big-tent-8.md

Matt Toback: Hello! I'm Matt Toback, and welcome to Grafana's Big Tent, the podcast all about the people community, tools and tech around observability... And today, remote work. I'm here with Tom Wilkie. Hi, Tom. Tom? Toooooom! Tom is not here. Tom last-minute got pulled away, and in a true remote work fashion, it could even go knock on his door and say, "Tom, please, I need you." But that's okay. So Tom is in London, and Tom is having a lovely evening, but I am here with Darren Murph. Darren Murph is head of remote at GitLab. Hi, Darren.

Darren Murph: Matt, what a pleasure to be here!

Matt Toback: How do you feel about being my temporary Tom today? Is that something you're willing to step into?

Darren Murph: I'm here for it.

Matt Toback: Okay.

Darren Murph: It's a great honor. I'll do everything I can to live up to the usual Tom standards.

Matt Toback: I want a Tom, as opposed to Mat. And I love Mat; Mat's our other co-hosts, Mat Ryer. And I want a Tom because there was a moment in Grafana Labs history that set us on this remote-first path. And we were sitting at an off-site at that point, which we still call it off-site now; we were joking earlier that now we call them on-sites,? Because it's where we see people. And we were sitting there, and at that point we had had an office, a small office, 400 square feet in New York City; people crammed into it, but it was for people... And we had an office in Stockholm, Sweden, where a few of the developers worked. And we're at this moment, in this moment of inflection, when Grafana was growing. And I think at that point, we were -- I think we were probably about 30 people, but it felt like a lot. And it was maybe pushing ten developers in Stockholm. And as we were hiring, I think Tom got into an argument or a heated discussion about this idea of remote-first and remote-friendly... And this idea that if we started putting people remotely, but then also build people in the office, we would create this disparity between these two sets of people. And more importantly, we would create disparity in the way that we communicate. And we walked out of that off site, saying we're a remote-first company, and we have been since.

So I wanted to talk about this in the context of Big Tent and observability, because open source communities are remote-first just at their heart. And they have been forever and ever. And we've adopted so many of those techniques and tools and the way that folks have worked in open source as a way and as a template of how to build our organization. But we're not the only ones. So I'll stop talking and I'll pose it to you... Why does remote-first, why does remote work matter? And more importantly, why does it feel like more than just a perk? Like, why does it feel like a burgeoning global movement that's just getting started?

Darren Murph: I love this question. I love this topic. I love that we're fitting this into Big Tent. When I initially heard the title Big Tent, I thought "This is beautiful", because remote work expands the tent for more people to enter into an environment that works for them. And for people, even if they were happy with their old ways of working, they have an opportunity to see a new world, or see a new subset of people. Why does this matter? Why does this intrigue you so much?

For a long time pre-Covid if you could find an organization that would allow you to work remotely, it was at best a perk. And now, you see organizations who aren't just allowing remote work, but empowering and supporting remote work. And there's a big difference between someone allowing you to do something, and someone supporting you in doing something.

The global movement part is interesting. There's been a lot of ink spilled on the Great Attrition or the Great Resignation, but I prefer the Great Awakening.

Matt Toback: [04:07] Yeah... I hate it, by the way. Every time I see it, I'm like -- besides the fact that it just feels like headline noise, it just feels like it completely misses the point in some ways. I don't know what your thought is.

Darren Murph: It does. The Great Awakening is a much more accurate statement. And what I mean by that is we've had two years forced into a unique environment where we are given the time and space to be introspective on a level that wasn't really possible before. And this is why it matters. Why it matters is it enables people to take a close look at the intersection of work and life, and the ratio of work and life, and ask themselves "Is this right for me? Am I optimizing for the right things? Now that I've been exposed to having more time in my day and more purpose and more agency, am I okay with relinquishing that? Or should I start architecting and designing my career and my work life to better support my life-life?" At the core, that's why this matters. It started on the workforce, but what is happening is it's seeping into how people live their lives and how they interact with other people who are now thinking about the intersection of work and life very differently.

Matt Toback: You say the Great Awakening... What I was trying to pitch was the Great Realignment, as opposed to the Great Resignation. But it felt like the same version. You're kind of all of a sudden faced with this idea where you're taking stock again, and you're like, "Oh, can I really renegotiate what it means to work, to commute? What's the point of commuting?"

