The Async-First Playbook: Remote Collaboration Techniques for Agile Software Teams

16

Questions to Reimagine your Tech Huddles

Over the past few chapters, we’ve examined some common agile practices through the lens of async-first collaboration. You may have noticed that we’re eschewing collaboration for collaboration’s sake. Sometimes we give a free pass to any activity that seems collaborative. Before you know it, you’ve built half a dozen gate checks to deliver a single user story. Each of those “collaborative” gate checks doesn’t just create interruptions and context switches. It also leaves an attention residue—your mind continues to think about the interruption even when you’ve switched to the task on hand. There is such a thing as a collaboration curse, as the Economist described some years back.

Organizations need to ...