Building and Scaling a Distributed and Inclusive Team
summary
Travis CI runs a distributed team of 40 builders across eight countries speaking nine languages from 15 home countries, with roughly 50% remote and a 12‑hour staggered on‑call rotation to cover time zones. Communication centers on GitHub issues and Slack (deploy channel tied to Heroku), open decision threads that sometimes take a year to resolve, and a public builders manual for runbooks and onboarding. These choices increase visibility and diversity but lengthen decisions and require continuous documentation.
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chapters (19)
- 0:00Start
- 3:41Distributed teams increase the chances of diversity due to having people from different cultures and backgrounds. Travis CI Team
- 4:24Communication Culture
- 7:19#incident-response
- 11:03GitHub Issues Create Visibility
- 11:46how-we-work
- 12:30Continuous Integration for Company Culture
- 14:07Inclusive Decision Making
- 15:16Distributed Teams Incura Tax on Communication
- 16:09Don't move information to authority, move authority to the information.
- 17:24"Less oral communication means more accidental documentation." Travis CI Team
- 19:30Continuous Improvement Talks
- 20:42A Distributed Team's Biggest Challenge: Inclusive Communication
- 21:24Engineering Culture
- 23:01Blameless Culture
- 23:59Engineers Work Customer Support
- 28:04English is Ambiguous
- 29:28Tone and Nuance Get Lost in Writing
- 30:01Never attribute to malice or stupidity that which is adequately explained by a missing perspective.
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