Origin story: A new blog on knowledge work for remote and distributed teams
If only my high school self could see me now. I took English AP courses that forced us to write on topics under time pressure. Write an insightful essay about the author’s intent, with good structure, and let’s face it, minimal edits due to writing by hand in pen. I hated writing. It’s with some sense of irony that I became a marketer by trade and more specifically am starting this Medium publication today.
Tim and I are exploring the topic of communication and collaboration in distributed teams. We both worked at developer-driven companies that embraced the concept of “remote-first,” where the presumption is that your colleagues are not sitting alongside you in the same office, or even in the same timezone. How would you work and build a company differently if your team was spread throughout the world?
We’ve both seen this work in practice, but the question is whether what we learned at GitHub and GitLab can be replicated in other companies reliably. GitHub famously had strict ratios such that 60–65% of all staff must be hired remotely, away from our one real office in San Francisco. GitLab went even further and never adopted an office in the first place.
In the times of COVID, this has become a much more pressing concern for virtually every company in the world. Some are returning to work (at the time of this writing) since their countries have reopened for business; whereas, some of us (like those in the USA and elsewhere) are facing a new reality with an indeterminate time horizon.
We think the process is repeatable. Some of that work can be accomplished through the right tools, some through a different culture and processes. There are myriad reasons why this is important during this time; however, we’ve seen that these approaches made a positive difference even during “normal times.”
So Tim and I have embarked upon a journey to learn as much as we can about the state of work today. Yes, we’re working on a product that we think has some legs. But that doesn’t matter to you, yet.
We realized that the research we’re doing is relevant. It’s a topic on people’s minds. Most startups fail, but the learning carries forward. Unlike the exam essays of my high school years, I’m not writing to prove to you whether I can write or not and earn a score. My goal is to share what we learn and observe because it might have value. For all of the fancy stuff about building a great company, much of the advice boils down to: create value and give people a way to access it. So here’s the birth of the Multiplyer blog.