Even leading up to the pandemic, I was going into the office maybe a day, a week, two days a week, and missing people... It would take me out of how I was being productive, to go there to sit on the Zoom, and talk to people that were halfway around the world anyway. I guess that's nuts and bolts, but it does -- all of a sudden, it feels silly in hindsight.

Darren Murph: It does, and it's okay. You didn't know any better. But now that you've had exposure to how it can be done differently, it's a massive opportunity to build better.

Matt Toback: So then let's level-set on this podcast and where we're going to talk... Because we talked about kind of what level of atmosphere/stratosphere/outerspace we're going to talk... And this is not going to be a "Top 10 tips to get back into the office" or this is not going to be a "Here's how to turn your company into remote-first." How do you describe it? Like, where are we going to exist in this conversation?

Darren Murph: My goal is to look 10 or 20 years ahead, and how work and life has shifted, and then draw it back to right now where we are, and look at "How do we start building now for that future that we want?" The future of work is not something that will happen to us, it will be something we build; we might as well invest the energy in building something awesome.

Matt Toback: So how'd you How'd you get here? Probably you didn't come into the workforce and thought like this was your path. How'd you get here?

Darren Murph: Most people will choose what they want to be in life. And then they'll allow an HR department to tell them where they have to be in life to achieve that goal. And I did the opposite. So when I left university, I chose a life of flexibility. And I've found a career that would support that. It always seemed massively misaligned that people would just relinquish that much agency. This is your whole life we're talking about, and for many people if you spend eight plus hours a day over decades - are you just gonna give that away? It just never made sense to me. And so I was pretty fixated on this a long time ago. And remember, 15+ years ago remote work was really rare and really hard to pull off.

Matt Toback: Yeah, it was.

Darren Murph: [08:11] And it was difficult to find employers, let alone colleagues that would recognize that and see the Why. But look, I had a penchant for travel early on; my wife and I got married and we saw all 50 US states in our first five years of marriage, traveled to over 50 countries, over 40 national parks, and I earned a Guinness World Record in my field of profession. I didn't have to take a five-year sabbatical, I did it while doing that. And that's when the light bulb really went off for me that--

Matt Toback: Let's not skip over this Guinness World Record thing just for the moment... I know that you could find this about Darren out there, but for our audience that may not do the legwork, how does one both decide, achieve and then celebrate a Guinness -- yeah, actually, let's skip to the celebration. When you got it, what did you do?

Darren Murph: I celebrated. It was amazing. It was -- a plaque arrived in the mail. It's like, this is legit. This came from Guinness World Record factory, it has a big seal on it... We got it framed, we had an amazing dinner, and then went on an absolutely wild podcast circuit. So you'll find a lot of podcasts from that era. It was a unique record at the time. I'm the world's most prolific professional blogger. So I captured this record while I was managing editor at a consumer tech publication called Engadget. And if you boil it all the way down, it means that I'm a really fast writer.

So when the record was captured, it was over 17,000 articles over four years. And so the pace, the prolific part is what blew their minds. It was an article published on average every two hours, 24/7, 365, for four consecutive years. It was over 6 million words. So the stamina and the endurance... And mind you, this is while we were traveling. And so this is when the light bulb went off, and it became the impetus for a book that I wrote called "Living the Remote Dream", which is I didn't achieve a Guinness World Record in spite of remote work, I achieved a Guinness World Record BECAUSE of remote work. That award would have literally not been possible had I had to commute to work every day; just the hours I would have lost to the commute would have made the record impossible. It would have been -- like, I had an unfair advantage because I didn't have the commute.

Matt Toback: Yeah. So then I can kind of see the personal journey that informs this desire... You touched on something, you were like, "Oh, others could do this. Others can take advantage of this." But then what do you do with that? You write the book, you're on the circuit, and then -- but then there's a difference between kind of sharing the word, and then also getting involved in an organization. Give me a little there.

Darren Murph: It started as a very personal journey. I wanted more flexibility in my life. I didn't want to wait till I was 60 or 70 to start knocking things off of my bucket list. So it began as a very personal journey. But the deeper I got into it, I began to realize that if you could scale this, it has the power to change entire organizations. And then it has the power to change entire municipalities. And then it has the power to change entire communities. And then countries, and so on. And so my focus began to shift from the me to the greater good. How can I position myself where there's a platform where we're building for something much bigger? And that led me to GitLab. And it was right about this time that the journey went even deeper for me. My wife and I adopted a newborn at birth, just over three years ago. And the adoption and fostering process - it is such a beautiful and extraordinary journey. But it was not lost on me how much easier that journey was because I had a career that supported flexibility.

