Should internal communication default to written async messages or to synchronous calls?

David Lieb · published 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 · published 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

Harry Stebbings · published 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 · published 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

Matteo Franceschetti · published Sep 12, 2026

A spouse who is also an executive should be treated exactly like a remote executive would be — non-urgent ideas sent as written messages, interruptions reserved for genuine urgency

Her framing — 'would you call a VP of Ops in New York at 10:15pm for this?' — is smart because her brain needs time to digest the day's information in order to perform

43:27 Default to written messages for non urgent matters reserving calls for genuine urgency even with a spouse executive

Emilie Choi · published 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