Leading a Distributed Team of Introverts

Most designers I know are introverts. We love to hide in our corner and imagine the pixels that could be. We love to write essays on our process. We sit on the train, headphones blocking out the world, deep into our Kindles while everyone socializes around us.

Yet most design teams I know are centered around in person interaction. We craft our offices out of big open spaces: perfect for the hovering art director to roam about. We fetishize the dream team locking themselves in a room together to create the next big thing. And we ask people to present their designs, in person, to a room full of others for critique.

GitHub didn’t have an office for the first six months I was an employee, and as of today, only about half our team works out of our main office. In this talk, I want to go over the systems and processes that we’ve developed as a distributed team, and why I think it’s an important lesson for introverts everywhere.