Building and scaling distributed teams
summary
Buffer builds a globally distributed engineering org that yields 40%+ team growth while hiring from pools of up to 1,500 applicants and reaching 40% women engineers. Practices are concrete: a buddy system with 30‑60‑90 plans and roll and culture buddies, twice‑yearly on‑sites, weekly 1:1s and skip‑levels every six weeks, and tooling like Motion GitHub Durable and the Donut Slack bot. Decision rules use RACI and a firm do not make decisions in Slack policy to avoid fragmentation and overwork.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:43Distributed teams
- 1:15Remote work
- 1:52The biggest productivity shift
- 2:27The Buffer team
- 3:02Four key things to get right
- 3:20Hiring from a global pool
- 4:22Buddy system
- 5:22Decision making
- 8:03Effective decisions
- 8:42Crossfunctional teams
- 10:36Twoway communication
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