Matt Toback: [12:17] Yeah.

Matt Toback: And it has been the most transformative thing to happen to our family. And the a-ha moment at that point was "How many people want to foster and adopt? How many people are called to grow their families in this unique way, but aren't able to, or feel constricted because they can't fit this around the fringes of their rigid commute?" And so at that point, I became steadfastly focused on breaking down the mental barriers, and the workflow barriers, the operational barriers, doing anything that I could to expose people to what real remote work looks like, and the opportunity for both employer and the employee. Because of course, the adoption cause is very near and dear to my heart. But how many other causes are near and dear to the hearts of others that I'm not intimately familiar with? Where if they had this repurposed commute time, they could focus that energy on solving something that matters to them. That's really, really powerful, and that's a lot of what drives me today.

Matt Toback: Yeah, I think it's even -- what we've observed is it's even like beyond just the commute. It's being able to reclaim time in a way that makes sense for your schedule, or for your job, or for the way that you work. Because not everyone works the same way. And I think it's also a shift to what you deliver, as opposed to when you're there.. And I was having a conversation with our CEO, Raj, a couple weeks ago, and just lamenting -- or not lamenting, but just this feeling of like the Slack green dot, and this perception that because it's remote, it's like if green dot, someone's there, and not green dot, maybe they're not there. And even that takes a mental shift to where you -- I don't know, when I say that, does anything come to mind? But I'm just thinking this idea of - it's almost like if you were to look around the office and no one was there, you're like, "Oh, no one's working." That's not even remotely true. Everyone's working in a way that makes sense for their life. And if they're delivering, that's the important part.

Darren Murph: What's interesting is that there already was a classical model to describe this pre-Covid. It's ROWE - results-only work environment. And this was found - it wasn't particularly widespread, but it was a thing, which is "Look, we focus on the results. We care a lot less about how you get there, or the clothes that you wear while you're doing it, or at what time of the day or week that you accomplish this." That said, it is still a big shift, and remote work enables results-only work environments in a spectacular way, but it requires the tools, and it requires the mindset, that availability should not be a focal point, and visibility should not be a focal point. The more that you focus on the results that people drive, the more you allow them to focus on real innovation. Any effort that you spend on becoming visible or politicking in the organization, is time that you could have spent on innovation, or with your family and community. Either way, it's a lot more productive.

Matt Toback: Yeah. Well, in the organizations I think you and I want to work for, it would be wasted effort. And if it's working, then probably the company needs to decide what's important to it, in so many ways.

Darren Murph: Right.

Matt Toback: So I get that it benefits the individual... But then if the company is doing it, then it's just still a perk. So then let's make it bigger again, right?

Darren Murph: [15:58] It benefits organizations in a multitude of ways. Let's start with this... It de-risks the business in a massive way; it makes any organization more durable and more resilient. The tighter that business results are coupled to physical geography, the more at-risk a company is to things like geopolitical crises. And the less ready they are to capture the next wave of great talent, which will value flexibility in a way that many would not have even asked for in the past five years. You just weren't comfortable asking for that at the negotiating table. Like, we can talk about salary and title, but I'm going to ask you to live 6,000 miles away from headquarters, and work when I want during the day. That was a bit too far afield in the past. Now, that's table stakes.

Matt Toback: Yeah, yeah.

Darren Murph: And for companies that prepare themselves for that, they'll be in an amazing position to capture that talent and build greater durability. The other point here is it adds what I call the forcing function into the organization, where innovation is not optional. When you commit to being remote-first, you are committing to building a future where there is no set map to get there. There are no paved roads where we are going. And so if an organization commits to this at an executive level, it ensures that people will innovate when it comes to tooling and workflows and questioning "Are our values still where they need to be? Are they as robust as they need to be, now that they need to be operating principles and not just words on a wall?" I like this; it acts as an accountability partner for the organization to make sure it's continually leveling up... Because where we're going hasn't been done before. And I think that's a big benefit to the org.

Matt Toback: And do you think it really is just because it's new ground for the organization, it creates a space for that innovation? Or I'm just thinking, is there something that makes that uniquely tied to a remote organization?

