What is Manager RemoteU?

Manager RemoteU is a four-week long, fully-immersive management intensive which equips graduates with skills needed to unlock value in remote teams.

Equipping For The Future of Work

How we work and how we manage people are changing at unprecedented speeds. As with any shift in technology, rapid changes create winners and losers.

Manager RemoteU will prepare you to be a winner within the new work paradigm. You'll unlearn practices which aren't helpful in remote environments, while being equipped with skills needed to unlock real value on remote teams.

Manager RemoteU is an intense four-week long, fully-immersive course curriculum. Your time in the program (40 hours/week) is fully-paid, and you're given an actual team throughout the entire four weeks.

Each day, managers will have 1:1s with their teams in the morning and then execute the data structure (for now you can think of data structure as templates) assigned for that day.

Each student is pared with a mentor who has graduated the program, a study group of students in the program, and a personal coach. At the end of the journey, students write a one page summary presenting their progress and most significant insights.

Students who successfully graduate our program are a prized commodity within ESW, and receive to the most challenging assignments (often to take over an entire central unit).

More than 100 managers have graduated from the program, many of whom are now key leaders in the organization.

What’s my goal in MRU?

Your goal, in‌ ‌the‌ ‌end, is to satisfy our External Quality Bar.

Title	Description	Grade
Metric Goal	Did the manager reach the quality and the productivity of the top performer with every team member? If they did not, do they present a 30-day plan which builds a path for the remaining ICs to hit the goal within 30 days?	Yes/No
2 Content actions executed	Did the manager execute 2 content actions? Content: The insight/action is about the core job of the team room, not process related. (see further information in the insight matrix doc)	Yes/No
2 learnings from the Top Performer executed	Did the manager execute 2 learnings from the top performer?	Yes/No
Executed on Time	The manager has not postponed actions that should have been taken by now (the 30-day plan does not include anything that could have been executed in RemoteU)	Yes/No

How will I get evaluated?

The “endgame” of Remote U has 2 stages: Oral Exam and the Final Evaluation.

Oral Exam - week 4, Thursday:

Graham and the other coach (not yours, to stay impartial) will evaluate your progress against the External Quality Bar and give you coaching before your final evaluation.

See How to do the Oral Exam for more details.

Final Evaluation (aka SVP Review) - week 5, Monday:

The final evaluation will be done based on your Written exam and your 2 slide deck.

The written exam will contain your most impactful insights and actions from your 4-week journey, while the 2 slide deck will contain your next most important action for week 5.

Tactical Steps for Those Beginning the Program

As a completely remote company, we rely heavily on documentation.

You should be able to find most information about the team you will be managing in the Google documents/sheets - it can be overwhelming at first, but you have to focus on the right ones, as we require you to start delivering already on day two.

The most important document for each team room is their playbook. You have two playbooks in this case, one for the MRU itself and one for your assigned team room (link in the starter pack).

Once you finished this document you should start by taking a very detailed look at the deliverable template and the IQB (Internal Quality Bar).

These 3 documents should give you a good understanding of the expectations from you in the program and on the individual deliverable level, or give you great questions to ask on the Kick-off call on Monday.

Once you’re done with understanding the MRU expectations and deliverables you should continue by reading your team room’s playbook and their quality bar (link in the starter pack).

Reading these documents will help you understand the goal of the team room and the expectations of your ICs. It will lay out the most important processes that you’ll have to adhere to and enforce as well.

Then you should set up a handover meeting with the previous manager of the team room to gather information about the TR itself and your ICs. You should have this before EOD Monday, but if you have it the week before starting that’s even better: The earlier the better.

When you start working with your team room your first action will be to determine your top performer based on quality (secondary sorting by productivity) of Trailing 4 Weeks T4W. This will determine your metric goal in RemoteU. Fill in this data in your Dashboard in your RemoteU deliverable’s first tab.

Next, you should ask for the TMS recordings from your top and bottom performers. If there are multiple ICs very close for the top and bottom performer places, then ask for recordings from all of them.

If your TP or BP works on projects completely different from others then take another recording. You have to be able to compare the videos.

This is crucial for you to succeed because on the first week the TMS is your hardest deliverable and you can waste days on not having the correct recordings. To find out what a “correct” recording is, please see the TMS tab on the deliverable template.

Whenever you start working on a deliverable you should first read the IQB and your deliverable template closely so you don’t waste time delivering subpar work.

Additional Reading

• 📖 The Key Themes that Matter for the Future of Work