Go async-first with your team
Use the filters below to find async-first methods that are relevant to your team. For detailed articles, check out the blog.
- Audit trails
- Budgeting and funding
- Collaboration fundamentals
- Communication tools
- Company culture
- Design
- Efficient onboarding
- Enable change
- Estimation
- General management
- Inceptions
- Lead by example
- Leadership communication
- Learn the basics
- Meetings as the last resort
- Pairing and feature dev
- People management
- Personal productivity
- Planning
- Promote feedback
- Relationships
- Remote strategy
- Rethink scrum
- Simplify the story lifecycle
- Sprint management
- Team bonding
- Team commitments
- Team culture
Take the long view
Don’t disrupt yourselves. The future of work is location and time independent. Prepare for that future.
Create slack in the system
Without the space to pause and reflect, you’ll rarely improve your systems. To get better, you need slack.
Practice “metawork”
Metawork is all the work you do, to make your actual work happen. Here’s why you, as a leader must practice it.
Coach your team to write
Your team won’t start writing things up diligently from day one. As a leader, you must coach them.
Aim for next level autonomy
Aim to keep getting better at distributed work. Matt Mullenweg’s levels of autonomy can guide you to improve as a company or team.
Community platform = knowledge platform
In tech, static knowledge is often less valuable than dynamic, tacit knowledge. To make this tacit knowledge visible at speed, you must elevate your community platform to be your knowledge platform.
Sponsor a collaboration tools audit
To figure out what tools and capabilities you need for knowledge sharing, consider a collaboration tools audit. This’ll help you identify tooling gaps and to create an investment roadmap for your executives to approve.
Tooling budgets
To follow an asynchronous, remote-first approach your people need the tools to be productive.
Rule of three for documentation
What’s the right time to document something? Liam Martin suggests the “rule of three” to identify the specific moment.
Bi-directional leadership comms
One way traffic doesn’t need to be synchronous. And synchronous communication better be bi-directional. Especially if it comes from you, dear leader!
Learn to respond with a link
When you write regularly, you’ll create referenceable artefacts. This will allow you to have fewer meetings. The artefact can serve as an efficient reference.
Be DRY when communicating
Think like a programmer. How can you avoid repetitive communication? Create once, share many times.
Communicate early and often
As a leader don’t take yourself too seriously. Be authentic and communicate early and often. The more you wait, the higher the stakes get.
Think TED when communicating as a leader
TED talks are influential and popular because of they’re relatively short. Take a leaf out of their book.
An async mindset to communication
Synchronous communication breaks down as your company grows. An async mindset to communication is more scalable and agile.
Think TikTok for leadership comms
In an attention-poor, time-starved world, short messages are winning messages.
Async audio
Async audio can be an interesting way to share your message while conveying emotion. Audio is particularly easy to consume passively; such as, when working out or when driving.
Onboarding checklists
A precise checklist takes away the guesswork from the onboarding process. Document what the new hire needs to do, by when they need to do it, and how.
Meeting hygiene
To ensure that the meetings you actually have are productive, here are a few simple things you can do.
ConveRel quadrants
The ConveRel quadrants are a way for you to triage your meetings and figure out which ones can immediately or eventually be async.
Write once, run many
Switch from fragile, redundant, ephemeral conversations to shared, persistent onboarding assets.
Pull requests
Pull requests are a feature that most source control systems provide (GitLab calls it a “merge request (MR)”). This feature allows anyone who wants to contribute code to a project, to package their changes so someone else can review their code before merging it into the codebase.
Business decision records (BDRs)
By documenting every business decision you make for your project, you help your present and future colleagues understand the rationale of why things are a certain way for your team.
Commit messages
Effective commit messages are a way for developers to communicate to each other about the changes they’re making to a codebase. These messages can be useful when fixing issues or when finding the root cause of a bug or even when troubleshooting a broken build.
Architectural decision records (ADRs)
Your architecture will change with time and in the future you may have to investigate why your architecture is a certain way. Architectural decision records (ADRs) help by providing an archaeology of your project.
Meeting minutes
By going async, you’ll limit the number of meetings you have. For the meetings you keep, you must afford your teammates, present and future, the courtesy of a meeting summary; a.k.a meeting minutes.
Demos only when necessary
Let’s be honest. Teams don’t always have something big to showcase every sprint. Without substantive demos, the sprint reviews become a formality and a reporting exercise. Take a pragmatic approach to sprint reviews instead.
Avoid communication blasts
A single line message that you send to 200 people isn’t a single line message anymore. It’s a 200-line message. Instead, “shrink the blast radius”.
Threaded conversations
One thread, one topic. And vice-versa.
Target your conversations
Limit chat conversations only to those necessary to the discussion.