Should teams be remote-first for flexibility, or in-office for collaboration?
Experts
Remote work unlocks global talent and deep focus. The office is a relic.
The best work happens in person. Serendipity, culture, and speed require proximity.
We replaced our sales team with 20 AI agents—here’s what happened next | Jason Lemkin (SaaStr)
I'll tell you, I talked with a really great VP of sales candidate that had worked with a top 10 tech company and I asked him what he wanted to do in this next role. He's like, "I've got a great team. I've got eight people that I can bring with me. We're ready to lock and load." I'm like, "Okay.
Too many of these folks are looking for, they look to go into management for promotion when what they really should look for is to be a super IC, and it's a shame that more folks don't try to implement a super IC role in sales, but that's basically what the career path is in management.
The one question that saves product careers | Matt LeMay
So that was 19 years ago, so that's now grown to be over 1700 people in actually 90 countries so we've actually been fully distributed and remote and asynchronous from the start, which I think is one of our superpowers. I actually wasn't the CEO in the beginning, but in 2014, so I guess 11 years ago, I became CEO. The original CEO was...
So that kind of for-profit, nonprofit, open source, working in concert I think is a really interesting model that we're starting to see a lot more companies do. It's actually very exciting to me that some of the things that were controversial when we started open source or distributed work are now the default for so many exciting new startups, and ...
Lessons from Atlassian | Megan Cook (Head of Product, Jira)
In our conversation, we discuss what Atlassian has done so right in being able to offer 15 different product lines, which many companies dream of, how they continue to stay ahead of the market in spite of the many competitors in the space, why Megan considers play so essential to building great teams and great products, a bunch of tactical advice f...
Yeah, absolutely. I think especially recently in the tech industry, it almost feels like we're going through a bit of a wake-up call at the moment. We were in this time of plenty, and everyone was hiring like crazy, and then COVID hit and suddenly people's behaviors had to really change. People couldn't travel; they had to work from home.
Driving alignment within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape | Nikita Miller
Yes. My entire career has been with remote or distributed teams. That's right. When I started early my career, I lived abroad for a while. I lived in Shanghai. I had a core team there, but also worked for the distributed team in Europe and Latin America, which meant all kinds of crazy hours and lots of sprints like we just talked about.
I think that's just really important, and everyone building up that muscle is really important. For all of the roles I've been in, this notion of what does it mean to have really meaningful and valuable in-person time that can sustain you for the remote and distributed time is a really important.
How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana)
It depends. So it depends on the complexity of the work, and it depends how much we want to talk about it. A lot of our crits happen in person on the design side. A lot of spec reviews are more asynchronous, and then we'll say, "Depending on the number of questions people have, we call a meeting." Otherwise, we do mostly async, but it's a mix.
So I would say our remote days are more impactful than the days we're together where we're getting into the swing of things.
Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium)
Now, the loops, the speed with which you're able to update their software and make sure that the sales motion is running appropriately on them, is quite high. In early-stage startups, that's the only thing that matters, it's a race against time to make sure that you get to success, so you can raise your next round of financing or get to profitabili...
An inside look at how Miro builds product | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro)
Yeah, absolutely. Because I think, as you would expect, we run Miro on Miro, so there's a lot of things that we could share as templates in terms of how we are running things on Miro, not just as OKRs, but in terms of product reviews.
Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook)
Yeah, our brains are good with linear thinking, not exponential. So I've heard that argument that like, yes, this is increasing exponentially and you can't fathom it. I'm like, yes, that is definitely potentially true.
Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon)
So in the newsletter we did together, I wrote about how over time, you go from asking your manager, "How can I help?" To suggesting to your manager, "These are some things I see that seem like they need to be done.
Once you have that, go ask how you can help, do whatever you're asked, and then go back to your manager and suggest or ask, "I would like to meet this goal. Can I keep helping you? What could I take on that you need that would also help me meet this goal?" And that's where you start to try to bring your two sets of aims together.
Feeling stuck? Here's how to know when it's time to leave your job | Ada Chen Rekhi
So then I took the step after we met and I gave her that feedback in one of our next coaching sessions where we invited each other to give each other feedback. I shared a lot of my impressions with her and I told her, "I respect you so much as an operator.
So I managed to get into this great role leading gross marketing for LinkedIn, working with their growth team from a hundred million to 200 million members, read every experiment brief that I could, spent a lot of time with the team, really understanding their process, and then shifted into the subscription side where I worked on LinkedIn subscript...
This will make you a better decision maker | Annie Duke (Thinking In Bets, former pro poker player)
But then a decade later, Matthew Killingsworth said, "That's not true that actually money and happiness are correlated through all the income levels. The more money you have, the more happy you tend to be." Okay, so this is a classic example where people will tear each other down sometimes and that guy's wrong and whatever.
Here's the thing that I think is the easiest to change, is to realize the only thing that's ever supposed to happen in a meeting is the discussion part. So we should absolutely be coming together as human beings to discuss everybody's judgments and opinions and the way they're modeling the problem and their forecasts.
Microsoft CPO: If you aren’t prototyping with AI you’re doing it wrong | Aparna Chennapragada
Yeah, it's as cheesy as that. And it's interesting because it works. In the last few weeks alone, I've been doing this experiment to say, "Hey, how much more AI pill can I get?" Both at work and in personal life to say, "When I'm trying to do anything manual, should I be demanding the AI to do this?
Yeah. The idea again is that code generation as a tool will unlock lot more products. I mean, they're not all competitors to the fact of... They're not all kind of doing the same job. I think when you are... At the end of the day, you are building code for companies to run on, you need to have a system.
How to speak more confidently and persuasively | Matt Abrahams (professor, speaker, author)
Totally. And that's why we come together every six weeks, everyone in person to review every project so we can hash out those disagreements. Go through all the core projects, all the merge service projects, all the growth projects. And it's a great forum to say, "Hey, here's where we disagree," really on the how and the tactics of what's happening.
It's kind of very much just imbued in the culture. Almost everything kind of feels that way. And I'll give, practically speaking, every six weeks all the R&D group leads we get together and we sit with Tobi and each other and review every single project across the company. Every six weeks, every single R&D pull up the dashboard, and look at it.
Making Meta | Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth (CTO)
At that time, almost all of us lived within one mile of the office. We ate most of our meals together because we were working, not to say we weren't also friends, but because we were working, it's like, oh cool, you just roll into a meal and roll back into work.
If the lifeblood of any company are the people inside of it who collectively commit to some kind of a goal and a mission and work together, then you want to maximize that potential. And creating this really open information ecosystem is one of the ways that we do that.
Monetizing passions, scaling marketplaces, and stories from a creator economy vet | Camille Hearst
Yeah. We have all kinds of ideas of really interesting ways we can bring groups of people together and get the monetization going.
I started at YouTube in, let's see, how old am I? It must have been 2010. And that was when I really think this whole thing was just first getting going. And we used to put together these playbooks of what made a creator successful because a lot of the effort there was trying to support this burgeoning economy.
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2 comments · Share your perspective
We went back to office 3 days/week and the energy shift was immediate. Junior engineers especially benefit from in-person mentorship.
Remote works if you're intentional about async communication and documentation. Most companies fail at remote because they try to replicate office patterns over Zoom.