Pre-order now · Ships July 21, 2026
The collaborative software development playbook for remote and distributed teams
Working from home does not equal working remotely.
By Ben Balter — a decade of remote-first lessons from GitHub.
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Your company shipped everyone a laptop, bolted Zoom onto the same approval chains, and called it remote work. It wasn’t. It was office work in sweatpants—same meetings, same status theater, same hallway politics, just piped through a webcam.
There’s a world of difference between being forced to work from home and intentionally building a distributed, async culture. This book is about that difference.
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.
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.
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.
Interviewing at a remote-first company? This is the playbook they wish you’d already read.
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. 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.
Transitions die quietly—leadership declares victory, people revert to old habits, and a year later nothing has changed. Spot resistance before it derails you, counter the arguments that kill async initiatives, and sustain the change whether you’re a manager leading a team through it or an IC working async when nobody else is.
If your colleagues can’t find your work, build on it, or learn from it, it might as well not exist. Give every decision, doc, and discussion a permanent home so context survives the people who created it.
The rituals that hold remote teams together can either compound trust or quietly drain it. Run them async-first, write them down, and stop waiting for review season to have the conversations that actually matter.
“Hours worked ≠ value created.”
“Writing scales; meetings don’t.”
“Silence is not consent; it’s invisibility.”
“Every workflow is a pull request waiting to happen.”
“If work isn’t visible, it might as well not exist.”
“Institutional memory shouldn’t depend on individual memory.”
“Got a minute?” is anxiety in three words.
“Control doesn’t scale; trust does.”
“Nobody quietly quits a team that remembers their birthday.”
“Working from home ≠ working remotely.”
“Async is the operating system; remote is the hardware.”
“Culture is whatever you tolerate twice.”
“Tools amplify culture; they don’t create it.”
“Your team won’t be braver than you are.”
“Every comment is a tiny meeting you just called.”
“Interruptions don’t steal minutes; they steal hours.”
“Async isn’t waiting. It’s working.”
“Async is a default, not a dogma.”
“If it’s not written down, it wasn’t decided.”
“Decisions without URLs get relitigated forever.”
“Charm doesn’t commit to the repo.”
“Surprises break trust faster than setbacks.”
“AI didn’t break async work. It vindicated it.”
“Outsource your thinking and you outsource yourself.”
“Proof beats persuasion.”
“The real risk isn’t openness; it’s opacity.”
“Problems don’t age well; they age expensively.”
“Jargon hides meaning; plain language reveals it.”
“An RTO mandate is an operating-model bailout.”
“Bad tools don’t lose files—they lose decisions.”
“Secrecy doesn’t protect decisions—it just hides the bad ones.”
“The most dangerous resistance looks like agreement.”
“Remote-first is a mindset, not a mailing address.”
“Your office has a single point of failure: its address.”
“Influence earned beats authority assigned.”
“Avoidance isn’t peace—it’s compound interest on damage.”
“Presence theater, not productivity.”
“A DRI with a URL beats a committee with a mandate.”
“The best meeting is the one a URL made unnecessary.”
“An ugly working URL beats a beautiful deck.”
“Async isn’t slow; it’s choosing your interrupts.”
“Markup is a contract; formatting is a costume.”
“Every tool is an opinion in disguise.”
“Social capital is conflict insurance.”
“Top talent chooses culture over compensation.”
“Invisible work hides invisible problems.”
“No news isn’t good news.”
“Organizations that resist remote work are competing on legacy hardware.”
“Hierarchy is a cost; make sure it’s worth paying.”
“A job that fits your life outlasts one that fights it.”
“The office isn’t where the work happens; it’s where the commute ends.”
“The managers people stay with longest are the ones who’d help them leave.”
“If leaders need to be physically present to lead, they’re not leading—they’re supervising.”
“Time zone distribution isn’t the problem—pretending everyone is in the same building is.”
“Chat is where information goes to die.”
The book in one page
Ten parts, each building on the last. Here’s the path.
Remote, distributed, open, async—what the terms actually mean and why the distinction matters.
The business case, the personal case, and why how you work matters as much as what you work on.
Parallelization, flow, impact over input, and optimizing for developer happiness.
Why everything should have a URL, documentation as a superpower, and the rule of no surprises.
Speak like a human, chat responsibly, the etiquette of issues and pull requests, and when async isn’t the answer.
Refactoring for remote, navigating resistance, and why open and async initiatives fail.
Decisions as documentation, leading like an engineer, one-on-ones, and weekly reporting that doesn’t suck.
Corporate self-care, navigating conflict asynchronously, and making the most of in-person time.
AI as a thought partner and agentic workflows in open, async teams.
Four threads, two checklists—one for leaders, one for ICs—and where to start tomorrow.
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.
Launching July 21, 2026
Don’t wait for launch day to start working better.
Reading on Kindle? Be first to read it — drop your email and we’ll send the buy link the second it goes live.
No spam — just the launch-day link. Unsubscribe anytime.
Prefer another store? Pre-order the ebook now — $9.99, merged to your reader the day it ships.
Don’t see your store? See all retailers →
Buying for your team? Bulk & volume orders →
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 has spent more than a decade at GitHub, most recently as Director of Hubber Enablement, where he helped thousands of GitHubbers do their best remote work. He’s used the time to figure out how large engineering organizations actually work—and why the obvious answers are usually wrong. This book is what he learned.
The U.S. Chief Technology Officer once called him one of “the baddest of the badass innovators.” A Presidential Innovation Fellow and one of the first to bring modern software practices into the federal government, Ben helped draft parts of President Obama’s Digital Strategy and Open Data Policy. He’s spent nearly two decades building software across open-source communities, government, startups, and large organizations.
Ben holds a J.D. and an M.B.A. from The George Washington University and is a member of the DC Bar.
11 min
Between interruptions in knowledge work
25 min
To recover focus after each one
10+ yrs
Making remote-first work at GitHub
For the terminally curious
A Model Context Protocol server that gives your AI assistant async-first tools—draft a decision doc, turn a meeting into an artifact, pressure-test a status update—without leaving the editor you already work in. Pick your tool and paste it in:
claude mcp add open-async -- npx -y @open-and-async/mcpA real tool, not a teaser—the method tools work on any project, no book required; the reference tools answer from the book’s public summaries, always cited and linked.
Free to run; the code is open source. Browse the code on GitHub →
Stop digitizing the office. Start building something better.
However you read, be first to pull it. Drop your email and the buy link lands in your inbox the moment Open & Async goes live on July 21, 2026.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.