Open and Async

Remote work isn't failing. Your playbook is.

For engineering leaders and individual contributors: how to work open and async, from Ben Balter's decade-plus at GitHub, a company that was remote-first before it was fashionable.

Your company shipped everyone a laptop, bolted Zoom onto the same approval chains, and called it remote work. It was office work in sweatpants—same meetings, same status theater, same hallway politics, just piped through a webcam. Hybrid teams have it worse. The moment one person dials in, the hallway becomes a liability.

Open and Async is about the difference between being forced to work from home and deliberately building a distributed team. It comes down to two habits GitHub practiced for years: working in the open, and defaulting to asynchronous writing instead of another meeting.

For engineering leaders

VPs, directors, and engineering managers: build teams that ship quality software without constant synchronous coordination. Replace status meetings with visible work, hallway knowledge with documentation, and "are they online?" with "what did they ship?" Retain your best people by respecting their time, focus, and intelligence. The book covers 1:1s, weekly reporting, documenting decisions, and navigating resistance to change.

For individual contributors

When you can't count on face time with decision-makers, your work has to speak for itself. Learn to work loudly, write so people actually read it, and build a reputation that doesn't depend on where you sit. Interviewing at a remote-first company? This is the playbook they wish you'd already read.

Inside, you'll learn how to:

• Treat meetings as an escalation path, not the default

• Give every decision a URL, so context survives reorgs and departures

• Measure impact over input, and stop rewarding whoever is online longest

• Follow the Rule of No Surprises—surface bad news before someone else does

• Chat responsibly, starting with what's wrong with "Got a minute?"

• Know when async isn't the answer, and meet on purpose

• Make the change stick after the novelty wears off

Ben Balter was most recently GitHub's Director of Hubber Enablement, helping thousands of GitHubbers do their best remote work. Before that, he was in the inaugural class of Presidential Innovation Fellows. The book is opinionated on purpose. Middle-of-the-road advice is what left everyone stuck.

Hours worked ≠ value created.