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
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.
Communication as a process; not an event
An async-first mindset helps you see communication as a series of steps, instead of a one-and-done event.
Coach your team to write
Your team won’t start writing things up diligently from day one. As a leader, you must coach them.
Clarify your essential intent
Your team’s purpose must be concrete and inspirational. Here’s a way to define it.
Celebrate in the open
Thank and recognise people openly. This is a small, low effort task that helps build team cohesion.
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.
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.
Document your role
Don’t let your team be vulnerable to a low “bus factor”. Make your role explicit.
Be an authentic communicator
Be yourself when you communicate as a leader. People will find you more relatable that way.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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 FAQs
An onboarding FAQ helps your preserve the “dumb questions budget” for any new hire to your team.
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.
Recorded presentations
Recorded presentations help you convey information asynchronously. This frees up time to meet for high stakes, engaging conversations and workshops.
6 page memo
The 6-page memo pattern forces you to prep for a meeting and to consume the background information before you dive into discussion.
Silent meetings
Silent meetings can better leverage the ideas, perspectives, and insights of your team. They’ll not just help improve your meetings, you’ll also see better ideas and solutions emerge.
Write, don’t meet
You can avoid many meetings by just writing things up. This can help you generate reusable artefacts in many cases.