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    How does your team manage synchronous vs. asynchronous communication?

    Adam Rochette
    2 replies
    Hey all, I'm working on an app to help remote teams use both asynchronous and synchronous communication seamlessly. How does your team manage synchronous vs. asynchronous communication? What policies, if any, drive this? What tools do you use? What are your frustrations with asynchronous, synchronous, or both? In my experience, it's been a mix of Basecamp for asynchronous and Slack for synchronous. Company policy on when to use which medium is very loosely defined, so many Slack messages should be Basecamp threads and vice versa. This has led to vital team members being brought on to projects far too late and a lot of unnecessary rework, to name two examples. Thanks in advance!

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    Tim Carambat
    For PH we rely a lot on Slack and Asana for project/objective tracking. I have worked at both sync and async companies and honestly the format we have setup for PH works wonderfully since we have a globally distributed team. Messages in slack are often threaded to keeps channels clear and responses on topic, and for overall goals we have Asana for tracking/comments/updates. We have many other tools that are team specific like Github/InVision, but they all lead back to Asana as the sole source of truth. Discussions for the most part are all on slack. We do have some synchronous meetings, but not so many that your flow is interrupted multiple times a day
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    Adam Rochette
    @tim_carambat thanks so much for the detailed response! If you don’t mind a follow-up question: how does your team make decisions on whether or not to move forward with a particular idea? Do you have a formalized proposal/discussion/decision flow? Would a tool that facilitated this process be something you’d find valuable?
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