I like flow as much as anyone but find the thought of working multiple days without speaking to my team to be crazy, I'd feel like none of us would be able to move as fast alone as we do together, and half the time would end up following rabbitholes, or spending too much time on the wrong things because we'd never check in for an opinion. The only way I'd see a full or more days of work without communicating working well is if we'd work on larger amounts of releasable code at once, but then there's more chances of conflicts, reviews get longer and harder to do and there's more risk releasing.
I think having a team with 1 rotating person responsible to handle all external requests per week, and everyone else being focused on their work but still being able to pair when needed, ask questions provide guidance, etc to be really cool. All of this remote, of course.
Thanks, yep, those are all legitimate concerns about whether this would scale.
It's occurred to me that Stripe's email transparency[1] could help (although they discovered limitations with that approach too, and have been good about publishing those).
We're lucky (in some ways) not to have a large inbound feedback load, which is surely also a factor. Thanks for the external-request rotation suggestion; that's a good idea to provide a refresher from focus work when the burden starts to affect the team.
Honestly though, I have to re-state that it's been so refreshing and enabling to work this way that I wonder whether there'd be ways to scale up and solve the consensus, conflict and opinion problems you mention.
Despite that, I'd add another problem to the pile: not everyone is going to be able to contribute at equal pace at all times (for various completely valid reasons) in a large enough team - and there needs to be genuine cultural understanding and acceptance of that which I believe is frequently absent from high-intensity startup environments.
That’s an interesting idea regarding rotating external request handling. Do the team members not currently on call forward requests to those on call? How do you manage continuity of communication once the rotation has shifted?
We usually sync out of hours on-call with the "handle requests from outside the team" so that while you're at work you're the same person, everyone in the company knows to go to a specific slack room for these requests to our team, or they can straight up create a "change request" ticket in our jira board if the request can be done few hours/days later.
Usually there's nothing (in almost 4 years I think less than 5) that goes across weeks that's still in progress. We have a very low volume of actual incidents, and external requests that are sizeable enough get turned into actual prioritised stories by the next planning.
I think having a team with 1 rotating person responsible to handle all external requests per week, and everyone else being focused on their work but still being able to pair when needed, ask questions provide guidance, etc to be really cool. All of this remote, of course.