Darren Murph: Yes, it does. Covid has created the most significant global permission slip to reevaluate operations that I have ever seen. If Covid had not happened and a traditionally collocated organization wanted to make a hard left turn and be remote-first, can you imagine the red tape and bureaucracy and PowerPoints to justify this? It would have taken years. Now we can just do it; everyone gets it. Do not squander that opportunity to cut through all of the petty arguments of "Is remote good or bad?" It is here. The only choice now is are you going to invest energy to making sure that you are as remote-fluent as possible, or as remote-fluent as your competitors, if you want to look at it through that lens?

Matt Toback: Yeah. Well, it's also interesting watching different organizations kind of now adapt post-Covid... They're like, "Well, where are people going to work? And when are they going to work? Let's talk hybrid, or let's talk this..." And we were chatting earlier, and I think you kind of pretty viscerally felt like that was missing the point. Like, don't fixate on where, fixate on how. Let's dig in there, because I really loved that when you were talking about it.

Darren Murph: This is so good, Matt. Look, the whole global narrative right now as we're recording this is so fixated on this return to office. "What are companies doing to return to office?" And I think how much energy has been spent revising a return to office decks, like "We're gonna go back in late 2020. Oh, let's revise that. It's gonna be early 2021. Oh, let's revise that." We have no idea. All of this energy is being spent. These are costs to the organization. How much better off would an organization have been if from the jump, they said, "We see remote-first happening. We don't know what it's going to look like, but we're committed to getting there, wherever there is. We're going to invest that energy into auditing and our tools and our workflows and our policies and our values."

[20:20] And if you fixate on the how - how do people work together? How do people build bonds together? How do we informally communicate? How do we adjust our meetings? How do we integrate asynchronous workflows into the hearts and minds of people? Fixating on the How, it removes the need to fixate on the Where. Because if you truly solve all of those Hows, as in "If one person is remote, everyone is remote", then you can just let people work wherever they want.

Look, if you've got a 40-year lease on a building, and you need to open it back up, then people could still go there to work remotely. If you fix the How, the Where becomes much, much less important. And I truly think that is the narrative that we should be focused on. Energy will be spent either way. Spend it in the right channel.

Matt Toback: Now you kind of got my head spinning a little, because now you're talking about like an education campaign... In some ways, your company gets it, but most of the people listening to this are probably at an organization that doesn't "get it", or it isn't first and foremost. So now people are caught between this -- maybe they're sitting here, nodding along, saying "Yeah, yeah! And I work this way, and I can be effective this way", and the company doesn't feel this way... I said let's not give tips, but let's just think about it. If I was sitting down with someone and they were thinking like, "How do I convince my company that this is valuable?", how do we do this?

Darren Murph: Well, first off, I would give it about one month, okay?

Matt Toback: Okay... To convince them, or...?

Darren Murph: Yeah. So Global Workplace Analytics - that's ran by Kate Lister. She is an amazing mind in this space, and has an incredible amount of patience. And she had enough patience to create a lot of tools that will essentially persuade people or show you the cost savings and the value etc, the numbers of why you should do this. So I would start at Global Workplace Analytics; they have world-class calculators.

The reason why I would only give it a month is that the actual answer to this is not about numbers. If you're really trying to find data of why the future looks different than the past, are you ever actually going to get it? And so the reason I say this is there will be some people listening to this podcast that agree -- they're just nodding up and down the whole time, like, "This is my future that I want to build." If that's you, don't waste your time at an organization that doesn't get it. If you can't persuade the people in a month, there's a better organization out there for you. And they want you. They want a mind like yours; they want your passion, because they recognize that this is the workplace's fax machine moment. And there are some orgs doubling down on the proverbial fax machine, and there are some saying we're throwing these out of the window without a clear roadmap of how to get to what's next. And they want you.

Matt Toback: Yeah.

Darren Murph: This is an amazing opportunity. There's a get-it factor that comes with this, and you've got to be sensitive to that. That's my heartfelt advice on that.

Matt Toback: As you're saying that, I got goosebumps, because -- I mean, we're all making career decisions over the course of our lifetime, and we're all trying to think like what's going to be fulfilling, and what are the values that we hold personally, and how do we get professional values to align with it... And sometimes we talk about tech and innovation, but then, almost like we said at the beginning, this is probably one of the biggest decisions that you can make as an individual that would impact your life holistically, about whether or not you choose to work with a company that aligns with -- some people are gonna say "No, I want to commute. I want to go in the office."

