We don’t know what we are doing and that’s ok because we have a core product that is the best in the world and the periphery to that is “so, what now?”. We have short and long term goals, and an extremely viable business with an excellent sales force. But yeah — for all the solidity of what we’ve built so far (and have been successful at selling) there’s ask a lot of blue sky above us and it’s all our jobs to reach for it.
Blue sky is a challenge because while don’t know how to get there, we can figure it out by talking, having ideas, finding out which ones rock, refining them, going off and hacking, and coming back and talking about it some more.
Things that work perfectly fine when working remotely: ideas, proofs of concept, hacking, thinking. Things that suck remotely: talking about stuff.
I would go crazy if I didn’t get the hybrid time in the office that I do, with my colleagues. Funnily, the top notch conversations are the ones that start in the office but then happen while we are walking around the business park on foot. How do you feel out a controversial idea on zoom when the call just ends and you have no soft touch ways of winding back from professional conflict? Does everyone who works remotely have some magical team juju that means they mostly agree on stuff all the time? Are you remote-first people all working on such clearly defined goals that you never have to go through the strife of what the goals should be in the first place?