Three years remote, no office: what actually mattered

Hubcove has never had an office. The team is spread across a handful of time zones, and that was a deliberate choice, not a pandemic-era default we never reversed. Three years in, a few things surprised us about what actually makes that work.

Overlap hours matter less than we thought, and response norms matter more. We don't require everyone to be online at the same two hours a day. What we do require is that if someone is blocked on you, you respond within a defined window even if it's just 'saw this, will look properly in the morning'. That one norm removed most of the friction people associate with async work.

Writing things down is the actual product of a remote team, not a nice-to-have. Decisions that only exist in someone's head might as well not exist for a teammate eight time zones away. We use Hubcove's own workspace for this — which is a useful forcing function, since we notice the rough edges before customers do.

The thing we underestimated: calls still matter, just fewer of them and shorter. A 15-minute call resolves in one pass what a day of back-and-forth comments sometimes can't. We didn't go all-async on purpose; we just got better at knowing which conversations need a call and which don't.