Darren Murph: [24:14] That's fine.

Matt Toback: Good. Then that's fine. But for the folks that we're talking about, the companies that we're talking about - you're right. In a way, it's early enough that it's self-selecting. People are opting into this way of working, and they're getting a template for how to do this well... And make some mistakes, and make some boneheaded moves, and we have, and I'm sure you have...

Darren Murph: Sure.

Matt Toback: ...but yeah, wow. I haven't thought about it that way. And then think like, "Then what? Then what happens?"

Darren Murph: If you're a builder, there's never been a better time to be in the workplace, because organizations need your help building. This is a fundamental rearchitecting of the operational underpinnings for every organization in which work can be done remotely. Granted, not every industry and org can work remotely. But if we're talking to industries that can, what an amazing time to build; if that excites you at all, please don't waste your time trying to persuade a mountain to move itself. Go find a river that's already flowing in this direction and put your energy and effort to it. I call it the remote community. The community needs you, and you've never been more welcome, and you've never had such amazing opportunity... So look for it, don't be afraid to take a leap if you have to. It's an amazing period of opportunity.

Break: [25:42]

Matt Toback: By the time this comes out, hopefully it will have already happened, but we are about -- I'm gonna go meet people that I've worked with now for the better part of two years in-person that I've never seen before. I'm psyched. And I drank the Kool Aid, we're remote-first, I love it... I love what it's done for my life, but as we've started to do more in-person things, we get asked a lot "Now what is the role of in-person?" It used to be "Go and get your team and lock in a room and go do a bunch of work." That doesn't feel true anymore. So how do you think about that? What is on-sites, now that we said, not off-sites? What role do on-sites play?

Darren Murph: First off, congrats on the upcoming - or maybe at the time of publishing, the outgoing on-site. I'm so glad you brought this up. A lot of people think that moving to remote means also moving away from seeing people in-person. And it couldn't be further from the truth. Remote-first forces you to have a really crisp in person strategy, in a way that you never really needed at a collocated office. Because look, people are going to commute and bump into each other. Like, why put any planning or effort into it? In a remote setting, you have to plan it, so I think it's even better. To your point, you're being very strategic about getting the team together, and making sure that people get to meet each other and build bonds and build rapport. I mean, there's just -- there's nothing like it.

So where does in-person fit? It has a seat at the table, and it has a very important seat at the table. I advise companies who are making this transition to allocate budget to getting teams together. Consider it for onboarding - it's a great way to really massively accelerate the cultural understanding at a company, if they jump in and they get to meet people in the first month. And then look to get sub-teams together every quarter or every other year and try to get the whole team together if it is feasible for your size of company, every 12 to 18 months. It means a lot. And so then that's where it fits in. It matters.

[27:52] But then the question is, "What do we do with this time together?" You made mention of getting together in-person in the past was locking yourself in a war room and doing a bunch of strategy work. That's still fine; it's doable. The highest ROI on in-person time in a remote setting is to use it for the things that you can't adequately do virtually. The boring solution here is have dinner together. Breaking bread and building rapport is so much richer; the food tastes better, the colors are richer, the laughter just sounds more beautiful. That's what you want to spend your time on. If you're going to fly people all over the world for a week together, please don't spend 80% of the time doing strategy. We can use document tools and video conferencing tools; they're really good at helping us collaborate and build strategy. Make sure that you spend most of your time getting to know each other. The 80/20 rule applies here. If you feel like spending 80% of your time doing work, flip it. Do 20%, and then hang out for the other 80%.

Matt Toback: That's sort of what we -- that's kind of it. I was in Chicago for our people team off-site, and we went in very deliberately and said, "Alright, let's do the things that we can't do on Zoom, that we can't do through normal work channels." And it was awesome.

I will say there's a little part of me that did crave that little bit of a warm room, in-person strategy, but that was because it was built on top of that relationship, that now I kind of felt like I wanted to do that. But that's also carried out beyond being in person, and now I think it's done so much. And I do think that it's a little bit of education saying it's not about not being in person. It's not about not spending time in person or only being virtual. That's such a -- it's a misread of it. Again, it's kind of like rebalancing how and where you spend that time. And if you're going to -- instead of commuting every day, save that up, and then go spend time together in some place and get the most out of that. That's going to pay dividends.

