Async first, meetings last
Every project gets a written log: decisions, demos, and open questions, all timestamped. A client in another time zone can read the whole week in ten minutes. Meetings exist for exactly three things — kickoffs, demos, and disagreements. Everything else is a message.
This sounds slower. It’s faster: writing forces clarity, and clarity kills the rework that actually eats schedules.
The weekly demo is sacred
Every Friday the client gets a staging link and a five-minute screen recording: what shipped, what’s next, what needs a decision. No “progress is going well” updates — clickable proof or it didn’t happen. In seven years we’ve never missed a demo week.
Clients don’t fear remote teams. They fear silence. A weekly demo makes distance irrelevant.
Our stack for staying aligned
- One roadmap board the client can read — no internal-only trackers
- Staging links for every milestone, kept live for the whole project
- Screen recordings over status meetings, every single week
- Design reviews side-by-side: file on the left, build on the right
- A shared launch checklist nobody can skip
Overlap hours beat long hours
We keep two to three hours of overlap with every client for live decisions, then protect the rest for deep work. Urgent truly means urgent: a staging site down, a launch blocked. Everything else waits for the next overlap — and mysteriously, most “urgent” things resolve themselves by then.
Handover starts on day one
Docs aren’t a phase; they’re a habit. Every repo has a readme that actually explains setup, every decision lives in the log, and credentials move to the client’s vault in week one. A distributed team you can’t leave is a trap — we build the exit from the entrance.
