Autonomous teams make their own decisions. So leave the decision of when to meet F2F, to the team itself.

If you were a product, it’d help people to know how to use you effectively. A personal user manual helps people do just that!

Make time-zones your ally. By alternating facilitation responsibilities across locations, you can make cross timezone workshops and inceptions less stressful for everyone.

During inceptions and workshops, it's easier to poke holes at something wrong than to write the first words on a whiteboard. So instead of starting from a blank slate, synthesise what you think you know and then validate your understanding.

Every activity in the inception journey has the potential to be at least partly asynchronous. To be pragmatic about how much synchrony you need, you must recognise inceptions as a process and not an event.

The lean inception is a focused way to gather information to start a project. You can complete this in a single week.

Technical design docs are an efficient way to communicate about software architecture and technical solutions. These docs precede an architectural decision record. They benefit from detail, though brevity is an important consideration too.

Feature breakdown documents serve as a single resource to catalogue all information about a feature. As the team enhances the feature, this document becomes a single source of truth about it.

Idea papers allow you to nurture fresh ideas by articulating them clearly. People can use this as a reference to share feedback and enrich the idea. Decision making is also easier if everyone can understand the idea well.

F2F interactions are a great way for your team to recharge your social batteries and to build camaraderie.

Async audio can be an interesting way to share your message while conveying emotion. Audio is particularly easy to consume passively; such as, when working out or when driving.

An onboarding FAQ helps your preserve the “dumb questions budget” for any new hire to your team.

A precise checklist takes away the guesswork from the onboarding process. Document what the new hire needs to do, by when they need to do it, and how.

A buddy is a new hire’s tour guide in the team. They can be a sounding board for questions, the person who makes introductions to others and also the first port of call for help.

1:1 meetings with new hires are a very effective way for them to get to know their colleagues.

Sharing a meal with your new team-mate can make them feel welcome to the team. Use this as a regular onboarding pattern.

Recorded presentations help you convey information asynchronously. This frees up time to meet for high stakes, engaging conversations and workshops.

The 6-page memo pattern forces you to prep for a meeting and to consume the background information before you dive into discussion.

Silent meetings can better leverage the ideas, perspectives, and insights of your team. They’ll not just help improve your meetings, you’ll also see better ideas and solutions emerge.

You can avoid many meetings by just writing things up. This can help you generate reusable artefacts in many cases.