Surprise Castle
Open and Async: The collaborative software development playbook for remote and distributed teams

Open and Async: The collaborative software development playbook for remote and distributed teams - Paperback

$21.99
$29.99
-27%
Quantity
01

Pay over time for orders over $35.00 with

Offers & Perks

Earn 21 points with this purchase

Added to your rewards balance after checkout.

100 points welcome bonus

Create an account and start with extra points.

Join now
Availability:In StockContributor:Ben BalterPublish date:7/21/2026Pages:578
Languages:EnglishPublisher:Open & ASYNC LLC.ISBN-13:9798995754213UPC:9798995754213Book Category:Business & Economics, ComputersBook Subcategory:Leadership, Organizational Behavior, Software Development & EngineeringBook Topic:ToolsSize:9.00 x 6.00 x 1.17 inchesWeight:0.763Product ID:SCBXGPP2F9

Working from home working remotely.

Your company survived the pandemic by shipping everyone a laptop, bolting Zoom onto existing workflows, and declaring victory. That wasn't remote work. That was office work in sweatpants - same meetings, same approval chains, same "quick sync" culture, just piped through a webcam.

Open and Async is the playbook for the teams that actually figured it out. Drawn from more than a decade at GitHub - the company that's been remote-first since before it was fashionable - it's an opinionated, battle-tested guide to the two practices that make distributed work succeed: radical transparency and asynchronous communication. Async is the operating system; remote is the hardware.

For managers

Build teams that ship without constant synchronous coordination. Create a documentation culture that scales across time zones. Retain your best people by respecting their time, their focus, and their intelligence - while advancing a career built on outcomes, not optics.

For individual contributors

Become visible, effective, and promotable without hallway politics or performative face time. Build a career on the strength of your work, not the luck of your seating chart.

Inside you'll learn:

  • Why everything should have a URL
  • How to treat meetings as escalation, not default
  • How to measure impact over input
  • Patterns for leading across time zones
  • How to navigate resistance to change
  • How to write decisions that outlive the meeting
  • How to make the shift stick long after the novelty wears off

Stop digitizing the office. Start building something better.

Languages:EnglishPublisher:Open & ASYNC LLC.ISBN-13:9798995754213UPC:9798995754213Book Category:Business & Economics, ComputersBook Subcategory:Leadership, Organizational Behavior, Software Development & EngineeringBook Topic:ToolsSize:9.00 x 6.00 x 1.17 inchesWeight:0.763Product ID:SCBXGPP2F9
Balter, Ben: - "Ben Balter spent more than a decade at GitHub, most recently as Director of Hubber Enablement, where he helped thousands of GitHubbers do their best remote work. A former Presidential Innovation Fellow and GitHub's first Government Evangelist, he's spent nearly two decades building software across open-source communities, government, startups, and large organizations - and the last decade proving that async-first teams don't just keep up, they pull ahead."
Publisher: Open & ASYNC LLC.

Contributor(s)

Ben Balter

Free shipping on orders over $75. Standard shipping takes 3-7 business days. Eligible items may be returned within 30 days of delivery. Conditions apply.