Twenty-three people, eight time zones, zero mandatory meetings
TechCorp is a product company that builds analytics tooling for e-commerce operators. What makes them unusual isn’t their product — it’s their team. Twenty-three people spread across eight time zones, from Vancouver to Tallinn, with a standing policy that no meeting is mandatory if the same outcome can be achieved asynchronously.
“We didn’t start remote-first as a philosophy,” said Amara Diallo, TechCorp’s CEO and co-founder. “We started it because the best people for our team happened to live in different countries. The philosophy came from necessity, and then we got obsessed with making it work properly.”
The problem with project management tools built for offices
For the first year and a half, TechCorp ran on a popular task management tool that most of the team had used at previous jobs. It was familiar, but it was designed around the assumption that people would sync up regularly in real time to fill the gaps. Dependencies were communicated in status meetings. Blockers were raised in standups. Context lived in people’s heads and leaked out in Slack threads that were impossible to search later.
“When your team is in the same building, those informal syncs happen naturally,” said Tomasz Wierzbicki, TechCorp’s Head of Product. “When your team spans Vancouver, London, Warsaw, and Colombo, there is no hallway. If the information isn’t written down and structured, it doesn’t exist.”
By mid-2023, TechCorp had grown from eight to twenty-three people and the coordination overhead was becoming unsustainable. Features were getting stuck at handoffs. Decisions made during a video call at 9am London time weren’t visible to the Colombo team until the next day, often arriving with no context about why the decision was made.
Why Pulse
TechCorp evaluated four tools before choosing Pulse. The deciding factors were Pulse’s structured async comment threads, which let team members have full project conversations without scheduling a call, and the time-zone–aware availability display that shows who is in working hours at any given moment.
“What we needed wasn’t just a task tracker,” Amara said. “We needed a shared brain — something that holds context, surfaces blockers without someone having to manually flag them, and makes it possible for a developer in Tallinn to hand off to a developer in Vancouver without either of them needing to be awake at the same time.”
Going fully async: month by month
TechCorp migrated to Pulse over three weeks in September 2023. In the first month, they kept a weekly optional video sync as a safety net. By month two, only four of the twenty-three team members were joining it. By month three, they cancelled it entirely.
“That was the moment I knew we’d actually done it,” Tomasz said. “Nobody missed it. Everything that would have been said in that meeting was already written in Pulse.”
Key to the transition was TechCorp’s adoption of Pulse’s project brief format, which requires every new project to include a written problem statement, success criteria, dependencies, and open questions before any work begins. It added about forty-five minutes of upfront writing per project, and saved hours of back-and-forth later.
Outcomes after nine months
- Synchronous meeting time reduced from an average of 7.4 hours per person per week to 1.1 hours
- Average time to resolve a cross-timezone blocker dropped from 31 hours to 6 hours
- Feature delivery lead time decreased by 28%
- Employee satisfaction score (internal survey) increased from 72 to 89 out of 100
- Zero team members cited “communication overhead” as a top frustration in the most recent quarterly review, compared to fourteen of twenty-three the prior year
What the team says
Karim Mansour is a senior engineer based in Cairo who joined TechCorp after two years at a company that required everyone to attend a daily all-hands video call despite spanning five time zones. The contrast, he said, was immediate.
“At my previous company, I spent forty-five minutes every morning on a call where maybe five minutes were relevant to me,” Karim said. “At TechCorp with Pulse, I open the tool, I see exactly what’s changed since I was last online, what needs my attention, and what’s blocked. I’m productive within ten minutes of starting my day.”
Pulse’s notification digest — which batches updates and delivers them at configurable intervals rather than pinging in real time — was particularly valued. “Real-time notifications destroy deep work,” Amara said. “Async digests let people choose when to context-switch. That’s not a small thing.”
What async-first actually requires
Amara is careful to note that Pulse didn’t create TechCorp’s async culture — it made it executable. “The tool only works if people commit to writing things down, to being explicit about context, to treating written communication as a first-class skill,” she said. “Pulse gives you the structure. You still have to bring the discipline.”
For teams willing to make that commitment, she believes the return is exceptional. “We have people in eight time zones and we ship faster than most thirty-person co-located teams I know. That’s not an accident. That’s what happens when you stop losing hours to coordination overhead and put that time back into actual work.”