Jori Lallo on Working Effectively Across Different Timezones

We hire and grow the team within the same timezone brackets that our current teams are on. Product development is divided between teams.

Distributed decision making is not easy.

On async team building,  a lot of people on the team like baking and cooking. So we did a bake-off, and it became a monthly thing that everyone  likes.

On culture, it's  surprising how little culture differences there are. We hire craft-minded, empathetic, senior people  that care about what they are building. We have over 10 nationalities, and it's surprising how similar people are within the industry.

Based on timezones, Linear is divided into two teams; the EU team, and the US team. The team is made out of 20 people, 10 in engineering, and 10 across design, sales, recruiting,...

Putting things on paper helps when new people join the team. It's not about being on the right room at the right time.

There is one meeting across the whole company once a week, but we minimize these so people don't have to wake up super early or go to bed very late.  We care about work-life balance. Lots of team members have kids, and we respect people's free time.

Meeting in person and knowing each other outside work creates a different type of bond. We try to do continent-wide meetups focused on smaller groups.  Planning in person is also beneficial because  spending time on Zoom is exhausting.

Working on a 20 people company is very different from working on a 5 people company. At the beginning everyone had context, decisions were made on daily syncs, and projects were smaller. Since day one, we've relied on  project documentation and PRDs. We reflect a lot on how we work, and this has helped us collaborate  asynchronously .