A guide to distributed teams

Increment's guide to distributed teams provides a comprehensive framework addressing six critical dimensions of remote work success. Communication strategies emphasize deliberately creating channels, balancing synchronous/asynchronous methods, overcommunicating with explicit positive language, and assuming 'someone missed the email, message, announcement, or meeting.' Coordination requires establishing predictable team tempos, minimizing time zone spread, creating overlap periods, and ensuring equitable meeting schedules. Collaboration thrives through rewarding collaborative behaviors in promotions, investing in periodic in-person meetings (every 6 months recommended), keeping teams small (3-4 engineers per PM), and embracing role overlap. Organizational structure focuses on cross-functional teams with end-to-end responsibility, working groups for domain expertise, and reduced interdependencies. Operations support includes providing equipment/workspace, designing remote-friendly hiring, structured onboarding, and using RFCs for distributed decisions. Culture building requires explicitly defining values, supporting mental health through 'traffic light' emotional check-ins, modeling healthy boundaries, and discouraging always-on culture. Engineering leaders will learn that successful distributed teams require intentional design across all dimensions, not just adding collaboration tools.