Latest / Tech Leadership with Fexingo: Engineering Managers, CTOs, and Technical Leadership Conversations / How One Engineering Manager Cut Cognitive Load by Adopting Async Communication
Transcript
- Lucas: So I want to talk about something that I think a lot of engineering teams are wrestling with right now — and that's the sheer weight of real-time communication. The Slack pings, the back to back standups, the 'quick sync' that somehow eats an hour. Luna: The cognitive load of constant interruption. I've definitely felt that. It's like your brain is in a blender from 9 to 11 AM and then you're supposed to do actual deep work. Lucas: Exactly. And there's a growing movement — I wouldn't call it a trend yet, more of a quiet shift — toward async-first communication. Not fully eliminating real-time, but making it the exception rather than the default. Lucas: I want to anchor this in a specific case. There's a mid-sized SaaS company — about a hundred and twenty engineers — that decided to go async-first about eighteen months ago. They documented the whole thing, and the numbers are pretty striking. Luna: Before we go deeper — I'm guessing this show is ad-free, listener-supported. If this conversation is worth a coffee to you, that link is buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Low-key, no pressure, just helps keep the lights on. Lucas: Appreciate that. So this company — let's call them DataFlow — they were a typical high-communication culture. Lots of Slack, lots of meetings, and their developer survey showed that people felt they only got about two hours of uninterrupted work per day. Luna: Two hours. That's brutal. Lucas: Yeah. So the VP of Engineering — a woman named Priya — she introduced what she called 'async-first' with three specific policies. First, all standups became written. A simple Slack thread where everyone posted their update by 10 AM. Lucas: Second, any decision that could affect two or more teams required a written one-pager shared in a shared drive before any meeting could be called. And third, Wednesday became a no-meeting day. Not optional — hard blocked on the calendar. Luna: Did people resist? I imagine that kind of change — especially removing the daily standup ritual — can feel like you're losing visibility. Lucas: Oh, there was pushback. Some managers felt they couldn't 'read the room' without seeing faces. But Priya framed it as a trust exercise — you're trusting people to do their work and communicate when it matters. Lucas: After six months, they measured the impact. Total meeting hours dropped by 40 percent. Deep work time — as measured by a simple focus-time tracker — went from 2 hours to 4.2 hours per day. And surprisingly, project delivery speed didn't change. Luna: Wait — delivery speed stayed flat? Usually you'd think more meetings mean better alignment, so you'd lose some coordination by cutting them. Lucas: Right, that's the conventional wisdom. But Priya's argument was that the meetings weren't actually creating alignment — they were creating the illusion of alignment. People would agree in the meeting, then go write code that didn't match because they'd misunderstood. Lucas: With written proposals, there's a permanent record. You can read it twice. You can comment line by line. The async format actually improved decision quality because people had time to think before responding. Luna: That's a really interesting reframe. The meeting isn't the unit of alignment — the document is. Lucas: Exactly. And there's another dimension here that I think is underappreciated: inclusivity. For people with ADHD, for introverts, for folks in different time zones — real-time communication privileges a certain kind of quick-on-your-feet thinking that not everyone has. Luna: Yeah, I've heard that from neurodiverse colleagues. The pressure to speak up in a meeting can be paralyzing. Async gives them a chance to formulate their thoughts. Lucas: Priya's team saw that too. Their engagement survey after the change showed that engineers who'd previously been quiet in meetings were suddenly contributing detailed, thoughtful feedback on RFCs and decision docs. Luna: But I want to push back a little. Async isn't a silver bullet. There's a risk of information silos — people don't read the docs, or they skim them and miss nuance. How did DataFlow handle that? Lucas: Good question. They had a few safeguards. One, every major decision doc had a mandatory 'read and acknowledge' step before any related work could start. Two, they had a weekly 30-minute 'sync' where teams could raise anything that needed real-time discussion. Lucas: And critically, they didn't ban all meetings. They just made them the exception. If you wanted to call a meeting, you had to write a one-pager first and state why real-time was necessary. That filter killed a lot of unnecessary meetings by itself. Luna: So the meeting becomes the last resort, not the first instinct. That's a cultural shift. Lucas: It is. And it takes top-down reinforcement. Priya had to model it herself — she stopped sending Slack messages that demanded immediate replies. She'd say 'no rush, whenever you get to it' in her messages. She also stopped checking Slack after 5 PM to set an example. Luna: That's huge. If the VP is always available, the team feels they have to be too. Lucas: Right. And one more thing — they introduced 'office hours' twice a week. Two hours where anyone could book a 15-minute slot with any leader if they needed a real-time conversation. That way, urgent things still got handled, but they were contained. Luna: I like that. It's like a pressure valve. You're not saying 'never talk to me,' you're saying 'let's talk at the right time.' Lucas: Exactly. And the results held over a year. They measured burnout indicators — self-reported exhaustion — and those dropped by 30 percent. And the turnover rate among engineers went from about 18 percent annually down to 10 percent. Luna: That's a concrete retention win. I imagine that alone pays for the friction of the transition. Lucas: Absolutely. So if you're an engineering leader listening, I'd say start small. Pick one day a week as a no-meeting day. Or swap one daily standup for a written thread. Measure the deep-work time before and after. The data will tell you if it's working. Luna: And if you want to dig deeper, Priya actually published a blog post detailing the whole experiment. I'll link it in the show notes. But I think the core lesson is: less real-time communication doesn't mean less communication. It means more intentional communication. Lucas: Well said. And honestly, in a world where our attention is the scarcest resource we have, I think async-first is one of the highest-leverage changes a team can make. Luna: Alright, next episode I want to talk about something that's been on my mind — engineering team size and when it's time to split a team. But that's for another day. Lucas: Looking forward to it. For now, thanks for listening, everyone.