Should internal communication default to written async messages or to synchronous calls?
5 recorded positions from 5 people, first said Jun 28, 2021. They do not agree — the readings below are what each one actually argued.
Written narratives force deep thinking and speed up execution later
David Lieb · Sep 21, 2022
The best product review format is a succinct doc with general or directed questions handled asynchronously, followed by an in-person discussion of only what hasn't been said yet
About 90% of the time meetings instead become re-reading the doc or presenting the deck, because humans want to feel validated in their work with their boss in the room — and that is a big waste of time
42:13 20 Product: The No 1 Metric You Need To Look at When Building Product | Why the Best in Product Have No Domain Experience | Why You Should Not Hire From Incumbents & The Difference Between Good vs Great PMs with David Lieb, Visiting Group Partner @ Y Comb
Marty Cagan · Dec 7, 2022
Forcing teams to think deeply up front — for example via a written narrative — makes them move faster overall.
The written narrative forces you to really think things through, which speeds up everything after.
50:19 20 Product: Marty Cagan on The Four Questions of Great Product Management, Product Lessons from Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and eBay's Pierre Omidyar & The Difference Between Truly Great Product Teams and the Rest
Also on the record
Harry Stebbings · Jun 28, 2021
Leadership today is very different from leadership of old — instead of chest-pumping in the HQ and firing up the org, it is remote and largely written
20:10 Leadership has shifted from oral chest pumping to remote written communication
Cliff Weitzman · May 9, 2026
Most long Slack messages should have been a phone call; long Slack threads waste engineers' coding time and details belong in the PR commit message instead
A call gets the answer immediately and allows follow-up questions; reading Slack pulls engineers away from coding
55:59 Call instead of long written threads
Emilie Choi · Aug 23, 2021
In a remote-first company leaders easily get disconnected from employees, so a leader should write a regular weekly note to the entire company
Weekly direct communication maintains connection that remote work erodes; she models it on Angela Ahrendts reaching Apple employees through their phones
9:03 Regular written weekly notes substitute for in person connection in remote companies
Your assistant can query this graph directly — 5 positions here, 19,646 across the corpus. Add 996.fm over MCP.