Darren Murph: And it's really a mind-bender for forced remote companies, where the only thing they know about remote work is what they've seen during Covid. I want to be really clear, Covid-induced work from home is not intentionally designed remote work.

Matt Toback: That's right.

Darren Murph: You can't have full-team on-sites during Covid. So we're trying to build for a world where these kinds of travel restrictions don't exist. It was a unique time. So for a lot of people, if that's your definition of remote work, trust me, it gets better when you're able to put more intentionality around it.

Matt Toback: Yeah. You're talking about this, and I want to ask you and put you on the spot... So a remote-first organization puts you in the place where you can innovate in processes, in the way that you communicate, both asynchronously and synchronously... What do you want? Like, what would you want right now at GitLab to make remote work better? If you could day-dream on tech.

Darren Murph: I would love technology that removes a lot of the manual process behind adding taxonomy and codification to the organization. So practically speaking, here's what I mean...

Matt Toback: [laughs] I was like, "You're gonna have to..."

Darren Murph: Oh, I have to give you an example. Right now, we do an amazing job of real-time documentation during work-related synchronous meetings. So everyone will have a Google Doc up, and we're documenting what's happening, and the key takeaways... It's built into the culture, so we're really good at it, we're really efficient at it. But then the next step is we have to get those key takeaways into the company handbooks. We have a single source of truth, it's like our operating manual for the company. And we want to put it in the place.

So to do that, you have to have a pretty firm understanding of the handbook, and you have to know enough about its structure to find where it needs to go and then look at what's old versus what needs to be updated... There's a lot of manual process that goes into it, and we value the rigor around it, so we do it... But many organizations would not put the amount of rigor around this, and so they just don't document. What a tragedy that is.

[32:07] So what I would love is technology that could listen in on these meetings, and not only transcribe what's happening, but be smart about it; understand what tone of voice belongs to what person, create taxonomy, create bullet points, and then using an API hook, look at your company handbook and figure out "Oh, we're talking about expense reports. That's probably in the finance section. Oh, here's what they were talking about. Let me make a merge request on their behalf. And I see who the code owner is for this page, the maintainer. Let me send it to them for approval", and it cuts out so much of the manual process.

I want that -- well, one, I want that at GitLab. But more broadly, I want that for the world. Because what I'm seeing is the biggest unlock for transitioning to remote is being a great writing culture. I have never seen a great remote culture that wasn't a great writing culture. And that is so hard to get right. So if technology can help organizations achieve that without the herculean task of making everyone a great storyteller, I think that we'll have much broader adoption of remote work.

Matt Toback: I mean, for us it's important because it also -- like, when we think about remote-first, we think about largely being asynchronous, right? Because we're across -- we're spanning time zones. And then when you're spanning time zones, the person that's awake at 9 AM their time can't ask a question for someone that's asleep at 3 AM. So then things have to be self-serve, things have to be written. But then, conversely, it changes who contributes and how they contribute. So now it's not just the loudest voice on a Zoom, or the loudest person in the meeting. So then also the contribution changes. And that also feels powerful. It feels like kind of a great leveler of the way that you can contribute on your teams.

Darren Murph: One of the great perks of remote work is the leveling. When you're in a meeting with the CEO and an intern, both of those individuals contribute with the same size font. That's really powerful. There's no loudest voice in the virtual room. We're both using size 12 Times New Roman. And what that does is it allows introverts and those who are more junior in the organization to contribute with a lot of confidence. Because when you contribute through that medium, the best idea wins. And isn't that what we should all want?

Matt Toback: Yeah. Is there anything that we should throw -- like, because we're early... Right? I think it's fair to say we're early in remote work. And I believe that. And in early products, there's things that you tried, that you throw away, because it didn't work. Like, what are we doing now that we should throw away even though we associated with remote work?

Darren Murph: We should throw away the notion that the tools we have right now will be the tools we'll always have. What's really fascinating about this forced remote work scenario that Covid has pushed the world into is that most of the world has made it work using office-first tools. Zoom, for example, was built in an office. It wasn't built virtually. A lot of Google's tools, like Chat, Hangouts, Gmail - they were built in an office. So what is amazing here is that we have figured out how to do remote work really well, using tools that weren't even designed for it. Can you imagine how good it's going to be now that there's product-market fit for tools that can be built for distributed teams, purpose-built?

