Delivering projects alone with limited resources
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Joe Thomas will share four case studies of companies that have achieved transformational growth using asynchronous communication. You’ll hear how they’ve rebuilt sales processes, won talent wars, delivered best-in-class products, and fully reimagined the employee experience. He’ll also highlight the work principles fueling these initiatives and the opportunities ahead for companies that employ them across their teams.
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Delivering projects alone with limited resources
- 7. 2011 1400+ $6B $415M 30M
- 9. How would I deliver this message, present this work, or move this project forward right now if no one else on my team or in my company were awake?
- 11. 2012 400+ $10B $332M 4M
- 15. 2015 158 $1.53B $203M 14M 200,000
- 16. “We may, at long last, shatter the geographic lottery, opening up opportunity to countless people who weren't lucky enough to be born in the right place.”
- 22. 2015 540 NASDAQ:UPWK $374M (2020)
Editor's Notes
- Day 3, AM. Enjoying yourselves? Hangovers. Beautiful morning. [read title] 1st: current state of work Then, company’s async strategies and impact. Coffee? Notes. Roll!
- [title] Default. Especially attendees. Flexibility is future. All agree? Flexibility is freedom. Worth fighting for.
- What fight? Burnout. [85%]. We're always on. Message overload. [60%] back-to-back-to-back meetings. [meetings], 52% loneliness. SaaStr x euphoria. Adapt in remote/hybrid? Cause can’t do SaaStr every week. Something → give! Unsustainable.
- Modern work, more than think different. Putting Async at heart. Excitement, investment, adoption async. Earliest days of MWR. Stories of async [read logos]
- Quickly, before sync vs async Sync is “real time” — 2+ same time. Ex: in-person or virtual, scheduled or impromptu. Examples are meetings, phone call, Zoom, water cool conversation. Best for: "bursty" communication. culture building. Asynchronous (or async) not happening same time. Ex: snail mail, email, company wikis like Notion or Confluence, project management like Trello. Async video like Loom. Best for: deep work. information dissemination. Middle ground: Slack, Figma.
- Async. Most important. Wherever. Whenever. Whether home office. Jess RV. High-growth, high-value startups embrace async, scale. Hope, every stage company lifecycle. Great cultures. Great product. Great teams. Scaling external resources.
- Start, async employee experience. Hear biggest pains peer and customer. Gitlab. Fortune, Quartz, FastCo top workplaces lists. Last week; LinkedIn’s Top Startups 2021 list. World’s largest all-remote. 1,300+ employees. 65+ countries. Deliberate processes, camaraderie, and culture – nuanced mosaic of employee experience.
- Gitlab default async. Pioneers! Trademarks of EX from jump. Quite literally book on operationalizing and mastering async communication. Ethos empowering employees where fulfilled and when works for them. I find most interesting, beyond programs like fully async onboarding and L&D practices – are the rules that bring “async as default” into focus and make it a reality.
- Elegant, memorable, and importantly, powerful questions. From a comms and collab perspective, one of best. And it’s from Gitlab’s employee handbook. [slide text] This is it. Underpins async mindset. Employee handbook 13,000pgs (not exagg). But this question if you personally practiced, team too pretty far along async journey.
- Few additional Gitlab async best practices Share Knowledge: Making information transparent and easily accessible. Open source “working handbook,” that covers everything Communicate Publicly: “We don’t send internal email here.” Team Slack channels, and later, team leaders decide what information needs to be permanently visible to others. Clarify What Needs to be Synchronous: Handbook suggests sync. Kick-off meetings roles & respons, expectations, & deadlines. Things like client meetings. Challenge Existing Norms + Assumptions: Every emp empowered to say no to meetings, Copy & paste language. Clearly big fan employee handbook, go check it out!
- Speaking of fan, Figma. We’re familiar. Personally such a fan boy. Figma delight, purpose, excitement at such an important time. Also, building products largely async – empowers users and customers do same. Garage stories. Woz & Steve, Larry & Sergey, Hewlett & Packard. Everyone in a garage! Build product async at core? Absolutely. Hello, Figjam!
- Figma, every co, fully remote COVID. Pandemic, burnt out meetings, Figmates started thinking bout product earlier in product process. Come together, share ideas, and connect. What ultimately became Figjam – launched mid-2021. Flagship, years stealth, Figjam out in public beta after 6-month sprint. Quick pace – high praise harsh critics: designers (no offense) Async, moving quick. Accelerate feedback loops, internal and external, better coordination. Ultimately enabling Figjam to get to market with higher confidence, faster.
