How we work · 3 min read
Getting together
Remote-first means being in one room is deliberate, not default: what we get together for, and what we don't.
We're remote-first, and we mean it: the company is built to run without anyone being in the same place. That's a feature, not a compromise. But remote-first isn't remote-only, and the fact that we work apart most of the time is exactly what makes the occasional in-person time worth doing well. When being in one room is rare, you have to be deliberate about what it's for.
Why bother being in a room
If we can do the work async, and we can, then the reason to fly people to one place isn't the work. It's the things that are quietly harder over a screen: reading a room, trusting someone you've only met in pull request comments, having the conversation everyone's been politely avoiding.
You can be perfectly effective with a colleague for a year and still not really know them. That gap is small until the day something's tense, and then it's the whole game. A little face-to-face buys a reservoir of goodwill you spend later, on the hard days, without noticing. That's what we're actually there for.
What these gatherings are for
Our version of an offsite is small, because we're small. Think a few days, the whole crew, somewhere without a status meeting in sight. The point is connection and the conversations that are hard to have well in text:
- The tension nobody's raised. The disagreement that's too nuanced for a thread, easier to work through when you can see each other's faces.
- The big, fuzzy questions. Where we're headed, what we're not doing, the stuff that benefits from a whiteboard and a long walk more than a document.
- Just knowing each other. Meals, terrible jokes, the unstructured hours where trust actually gets built. This is not filler around the "real" agenda. It is the agenda.
Not a status meeting with better catering
If a session could have been a doc, it should have been. We don't spend rare, expensive in-person time reading updates at each other. Save the room for what only the room can do.
What they're not for
The failure mode of getting together is recreating the office: packing the days with presentations, demos, and roadmap readouts that would have been better as writing. That wastes the one thing an offsite has that a normal week doesn't.
We keep the structured part light and protect the unstructured part fiercely. No one should leave feeling like they attended a conference. The measure of a good gathering isn't how much we covered; it's whether people came back knowing each other better and pulling in the same direction.
How this fits the everyday
Getting together isn't a substitute for staying human day to day; it's the punctuation on it. The habits that keep us connected between trips, treating people like adults with lives, leaving room for the non-work parts of being coworkers, matter far more in total, simply because there's far more of them.
Think of it as two halves of the same thing. The daily habits keep the relationships warm across distance and time zones. The occasional room resets them deeper than a screen can reach, and then we go home and the daily habits carry it forward. Neither works alone. One without the other is either all warmth and no depth, or a nice week that fades by the following month.
We won't do this often, and that's the point. Rare and deliberate beats frequent and hollow. When we do get together, it's because there's something worth being in a room for, and we treat the time like it cost something, because it did.