Building a High-Performance Remote Engineering Culture
Three years of fully distributed teams taught us what actually works — and what burns people out. Here's our playbook.
The transition from a co-located engineering team to a fully remote one often exposes cracks in organizational communication. You can no longer rely on tapping someone on the shoulder or overhearing context at the water cooler.
Asynchronous communication is king
Meeting fatigue destroys developer productivity. To combat this, we shifted 80% of our communication to written, asynchronous updates. Daily standups became threaded Slack check-ins. Design reviews became annotated Figma links and Loom videos.
When you force communication into writing, you inherently demand clarity. It also democratizes access to information across different time zones.
Focus on output, not hours
The era of monitoring keyboard activity or screen time is over. High-performance remote culture is built entirely on trust. We evaluate our engineers strictly on the code they ship, the code reviews they provide, and the technical debt they resolve.
Don't forget the human element
Remote work can be isolating. We counter this by hosting monthly casual "coffee chats" (strictly no-work talk allowed) and bringing the entire company together once a year for an immersive in-person retreat to forge the bonds that sustain us for the other eleven months of the year.
