It’s fair to say that remote work is a hot topic. A growing number of visionary organizations like Zapier, Automattic, and Buffer have demonstrated for years how successful a remote-only model can be. On the other hand, many product companies have doubled down on maintaining centrally located, in-office teams.
While some companies do offer work from home days, or allow for a handful of high-demand, individual contributor roles to be distributed, it’s not the same as being remote-first. For the January Downtown UX Meetup here in Orlando, I gathered a panel of UX professionals working in remote-first organizations to talk about some of those differences.
The panel included Aarron Walter from InVision, Alexandra Mack from Ad Hoc, Andy Volpe from Gitlab, Arun George from Nuance Communications, Stephanie Bodendorfer from Hireology, and myself, representing Paylocity. We had a great time chatting about #remotelife and how a UX practice can thrive in a fully-distributed environment.