Distributed Team Vocabulary
2 exercises — async-first, working agreements, follow-the-sun, DACI, and other distributed team concepts.
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A new colleague mentions they're uncertain about your team's communication style. They ask about "async-first" and "working agreement." Which definition is most accurate?
Option B gives accurate definitions of both terms:
Async-first:
• Default communication channel: written, persistent, non-real-time (Slack, Notion, GitHub, Jira comments)
• Meetings are not banned — they're reserved for things that genuinely benefit from synchronous interaction: creative brainstorming, sensitive conversations, live debugging
• The opposite of "async-first" is "meeting-first" — where the default for every question is scheduling a call
• Benefit: allows distributed teams across multiple timezones to function without everyone being online simultaneously
Working agreement (also: "team charter", "team norms document"):
• Typical contents: core hours (UTC time window when everyone is expected to be reachable), async response time SLA ("respond within 4h during working hours"), decision-making process (DACI, RFC process), code review norms, communication channels by topic (production issues → #incidents; social → #random), PTO communication process
• It's not a legal document — it's a living practice guide the team owns and updates
• It eliminates ambiguity for new team members and prevents recurring friction
Overlap hours / core hours: The daily time window when all team members across timezones are expected to be reachable. Small teams might have 2h overlap; larger teams with more distributed members sometimes have zero natural overlap.
Async-first:
• Default communication channel: written, persistent, non-real-time (Slack, Notion, GitHub, Jira comments)
• Meetings are not banned — they're reserved for things that genuinely benefit from synchronous interaction: creative brainstorming, sensitive conversations, live debugging
• The opposite of "async-first" is "meeting-first" — where the default for every question is scheduling a call
• Benefit: allows distributed teams across multiple timezones to function without everyone being online simultaneously
Working agreement (also: "team charter", "team norms document"):
• Typical contents: core hours (UTC time window when everyone is expected to be reachable), async response time SLA ("respond within 4h during working hours"), decision-making process (DACI, RFC process), code review norms, communication channels by topic (production issues → #incidents; social → #random), PTO communication process
• It's not a legal document — it's a living practice guide the team owns and updates
• It eliminates ambiguity for new team members and prevents recurring friction
Overlap hours / core hours: The daily time window when all team members across timezones are expected to be reachable. Small teams might have 2h overlap; larger teams with more distributed members sometimes have zero natural overlap.
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