Craftsmanship against request asymmetry
What makes asynchronous work really work.
Some history
I've never worked in a traditional office. For the past decade, I've been in fully remote environments - highly autonomous from the earliest stage of my career and inherently asynchronous. Part of that was team seniority, the rest was geography.
There was no difference across the domains I worked in. Engineering, product marketing, community - asynchrony wasn't a preference. It was the only way the work could happen.
The anecdote
There's a practice from my early days at Auth0 that's worth sharing and revisiting at the end of this piece. We had an unwritten rule: if you couldn't make progress on a problem within roughly 30 minutes, you reached out to a teammate. If they couldn't help, you escalated to a subject-matter expert.
Simple in theory. Harder in practice when your teammate was on the opposite side of the world and the next opportunity for help was several hours away.
The problem
It's easy to assume the challenge in asynchronous work comes from the obvious variables:
- Different working hours
- Different schedules
- Different responsibilities across domains
But that's not the root of the problem.
The real friction appears before any collaboration even begins. It starts the moment you sit down to define what you need to do. You open your task manager, try to understand the work, and establish the basic context required to move forward.
Without that clarity, everything downstream slows.
Context is king.
The work process
To make asynchronous work actually work, everything begins with one element: craftsmanship.
At its core, craftsmanship is about how people approach their work. Most think of work as the final output - a shipped feature, a marketing launch, a community initiative. Others expand that view to include the technical or creative process that leads to the result.
But there's a third layer that becomes essential in asynchronous environments: the quality of communication, especially written one.
Those three elements essentially form the work process.
In async setups, writing isn't a companion to the work. It is the work. It's how context is created, transferred, and preserved. Without it, no process or output can scale across time zones, schedules, or domains. Not to mention, achieve highest possible quality.
Craftsmanship
Everything starts with quality. That's why you hire people who approach their discipline as a craft. They hold a clear internal standard for what good work looks like, not just the final output, but the decisions, structure, and reasoning that lead to it. In this sense, product means the work itself, no matter the domain you operate in.
Craftsmen don't wait for external approval. If something isn't right, they refine it until it is. That intrinsic bar for quality gives them the ability to break complex work into smaller, understandable pieces, making the process transparent to others.
And because they hold themselves to high standards, they expect the same from the people they work with:
- High-fidelity transparency in how work is built
- Total ownership of outcomes
- Extreme attention to craft and detail
- Respect for the craft of others, across the entire process
These aren't preferences. They are the prerequisites that make asynchronous work sustainable and the conditions that naturally solve the request asymmetry problem.
What makes asynchronous work really work
Asynchronous work functions when everyone provides a high-quality work process to others and expects the same in return. That reciprocity is what resolves the request asymmetry problem.
Regardless of who is doing work for whom, one element is always shared: context. Context sets expectations. It defines the work, the process behind it, and the communication required to move it forward.
Async work isn't about creating the bare minimum of tasks in Linear. And it isn't about doing the work for someone else. It's about doing the context work yourself before asking for another person's attention. The more clearly we specify what we need from each other, the more efficient and higher quality the execution becomes.
Craftsmen know the difference between "not enough" and "on point." When everyone operates with that standard, asynchronous work stops being a constraint and becomes an accelerator.
The anecdote follow-up
When the core context is clear, technically and conceptually, you already have what you need to begin the work. You no longer depend on someone else to unblock you in the moment.
Remember the hours lost waiting for a teammate across the world to respond?
With the right context in place, that problem disappears.