Coming someday
The collaborative software development playbook for remote and distributed teams
“Writing scales; meetings don’t.”
“Hours worked ≠ value created.”
“Hidden work is invisible impact.”
“‘Got a minute?’ is anxiety in three words.”
“Proof beats persuasion.”
“Problems don’t age well; they age expensively.”
“In async, angry words never expire.”
“Interruptions don’t steal minutes; they steal hours.”
“The real risk isn’t openness; it’s opacity.”
A new book by Ben Balter, Director at GitHub
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Most teams just moved the office online—more meetings, constant availability, hours over results. That’s not remote work. It’s the same broken office with a webcam.
GitHub proved that distributed teams can thrive—shipping better software, retaining top talent, and doing it across every time zone.
Drawing on a decade at GitHub, Open & Async provides battle-tested practices for building distributed teams that actually work.
Not by recreating the office from home, but by working in the open, defaulting to async, and measuring impact over input.
The practices that scaled a startup to a global platform are yours to steal.
“Writing scales; meetings don’t.”
“Hours worked ≠ value created.”
“Hidden work is invisible impact.”
“‘Got a minute?’ is anxiety in three words.”
“Proof beats persuasion.”
“Problems don’t age well; they age expensively.”
“In async, angry words never expire.”
“Interruptions don’t steal minutes; they steal hours.”
“The real risk isn’t openness; it’s opacity.”
For leaders & ICs
Whether you’re leading teams or leading the work.
Build teams that ship quality software without constant synchronous coordination—and advance your own career in the process. Create a culture where documentation replaces tribal knowledge, transparency replaces status meetings, and your best people stay because the work respects their time and intelligence.
For Engineering VPs, Directors, Engineering Managers, and Product Managers
When you can’t rely on hallway conversations or face time with decision-makers, your work has to speak for itself. Build your reputation through writing, async collaboration, and transparent decision-making—the skills that make you visible, effective, and promotable regardless of where you sit.
For Software Developers, Senior Engineers, and Tech Leads without direct reports
Managers who read the IC chapters gain empathy for their teams. ICs who read the management chapters get a head start on their next role.
Concrete practices drawn from a decade of remote-first work at GitHub.
Treat meetings like production incident escalations: you don’t jump to a war room before checking the logs. Start with async writing, escalate to a call only when the discussion genuinely requires higher fidelity.
Treat every repeat question like a piece of code: capture the answer once in concise, skimmable docs, then update or archive as needed. Cut interruptions, speed up onboarding, and finally focus on what really matters.
When in doubt, keep moving forward—but do it loudly. Share progress, surface risks early, and include stakeholders so nobody is blindsided. If no one objects, you’re on the right track.
The correlation between hours worked and value created isn’t just weak for knowledge work—it’s often inverted. Measure what people deliver rather than how long they’re online.
The average knowledge worker gets interrupted every 11 minutes and needs roughly 25 minutes to refocus. Do the math on how much deep work actually survives. Async workflows protect flow state by treating communication like non-blocking I/O: your team stays connected through visible artifacts instead of constant pings.
You wouldn’t manage a codebase in spreadsheets and slide decks—so why manage your team that way? Issues, pull requests, and project boards aren’t just engineering tools; they’re transparency machines that make leadership decisions visible, reviewable, and searchable.
AI agents are a natural fit for async-first teams: they work independently, share results in writing, and never ask to “hop on a quick call.” Learn how to experiment with AI as a thought partner while keeping humans in the loop where it counts.
Three full chapters on why open-and-async initiatives fail, how to recognize resistance before it derails you, and concrete strategies for sustaining change. Whether you’re a manager leading a transition or an IC trying to work async when nobody else does.
The objections you’re already thinking of—addressed head-on.
“Won’t async slow us down?”
Async doesn’t mean never meeting. It means starting with writing and escalating to a call only when the discussion genuinely requires it. The book includes a full chapter on when async isn’t the answer, plus concrete guidance on meeting intentionally rather than reflexively.
“Remote kills culture”
Culture isn’t built in hallways. It’s built in how teams make decisions, resolve conflict, and celebrate wins. The book covers team health, showing employees they’re valued, making the most of in-person time, and why work should be fun—all in distributed contexts.
“I can’t evaluate people I don’t see”
That’s the wrong metric. The book’s central principle—impact over input—shows how to measure what people deliver rather than how long they’re online. If you can only evaluate people by watching them, you have a management problem, not a remote work problem.
From the book
Opinionated, specific, and written like a human, not a corporate training manual.
Chapter: Speak Like a Human
“Per my previous email, I wanted to circle back and touch base regarding the action items we synergized on during our last alignment session.” Did that make you cringe? Good. It should. Speak clearly and simply in async communication to avoid misunderstandings that waste time and erode trust. Ditch the jargon, be specific, and write like you’re talking to a colleague, not drafting a memo.
Chapter: The Rule of No Surprises
If information would surprise someone when they discover it later, share it now—not when it’s convenient, not when you have a solution. One blindside can undo months of trust, but consistent transparency earns you the autonomy that makes micromanagement unnecessary.
Chapter: What Leadership Looks Like
When your team never sees you in a hallway and can’t read your body language, your leadership is defined entirely by the artifacts you create: documented decisions, visible priorities, and clear expectations. Leadership isn’t a title or a presence; it’s a trail of evidence.
Chapter: What I Wish I Knew Before Going Remote
Nobody tells you this before you go remote: your success hinges on owning your own onboarding, shipping something—anything—within your first two weeks, and surviving the month-one firehose of async communication without panicking.
The foundation
Working in the open—giving everything a URL, documenting decisions, surfacing problems early—is how trust gets built when you can’t rely on hallway conversations.
Async-first communication treats writing as a core skill, not a chore you squeeze in between meetings.
Impact over input means measuring problems solved, not hours logged. Flow matters more than face time. Shipping matters more than performing busyness.
Fun isn’t a distraction—it’s a retention strategy. Self-care isn’t weakness; it’s operational discipline. The book covers team health, preventing burnout, and building remote cultures that last.
Ben Balter is a Director at GitHub, where he’s spent more than a decade helping employees do their best remote work. He’s held roles across product, security, operations, and technical program management, delivering more than 500 features along the way.
Before GitHub, Ben was a member of the inaugural class of Presidential Innovation Fellows and helped draft the White House’s first digital strategy. Nearly two decades building software across open source, government, startups, and large organizations.
The last decade? Proving that async-first teams don’t just keep up—they pull ahead.
500+
Features shipped
10+
Years at GitHub
1st
Presidential Innovation Fellow class
“The future is open, async, and yours to shape. Now go build it.”
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