Three Essential Remote Work Practices for Engineering Teams - Shopify

Remote Work at Scale: What Shopify Learned in Two and a Half Years

Shopify has been a remote-first company for roughly two and a half years, and like the software it builds, its remote practices have evolved iteratively. The tools haven't changed much since the office days—chat apps, video calls, email—but how teams use them together has had to adapt. Three practices have proven essential: structuring teams around time zones, establishing explicit communication norms, and building individual discipline around work-life boundaries.

Synchronous Inside, Asynchronous Outside

Hiring globally means accepting that time zones exist and planning around them rather than fighting them. Great work happens through real-time collaboration, pair programming, and mentorship, which is especially important for engineers early in their careers. Teams need a high degree of synchronous overlap in their working hours so that nobody feels like they're suffering in silence when they're stuck.

Practically, this means staffing teams from broad geographic areas rather than scattering individuals across the globe. A team might be mostly European, mostly on the U.S. East Coast, or mostly on the West Coast. The goal is that engineers can reach teammates during most of the working day for discussions, pairing, and mentoring.

Outside the immediate team, asynchronous communication takes over. Managers and senior individual contributors primarily communicate by writing rather than in meetings. Engineers use async time for deep work inside codebases, and teams are expected to produce high-quality documentation for code and services, which reduces cross-team meeting load. The formula: synchronous communication inside teams, asynchronous communication between them.

Document Your Communication Norms

With so many communication channels available—chat, SMS, email, documents—ambiguity quickly becomes noise. The fix is to establish team norms that specify which medium to use for which situation and what the expected response time is. A simple table listing each channel and its expectation can make the rules explicit.

Running a norms session starts with a blank version of that table and asking the team to list every way they communicate and what the expectations should be. Disagreement is a sign that the exercise is working; that's exactly what needs to be resolved. Once agreed, the norms are written up and added to the team's documentation.

Documented norms have two practical benefits. First, they make it safe to ignore messages outside working hours: if the norms say urgent issues warrant a phone call, everything else can wait until the next day without guilt. This is critical for on-call schedules. Second, they permit deep work during business hours—if norms say a few hours to respond to chat is acceptable, an engineer can close Slack and focus on a thorny problem without fear of missing something important.

Define Your Own Boundaries

Norms manage attention within a team, but sustainable remote work also requires individual discipline. The office imposed a forced routine: commutes were a clear transition between work and home, and open-plan layouts created serendipitous encounters. Remote work removes those invisible structures, so everyone must take ownership of their own.

That means introspection about what makes each person feel productive, connected, and able to sustain this indefinitely. Shopify's approach is to trust employees to run their day in the way that produces their best work. Some start early and finish early for family time; others start late and finish late. Some take a long walk or bike ride at lunch to clear their head—or design their day based on their own creativity and energy cycles, rather than a fixed office schedule that fights those cycles. Conversely, some find a strict work-life split necessary, and avoid any work-related chat in the evening.

To reinforce this, teams should openly discuss how each individual manages their time. Celebrating these differences—through team conversations or internal social channels organized by shared interest—builds community and a stronger collaboration culture.

Remote Work Is Different Work

Remote doesn't require different work, but it does require working differently. Teams that struggle should step back rather than push through: structure for the right synchronous/asynchronous balance, run norms exercises to make communication stress-free, and use flexibility to let people do their best work at the hours that suit them. Connect teams across continents, write down how you communicate, and manage your own day deliberately.