Async-First Playbook

Reinventing Agile for Distributed and Remote Teams

Distributed work is now inevitable, but conventional agile approaches are too "synchronous" for today's remote teams. Meetings, ceremonies, and rituals can quickly become unsustainable when teams are scattered across the globe. The result: burnout, constant interruptions, a lack of deep work, poor work-life balance, greater frustration, and workplaces with poor diversity.

In The Async-First Playbook, Thoughtworks Principal Product Manager Sumeet Gayathri Moghe provides tools and techniques to embed remote-native, asynchronous practices into traditional agile methods, making remote work more effi cient, inclusive, thoughtful, and fun.

Drawing on extensive experience leading distributed teams, Moghe addresses the "nuts and bolts" of specific practices and the crucial "softer" elements such as culture, mindset, and leadership. Short, practical chapters show how to adapt traditional agile techniques such as sprints and pair programming for the realities of today's distributed environments. Whatever your project, you'll learn how to create asynchronous environments that promote success, improve the workplace experience, and deliver better results.

• Discover why asynchronous collaboration is crucial to your project's success
• Prepare to go "async-first": get your tools, skills, and protocols right up front
• Map current agile techniques to async-first versions that better reflect today's realities
• Become a more supportive and effective leader of async-first teams
• Anticipate, navigate, and mitigate the pitfalls of async-first distributed work
• Bring it all together: walk through your async-first transition
• Access valuable resources, examples, and hands-on templates at the companion website

"The plays in this playbook will empower you to lead and build differently. All that you need is an open mind and a belief that the status quo isn't worthy of defining the future."--From the Foreword by Darren Murph.

Biographical Note:

Sumeet Gayathri Moghe, principal product manager at Thoughtworks, is an agile transformation specialist with more than twenty years of IT consulting experience. He has worked with clients in travel, payments, financial services, education, analytics, consulting, retail, and corporate systems, helping them deliver new products and adopt agile ways of working. He has always worked in distributed teams and began working in an all-remote mode in 2017, long before the COVID-19 pandemic. He blogs on remote work at asyncagile.org.

Table of Contents:

Part I: Adapting to the New Normal
Chapter 1: There's Got to Be a Better Way to Work
Chapter 2: Foster a Mindset for Change

Part II: Prepare to go Async-First
Chapter 3: The Tools You Need
Chapter 4: The Biggest Async-First Superpower
Chapter 5: Three More Async-First Superpowers
Chapter 6: Calm Things Down with Collaboration Protocols

Part III: The Practitioner's Guide
Chapter 7: Meetings as the Last Resort
Chapter 8: The Value of Being Face to Face
Chapter 9: Micro Moves to Shift Left
Chapter 10: Write a Team Handbook
Chapter 11: Tame the "Instant" in Instant Messaging
Chapter 12: Standup Meetings--An Easy Shift Left
Chapter 13: Take Charge of Your Development Cycles
Chapter 14: Run Meaningful Retrospectives
Chapter 15: Kick-Offs and Desk Checks--Reduce Ritualized Interruptions
Chapter 16: Questions to Reimagine Your Tech Huddles
Chapter 17: Pair Programming--The Elephant in the Room
Chapter 18: Audit Trails from the Flow of Your Work
Chapter 19: Communicate Tech and Functional Design
Chapter 20: Two Stable Pieces of Handbook Documentation
Chapter 21: Brew the Perfect Onboarding Storm

Part IV: Async-First Leadership
Chapter 22: The Async Leadership Mindset
Chapter 23: Manage Your People with Care
Chapter 24: Set Up Your Team for Success
Chapter 25: Farming Tacit Knowledge in Your Company

Part V: Navigate the Pitfalls
Chapter 26: The Great Hybrid Kerfuffle
Chapter 27: The Async Island
Chapter 28: Preempt Workplace Toxicity

Part VI: Bring It All Together
Chapter 29: The Async-First Starter Kit
Chapter 30: A Brave New World of Work