices are true and which ones are off-base.
2. Quality is Top Priority
As an Individual Contributor, you are responsible for the quality of your units. It means you need to make sure you have an excellent quality and every unit that you produce will pass the quality bar of the system. You will learn how Quality Bars are used for enforcing quality.
Any failure requires you and the QA team to do a rework. Also, if somehow that units goes out undetected, it can cause extra effort on the downstream team, because they will either reject that unit, or spend time to make it work. The failure might even reach the customer and can damage the reputation of the company or might cause losing business. Therefore quality is the Top priority - you should always focus on quality first.
If you instead focus on productivity and let quality go down, you might think you are going to have a better performance but that is wrong. You will be ranked by your quality. Bad quality means bad performance no matter how high your productivity is. Also note that, if you have high quality, since you avoid rework, you will naturally have higher productivity.
Passing the quality checks of the quality assurance teams is necessary but not sufficient for ensuring high quality. While working on tickets in the factory, you should always think about solving a specific problem for your customers in a better way. There are different levels of solutions and not all of them have the same effect. You will learn how to fix problems better, how to deflect tickets and how to fix products.
Quality of your communication is also important. You need to present yourself concisely so that readers (your manager, manager of your manager etc.) understand what you wrote without asking questions or getting bombarded with redundant words. Each question asked by the readers would imply the quality of your communication was poor. For instance, take this example, where IC tries to explain his performance with respect to the goal: "I didn't reach the goal on Day 3. My goal for Day 3 was a 100% FTAR and progress of 17 however due to lapses in quizes and rework on deliverables due to errors during Day 1 & Day 2, the FTAR goal has not been reached and is at 70.6%. Productivity goal of 18 also was not reached." You can present the same data concisely without losing meaning: By the end of Day 3, I delivered 17 units @ 70% FTAR whereas the goal was 18 units @ 100% FTAR.
You will learn more about conciseness during IC RemoteU.
3. Have the right goals: 3x as productive as office ICs
So many have squandered their remote work opportunity which has builtd a terrible reputation for remote workers. It’s not enough for you to be a little better than an office worker. As Elon Musk puts it (go to 0:59), you have to be significantly better, 3x better, than an office worker to convince a business to go with you over the entrenched option. How can you become better? First, you push yourself to your TR's level (TMS). Then, you surpass TR's level and pull your TR to your level (ZBT).
TMS: TMS would allow you to see how you are aligned to your team. You should do a TMS on the Top Performer (TP) to see the current way of unit delivery in your TR (you can request TP's TMS from your manager). You should then do a TMS on yourself, and compare your own TMS to TP's TMS, identify the improvement areas (insights) and act on them. This way, you will reach the level of the TP. You should be able to execute those insights quickly, since the TP is already executing them - you won't need to build something from scratch. Just follow the TP's practices.
ZBT: After TMS, you will be as good as the TP but that is not good enough. You need to surpass the TP. This time, you should think independently from the TMS, the current way of delivering a unit. Take a step back and consider how a unit can be delivered in an ideal world without any blockers. This is your ZBT. Come up with the ideal steps (ZBT steps). Determine the TMS steps that can be eliminated by comparing ZBT steps to TMS steps, and the actions needed to eliminate them. Then, for the steps that cannot be eliminated, think about how you can automate them.
Now, you will have a list of ZBT insights. It is time to make a plan and start executing it. Please note that, on IC RemoteU deliverables, you will be requested to implement your ZBT insights right away since those deliverables are designed as simple exercises. In the factory, your ZBT insights would probably require significant implementation effort. You should create a Personal improvement plan for implementing those insights:
List the ZBT insights and actions that would allow you to eliminate or automate steps.
Stack rank them based on their impact (You should focus on the most important & feasible insight first).
Create an implementation plan and set yourself a goal that includes a due date.
Share your plan with your manager
This way, you will surpass the TP's level and become the next TP on your TR.
Note that TMS and ZBT are not one-off tasks. You need to seek improvement continuously (it should become a habit). You should do TMS and ZBT exercises periodically (e.g. once a quarter). This would allow you to stay up to date with the changes in the world (e.g. there might be a new tool that wasn't available before) and also be the TP at all times, not just 1 quarter.
4. Staff for Stars
Within our Staff for Stars section, we will teach you how to nail the basics of remote work: internet strength, physical background, workspace and the likes. These are easy basics to master but you’d be surprised how many remote workers have failed because of them. You will learn how to constantly find ways to improve, welcome negative feedback, and seek out not the easy problems but the ones that no one else is willing to tackle.
5. Pound the Productivity
During Pound the Productivity, we will teach you how to take ownership of your productivity and explain why this skill alone will set you apart from every other mediocre remote worker. You will learn to structure your time for deep work, give improvement feedback, and leverage Crossover’s WorkSmart tool.
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