The Shift Away from Office Reflexes
When Shopify moved to a remote-first model, which the company calls being Digital by Design, it wasn't just a change of venue. It was a fundamental break from decades of office-shaped habits in the tech industry. In a physical office, context spreads by osmosis: a chat at the coffee machine, a question prompted by a recent commit, or a conversation over lunch all build shared awareness without deliberate effort.
That no longer happens when a team is distributed globally. Colleagues are online at different times, immediate answers are harder to come by, and you can’t glance around the room to see who might know the answer. The shift to asynchronous communication is an essential tool for making this model work. It gives every employee the same view of the company regardless of location or timezone, leaves a trail of decisions, and forces a discipline of concise, written thinking that sync-heavy cultures never required.
A Spectrum, Not a Binary Choice
Remote work isn’t a simple choice between synchronous and asynchronous; it’s a continuum. Different tools and formats sit at different points along that line, each with their own trade-offs in permanence and immediacy. Visualizing this spectrum helps teams reason about which medium fits a given purpose.
- Video calls and pair programming sit at the fully synchronous end—every participant must be online and available at the same moment.
- Chat is written but has a short half-life. It expects a quick reply or it gets buried and lost.
- Recorded video leans asynchronous, but it’s often used to broadcast or complement a document, meaning its relevance can fade just as fast as the event it captures.
- Email is archival and permanent, typically reserved for important communication, but replies may come days later or not at all.
- Written documents anchor technical designs and in-depth analysis. They may be read years later but often represent a snapshot in time that needs maintenance.
- Wikis and READMEs are the most asynchronous of all; if maintained, they remain useful indefinitely.
Shifting left on this spectrum is a deliberate act of relearning. In the office, synchronous work was easy, but it excluded people who were remote, on vacation, or in other offices entirely. Treating everyone as remote means writing as the default form of communication so all employees access the same information. Town halls get recorded and rebroadcast for other timezones, whiteboarding becomes collaborative documents in Miro, and the knowledge that used to live in people's heads has to be written down. This is hard work, but it’s the only way to solve problems at scale with a global team. Crucially, it’s a great leveler: it connects everyone together and treats everyone equally.
Permanence as a Byproduct
The more asynchronous the communication, the more permanent the artifact it leaves behind. Written documents, pull requests, and detailed meeting minutes form an archive that teams can review, reflect upon, and learn from—not just today, but months later.
Shopify has a single internal source of truth called the Vault where employees find information on teams, projects, news, and videos. Design documents for major changes are raised as issues in a technical designs repository, meaning significant decisions are reviewed, ratified, and archived in the open. New engineers can discover the archaeology of the codebase and the reasoning behind its architecture by reading historical discussions rather than relying on a colleague’s memory.
This visibility can be intimidating for people who haven’t worked this way before, so pairing and mentoring are essential for those doing it for the first time.
Norms are a Necessity
With channels ranging from chat to email to collaborative documents, choosing the right one can be overwhelming. Teams need to define and write down their preferred norms. This means agreeing on response time expectations for chat versus email, establishing how consensus is reached on decisions, clarifying whether synchronous meetings are ever truly necessary, and defining etiquette for "raising your hand" on video calls. Teams should also make it easy to find each other's working hours and decide where design documents live so they remain accessible.
These norms span both ends of the spectrum. Teams make the most of their daily overlap windows, setting aside time for pair programming, impromptu chats, and collaborative sessions. Outside those windows, individuals are encouraged to block off time, turn on do not disturb, and protect their flow state. This extends to code review and shipping practices: some teams prioritize reviewing pull requests from other timezones first thing in the morning, while others find additional engineers in similar timezones to lean on for support, review, and pairing.
Balancing Asynchrony With Human Connection
Once teams become comfortable with asynchronous workflows, there is a natural pull to make everything asynchronous—stand-ups on Slack, planning in Miro, and no video calls at all. Yet the same benefits that make asynchronous work so effective can undermine one of the most important ingredients of a healthy team: connectivity. Humans are fundamentally social, and feeling connected to other real people matters for wellbeing. That connection should not be sacrificed in the name of efficiency.
Synchronous meetings still hold value, even when they are technically less efficient. Seeing colleagues' faces and having unstructured conversations builds relationships that no ticket or pull request can replicate. This is a deliberate part of engineering culture at Shopify. The company invests in connectivity through several mechanisms:
- Pair programming: A core practice across the engineering organization, often facilitated through Tuple, to solve problems together, share codebase context, and help hundreds of new engineers onboard with confidence.
- Casual play: Shopify Party, an internal virtual world, gives employees a space to play games or meet up with colleagues in a relaxed, non-awkward way.
- Team time: Teams are encouraged to spend Friday afternoons playing board games remotely together.
- Offsite gatherings: At least twice a year, teams come together in Shopify-owned spaces around the world for intentional moments of brainstorming, team building, planning, and offline connection.
The design principle is straightforward: asynchronous communication brings efficiency, while synchronous interaction brings connectivity. Shopify deliberately supports both, rather than letting either mode dominate. For engineering teams moving toward more asynchronous practices, maintaining that deliberate space for social connection is not a luxury—it is a necessary counterpart to the productivity gains that asynchrony provides.
