How effectively we work over where and when we work

Intentional actions over serendipitous success

Focus and cognitive flow over always-on availability

Courage to experiment over upholding established practices

Principles for modern, async-first work

These principles complement the 12 principles of the Agile Manifesto.

1. The productive output of knowledge work doesn’t increase proportionately with the number of hours worked. Effective teams measure results, not hours.

2. The location of work impacts people’s productivity and happiness. If you hire talented people, trust them to identify a work location from which they’ll deliver the most value.

3. When a team agrees on its work processes, it helps to reduce guesswork about how to solve problems.

4. Effective distributed teams leverage modern collaboration tools to scale communication and reduce confusion.

5. Documentation, in particular, written communication is the most scalable, and least intrusive way to share information in a distributed team.

6. Meetings are the last resort, not the first option. Implement asynchronous workflows to avoid interruptions through meetings.

7. On a team, anything that anyone knows, everyone else should have a way to know, with little effort. Distributed teams must invest in systems that make knowledge transparent and easy to retrieve.

8. Diverse teams with inclusive work practices make the most sound decisions. Location independence and asynchronous communication help improve inclusion in teams.

9. The more decisions a team makes, the more progress it makes. Teams should endeavour to make smaller, more frequent decisions, so that every decision feels manageable.

10. Effective teams benefit from autonomy to make decisions. To encourage a bias for action, teams must push decisions to the lowest level possible.

11. Effective leaders on distributed teams leave nothing to chance. They learn from experience and design systems iteratively, for the outcomes they must achieve. 

12. Trust and cohesion on teams are hard to build through purely asynchronous means. Teams must plan an appropriate level of in-person and synchronous interaction to build interpersonal relationships.