So the thing you should throw away is like, "Hey, we've got it all figured out." Or "What we used during Covid - let's just keep doing that." Don't do that. Keep your eyes peeled for what's to come, because it's gonna get good. I'm very bullish on it.

Matt Toback: I'm also bullish on -- and I believe this deeply, but that open source is eating the world. I think we're going to continue to see inspiration from open source bleeding into corporate tech. And the reason that I think that'll happen is because these were distributed communities that found ways to work efficiently remotely, for the last 20 years.

[36:16] We even talked about it slightly before, even Git is a workflow that was built for people not sitting in the same place. And IRC - I used to hang out in IRC channels, and there were means of communication. This isn't like the "Back in my day, this is how we did it." I think that there's just been some lessons that have been learned that probably could stand to be incorporated by more traditional office environments, or former office companies. [37:02]

Darren Murph: For sure. One of the theories I have is that some of these great open source technologies will end up -- the people organizations will end up modeling some of the great technological process that's happened. GitLab is featured in the Journal of Organizational Design. A lot of great researchers studied how we ran our people, and they saw so many parallels to Git. And it's amazing. We learned a lot about how we can function really efficiently as people by looking at what functions really well in a distributed fashion, through open source technology.

Matt Toback: Yeah. One of the other things that I was thinking about, and I've been talking about, and I want to know what you think about this is - for years, switching jobs would come with a life switch. So you would have to maybe move to a whole new city, you'd have to move across the country. Or you'd have to change your commute. Or like now your commute would double and it takes away -- there's all these considerations. And with that, I think there's kind of some inertia. Even physically, the people that you surround yourself with, your social circles, who you hang out with after work - a lot of that is a big move, it's a big lift. Arguably, because of the tools and because of the tech, and because of your workstation, you can sign off on a Friday from one company, start at a new company on Monday, and very little about your world is upended. So what do we make of this? How does that change how a company needs to think about its employees, and in what experience it gives the employees?

Darren Murph: Two things on that. One, it's a massive opportunity for organizations. But the other side of that is it's a massive accountability partner for organizations. Companies no longer have the grip they had on employees. What we're seeing is the greatest transfer of institutional power that I've seen in my lifetime. Employees have more options than ever before. That means organizations have to be better than they were before. Organizations have to earn your longevity and your durability and your loyalty. Arguably, that's how it should have always been, but now they have to try a little harder.

Matt Toback: It's crisper.

Darren Murph: Yeah, it's crisper. I think that's awesome. I think that's awesome. It's another forcing function, so that the organization stays sharp, and you want your people treating the org like a product. You constantly want them thinking, "How can we make this product better? How can we build it in a way that's more resilient to outside forces?" Think about your workplace as a product. It's almost exactly the same thought that would go into it?

Matt Toback: Yeah, I mean, it's churn. Attrition and churn. Same, same.

Darren Murph: Yeah.

Matt Toback: So then practically, how do you think about that in seat now, when you're a product leader or as a head of remote leader? How do you encourage or where do you encourage the company to earn that?

Darren Murph: It's going to require a big mental shift, and it starts by understanding that in a great remote setting workplace culture is largely built outside of the office. For a long time organizations have fixated on "How do we make our internal scenario more appealing?" The foosball tables, the free beverages...

Matt Toback: [40:14] Cucumber water...

Darren Murph: Yeah, cucumber water. I love cucumber water. But in a remote-first world, employers have to understand that people are more aware of their local communities and their time with family than ever before. And they're going to value it more highly. And so organizations can do right by those people by making it more efficient to work there, more enjoyable, less busy work, less proving their work, less visibility exercises, and instead arming them with an amazing tool stack, crisp goals and objectives, and getting out of the way.

The best organizations will be the best at getting out of the way of their people and letting them do great work, so that they can go live great lives. So the question is, "Are we getting in the way of our own people?" If we are, we need to figure out how to not do that.

Matt Toback: Yeah, and even as you're answering that, I'm thinking like, "Oh, it's not a new challenge. Maybe it kind of moves the pieces in the board slightly, but it comes down to - you know, you want to work for a company that values you, but also trusts you, and that you trust.

Darren Murph: Correct.

Matt Toback: And if there's a base level of trust, then that's kind of fertile ground for -- you'll want to stay there and grow there within the organization. So we'll say okay, fine, that one's not remote related; maybe just exacerbated slightly by...

