Help your people get better at what they love doing. Fund their personal development.

Metawork is all the work you do, to make your actual work happen. Here’s why you, as a leader must practice it.

An async-first mindset helps you see communication as a series of steps, instead of a one-and-done event.

Your team won’t start writing things up diligently from day one. As a leader, you must coach them.

In tech, static knowledge is often less valuable than dynamic, tacit knowledge. To make this tacit knowledge visible at speed, you must elevate your community platform to be your knowledge platform.

To figure out what tools and capabilities you need for knowledge sharing, consider a collaboration tools audit. This’ll help you identify tooling gaps and to create an investment roadmap for your executives to approve.

People won’t automatically adopt your knowledge and community platform. You need community managers and curators to make the platform attractive and useful to people.

Don’t let your team be vulnerable to a low “bus factor”. Make your role explicit.

Technical design docs are an efficient way to communicate about software architecture and technical solutions. These docs precede an architectural decision record. They benefit from detail, though brevity is an important consideration too.

Feature breakdown documents serve as a single resource to catalogue all information about a feature. As the team enhances the feature, this document becomes a single source of truth about it.

Idea papers allow you to nurture fresh ideas by articulating them clearly. People can use this as a reference to share feedback and enrich the idea. Decision making is also easier if everyone can understand the idea well.

Async audio can be an interesting way to share your message while conveying emotion. Audio is particularly easy to consume passively; such as, when working out or when driving.

An onboarding FAQ helps your preserve the “dumb questions budget” for any new hire to your team.

Recorded presentations help you convey information asynchronously. This frees up time to meet for high stakes, engaging conversations and workshops.

The 6-page memo pattern forces you to prep for a meeting and to consume the background information before you dive into discussion.

You can avoid many meetings by just writing things up. This can help you generate reusable artefacts in many cases.

Switch from fragile, redundant, ephemeral conversations to shared, persistent onboarding assets.

Create smaller decentralised pods inside the team to devolve responsibilities. Pods operate autonomously and make their own decisions.

Queue up candidate stories for the next sprint, about a week in advance. Let the devs take a look at them and ask questions.

Most project management tools allow you to define a workflow for your team and visualise that workflow as a task board. When you revisit your workflow be careful not to design for the exceptions and worst-case scenarios.