We have engineers in Canada, Pakistan, Ukraine, Nigeria, Brazil, India, the Philippines, and Germany. Our timezone spread is 13 hours. We ship every week. Here's how.
The meeting tax
Every 60-minute meeting with 5 people costs 5 engineer-hours. That's half a day of productivity gone. Now multiply that by daily standups, weekly syncs, and ad-hoc calls — and most "agile" teams are spending 20–30% of their working hours in meetings.
Async-first doesn't mean no communication. It means defaulting to written, recorded, and permanent communication over synchronous calls. It means trusting engineers to manage their own time.
Our stack
Notion — every project has a living spec. Not a PDF that's out of date by Tuesday. A real document that engineers update as they discover things.
Linear — all tasks, priorities, and status in one place. No Slack threads asking "what's the status on X?"
Loom — async video for anything that would take 20 minutes to write but 3 minutes to show. PR walkthroughs, bug reproductions, architecture reviews.
GitHub — PR descriptions are first-class documents. Every PR has a summary, screenshots, test coverage, and a deployment checklist.
The rule we live by
If a question can be answered by reading existing documentation, it shouldn't be asked in Slack. If it can't be — that's a documentation gap, not a meeting opportunity. Write the answer down and update the docs.
When we do meet
We have exactly two recurring meetings: a weekly 30-minute demo with the client (recorded), and a fortnightly retrospective. Everything else is async. If a call needs to happen, it's recorded and transcribed automatically.