Darren Murph: Sure.

Matt Toback: So then communities -- so then now, when you're not within the bounds of your work environment, and when you don't get up, commute, go to work, go out for drinks, only surround yourself with... Like, now what?

Darren Murph: Man, what an amazing time for community. I look at communities in this lens, in two ways. One is I'll call it broadly the remote community. So I touched on this a bit earlier - there's a movement of people that believe that there's a better way to build organizational design going forward. And it really doesn't matter what organization they work at. They are collectively trying to build a better way of working, a template for how to do this, and then organizations plug into that template. And there's some amazing work being done.

Remote Connect was an amazing conference that pulled together a lot of people, and they did an amazing job on that. There are some burgeoning communities where -- Slack's Future Forum is another one. There's some more formally organized communities that are pulling together on this, but I just love how even though they're different organizations, they're rowing in the direction of "How do we build a more inclusive workplace for the future?" So I love that. There's more places than ever to plug in on that.

But then the second part of it - physical communities. And what's very interesting is that the shift to remote work will have an outsized impact on physical communities. You're like, "Wait, we're moving all of work virtually. How does this have a physical impact?" Well, it enables people to ask themselves, "Is the physical community that I'm in right now - is it the one that's actually ideal for me? Or is it the one that my last employer chose for me?" To your point earlier, if you were asked/forced to relocate to London or Singapore or San Francisco or Iowa, to some degree, the organization chose your physical community. And you've probably been doing the best you could with that. But what happens when you design your life for the community that really fulfills you? What happens if you move back home? What happens if you move 3,000 miles to be within walking distance of a hospital that's the only one in the country that specializes in the disorder that your child has?

[44:00] We're talking about massive quality of life improvements, by being able to look at communities, physical communities around the world, and say "Which one do I want to be in day to day?" Or if you're nomadic, "Which ones? Where do I want to spend my time and energy?" That's really powerful.

I look at the second and third-order impacts of remote work, and you look at just one thing like rural depopulation. You have small and midsized towns around the globe that have been gutted by the best people in the communities having no choice but to move to massive urban centers to build the careers that they want. That doesn't have to happen now. You can have a reversal of that. Maybe there's a resurgence of these places; just like cultural, just amazing -- just cradles of culture that can be revived by people having reverse inflows, and moving back to communities that matter to them.

This is big stuff. It's not going to happen overnight, but now the table is set for movements like this to actually happen... This is no longer a philosophical debate, or you know, "If 17 Things happen, then maybe this can happen." We can make it happen.

Matt Toback: Yeah. And I like that. I mean, yeah, the second and third-order impact to this; the world does -- in my view right now, I'm thinking, "Oh, it's cool, because I get to work with a bunch of people all over the world, and that gets to inform my opinion." Then you add ten years, and you add more people doing this, and the world starts to look different.

Darren Murph: Vastly different.

Matt Toback: What do you think? Where do you want to leave it when you sign off for the last time?

Darren Murph: I want people to really think about what they've been told in terms of how you have to live your life, and I want you to question all of it... Because we have the most amazing opportunity to take those preconceived notions and really challenge them. This is an opportunity to design your life, to influence communities, to have impact on a societal level that is transformational. And you get to do it while also building a career that fulfills you. You don't have to choose one or the other. So first, I want you to question all of that and think about "What do I do if I'm designing my life for something different?"

The second thing is, I want you to tell everybody you know. Because like my journey, it started as a very personal one. But what I've realized is that the most fulfillment comes from enabling other people, enabling other communities to do things differently. To not be held back by the bounds of what work used to be like. So share, help people think differently, inspire people. This is happening. This is happening. You are not going to put this genie back in the bottle. Distributed work is here and it will proliferate. Let's do something great with it. That's where I would leave you.

Matt Toback: Well, Darren, I think that's pretty much the best place to end today's conversation... And it sounds like to start a conversation in your own world, around your own people on this.

Alright, well, outro music will come up, and I'll say, "Sadly, that's all the time we have for today." Thanks to Darren Murph for joining us, and thanks to Darren for keeping the conversation, I think, "Where we want to go", and not being a "How to get back into the office", but it's more of a "What can we do if we stop thinking about going back in the office?" I think today I'm walking out with a feeling that we could do some pretty exceptional things.

I'm Matt Toback and I want to thank you for listening. We'll see you next time on Grafana's Big Tent.