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
- Estimation
- General management
- Inceptions
- Lead by example
- Leadership communication
- Meetings as the last resort
- Pairing and feature dev
- People management
- Personal productivity
- Planning
- Promote feedback
- Relationships
- Rethink scrum
- Simplify the story lifecycle
- Sprint management
- Team bonding
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.
Find the "goldilocks" zone
Not too easy. Not too difficult. Just right. How do you find that zone for your direct reports?
Don't oversubscribe yourself
Most people can’t reliably manage more than 4-5 people. Work with your HR team to streamline reporting relationships so you only have as many people to manage as you can truly care for.
Fund cross team retreats
Meeting people from different teams can be really fun. Such events are tough to organise, but incredibly valuable.
Identify community managers and curators
People won’t automatically adopt your knowledge and community platform. You need community managers and curators to make the platform attractive and useful to people.
Escape recurring meeting hell
Recurring meetings are the bane of leaders’ and managers’ existences. Just. Get. Rid. Of. Them.
Document your role
Don’t let your team be vulnerable to a low “bus factor”. Make your role explicit.
Eliminate bullshit jobs
No one needs to do meaningless, soul-sapping work. Not even you. Take the time to get rid of such work so you and your colleagues can focus on the work that brings you joy.
Be an authentic communicator
Be yourself when you communicate as a leader. People will find you more relatable that way.
1:1s with direct reports
The most effective tool to support and lead your direct report, is the 1:1 or one-on-one meeting. Here are some tips to do them well.
Tooling budgets
To follow an asynchronous, remote-first approach your people need the tools to be productive.
Team bonding budgets
If you care about culture and building teams - invest in it by setting aside time and money for it.
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.
Decentralise team F2F events
Autonomous teams make their own decisions. So leave the decision of when to meet F2F, to the team itself.
Personal user manual
If you were a product, it’d help people to know how to use you effectively. A personal user manual helps people do just that!
Baton pass inception facilitation
Make time-zones your ally. By alternating facilitation responsibilities across locations, you can make cross timezone workshops and inceptions less stressful for everyone.
Validate. Don’t start from a blank slate.
During inceptions and workshops, it's easier to poke holes at something wrong than to write the first words on a whiteboard. So instead of starting from a blank slate, synthesise what you think you know and then validate your understanding.
Inceptions as a process, not an event
Every activity in the inception journey has the potential to be at least partly asynchronous. To be pragmatic about how much synchrony you need, you must recognise inceptions as a process and not an event.
Make your inceptions lean
The lean inception is a focused way to gather information to start a project. You can complete this in a single week.
Technical design docs
Technical design docs are an efficient way to communicate about software architecture and technical solutions. These docs precede an architectural decision record. They benefit from detail, though brevity is an important consideration too.
Feature breakdown documents
Feature breakdown documents serve as a single resource to catalogue all information about a feature. As the team enhances the feature, this document becomes a single source of truth about it.
Idea papers
Idea papers allow you to nurture fresh ideas by articulating them clearly. People can use this as a reference to share feedback and enrich the idea. Decision making is also easier if everyone can understand the idea well.
F2F social events
F2F interactions are a great way for your team to recharge your social batteries and to build camaraderie.