When we co-located our first engineering office in Oslo three years ago, the assumption was that the Mogadishu team would orbit around the European one. We were wrong. The opposite happened — and it made us a better company.
Sync is the exception, not the rule
We default to writing. Every decision lives in a document with a comment thread. Stand-ups are async, in a channel, with screenshots. We protect two overlap hours a day for live conversation, and we use them for what they're best at: disagreement, not status updates.
Hire for ownership
Distributed work amplifies whoever you hire. Strong individual ownership scales beautifully. Anything less collapses, no matter the tooling. We've stopped interviewing for collaboration patterns and started interviewing for what people did when nobody was watching.
