We believe in working online as much as possible, mostly because it makes things accessible and inclusive:
- Face-to-face meetings and conference calls are sometimes necessary, but they tend to be inefficient, requiring all participants to be available at the same time. We prefer working asynchronously, making it easy for people to take part if and when they want.
- Digital content can survive and evolve into something ultimately useful. Post-its and fancy paper prototypes turn stale. Notes captured in a Hackpad have at least a shot at being recycled down the line.
- Finally, when you work online, people have an easier time to get involved into things that they weren’t specifically invited to. It is surprising how often one of us jump into a discussion on GitHub that they were notified of on Slack.
A few tools we use across the whole team;
- We use Slack for most interactions. It also integrates with many 3rd party services we use and provides a ton of useful notifications (e.g. new issue on a GitHub issue).
- GitHub is where we track pretty much everything; recruitment, marketing, development, operations…
- Google apps (Gmail & Google Docs mostly) for email, documents, spreadsheets, forms…
- Often times, we will draft documents on Dropbox Paper (e.g. client proposal or SCRUM notes).
We also use WeChat, mostly because it works great both in China and abroad, as well as InVision to share our design work and collect feedback.