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.

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.

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.

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.

To ensure that the meetings you actually have are productive, here are a few simple things you can do.

Most “quick syncs” can be async. This honours everyone’s need for flow and deep work.

The ConveRel quadrants are a way for you to triage your meetings and figure out which ones can immediately or eventually be async.

Switch from fragile, redundant, ephemeral conversations to shared, persistent onboarding assets.

Pull requests are a feature that most source control systems provide (GitLab calls it a “merge request (MR)”). This feature allows anyone who wants to contribute code to a project, to package their changes so someone else can review their code before merging it into the codebase.

By documenting every business decision you make for your project, you help your present and future colleagues understand the rationale of why things are a certain way for your team.

Effective commit messages are a way for developers to communicate to each other about the changes they’re making to a codebase. These messages can be useful when fixing issues or when finding the root cause of a bug or even when troubleshooting a broken build.

Your architecture will change with time and in the future you may have to investigate why your architecture is a certain way. Architectural decision records (ADRs) help by providing an archaeology of your project.

By going async, you’ll limit the number of meetings you have. For the meetings you keep, you must afford your teammates, present and future, the courtesy of a meeting summary; a.k.a meeting minutes.

Let’s be honest. Teams don’t always have something big to showcase every sprint. Without substantive demos, the sprint reviews become a formality and a reporting exercise. Take a pragmatic approach to sprint reviews instead.