- Zoom in - Async feedback - Two ways! Internal async feedback. #figjam-feedback Slack channel fast feedback Different voices heard → faster feedback, earliest versions ALL Figmates, not just PDE. Sales Manager, Comms Dir, everyone. 100+ unique Figmates, 2,000+ messages internal dogfood. Bug reports, feedback, new ideas. Small, really important details post it color.
- External async feedback. Clever & smart gather external. Alpha testers Discord, Netflix, Square and Stripe Async directly in a Figjam board, hundreds comments and videos. Big takeaway: more async for high volume, quality, speed feedback. Better product, faster.
- EX and Prod Build Async. In the books. Hire great teams async? Show hands hiring struggles? [raise hand] We’re feeling this, too. Case study: Loom use looms to hire great teams using async practices. Not familiar → Loom video comms platform for async work. Also, remote first company. Still believe offices for gathering and socializing. Remote first means anyone, anywhere first class citizen Including, and especially, our hiring practices.
- HUGE benefit hire talent from a global pool. Standout loommates other companies wouldn’t consider. Changing most all companies → hybrid and remote work. EXCITING. Divorcing physical location and opportunities – exciting proposition for everyone. Marc Andreessen articulated why a few months back. [read quote]
- Today’s market great talent have choices Look for roles, brands and opportunities that stand out. We think how to connect with candidates in a deep way? For Loom, “Remote” recruiting rule vs. the exception We’ve needed to be great at this. 5 years, not bad [slide].
- Use own product – async video. Establish connection Better assessing candidates Standing out from the crowd That starts with candidate outreach. JDs always have looms from hiring managers. Recruiters send personalized looms as a first contact in sourcing. By the time someone interviews at Loom, they’ve watched at least one video. Keen sense of team members, interviewing panels, etc. Give sense of what it’s like to be a loommate.
- Ask candidates async for take home. It’s a win win from both sides Reduce overall synchronous meeting time in the interview process Candidates to put their best foot forward. We believe incorporating async video to have candidates present on their own terms (vs submitting an artifact or presenting live) allows us to get a better understanding of their skills. We also hear from candidates that it helps them feel more confident than live take home presentations. Bonus; representative of how we work; ASYNC
- Leads to a 50% higher pass through rate vs live take homes during superday. How? This is due to: reviewing take home video before officially moving to superday. A higher pass through rate in this case is a good thing! Minimizing unnecessary interviews only bringing candidates on-site that have a high likelihood of going to final stages. Candidates felt like by turning in async including video, absolute best shot.
- One of my personal favorites, Looms at the offer stage. Congrats, why specifically excited to work together; every loommate interview process This helps to get prospective Loommates over the finish line. Builds personal connection Shows genuine excitement, infectious Acceptance 72%, 11% above industry average in tough market.
- Close freelancer marketplace Upwork How their platform empowered async Making collaboration more efficient at scale, but not traditional FTEs. Freelancer economy is booming. Companies are relying on contractors for expertise and outsourcing. Upwork is exploding with their stock up over 600% in the last 18 months. Implications on the modern freelance worker and the modern company. Mechanics of fully functioning, productive team when composed of employees outsourcing and working with contractors? - likely spread across different time zones – is difficult. Async has been key to making this work.
- Upwork recognized the limitations of synchronous early on in their own marketplace. Ran extensive surveys and quant + qual customer research: Synchronous tools weren’t effective in connecting freelance workers and companies from around the world. 21% of phone calls were never completed “Required” meetings by the company or contractor equal delays and slower project completion times. 57% of clients that tried video conferencing with upwork only used it once
- Upwork knew easier for clients and freelancers to comms & collab on platform They’ve put async features and practices at heart of its marketplace – providing all the content freelancers and clients need to review at each stage. Since leading with async and generally practices I’ve mentioned in this talk, Upwork has seen: Faster completion complex, multi-phase projects due to fewer and shorter communication cycles between freelancers and clients. Reduction of meetings leading to significant time savings for both freelancers and clients [slide]
- Takeaway hopes: Principles and practices of Gitlab, Figma, Loom and Upwork. More importantly, understanding bigger trend. Truly believe there’s a better way to work.
- At loom, we like to Imagine a world where: Teams have time for focused & fulfilling work. Gitlab, create space for deep work, fewer meetings, less burnout. Individuals are seen and heard. Figjam giving equal voice to everyone with async. Organizations transparent and human. Starts with engaged, connected global teams, enabling understanding and seamless communication. Async has been and will increasingly make modern work a reality!
- Now, go forth and… What the heck...? It’s supposed to be async, like asynchronous, not a sink with a tap and drain. This whole presentation should’ve been done with async video, and then I would’ve stuck the landing. HAHA. Future dad here. So corny. Everyone here in the audience is now perfectly equipped to build a $10b company - ASYNC!!!!