Asynchronous Communication with Cate Huston of DuckDuckGo

**Dan Lines** (0:02)
Hey, everyone, welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm Dan Lines, and today's topic is asynchronous communication. How to communicate with and improve your newly remote Dev team. Joining me today is Cate Huston, a distributed Dev team expert, and currently the Director of Engineering for Mobile at DuckDuckGo.
Cate, so happy to have you on Dev Interrupted today.

**Cate Huston** (0:29)
Thank you so much for having me.

**Dan Lines** (0:33)
Before we get into our main topic here, where we'll talk about async communication and probably some other great stuff, I usually like to give some context about your team at DuckDuckGo, how many people, how many Dev teams, are you remote or not, things like that.

**Cate Huston** (0:58)
Yeah, sure. So DuckDuckGo is, I think we're just around hitting 100 people now, but growing.
And so I'm what we call the FDRI, or the Functional Directly Responsible Individual for our mobile org, which is I think a bit over 10 people right now, but we're hiring aggressively. And so I'm expecting it to to double in size over the next few months.

**Dan Lines** (1:27)
Oh, that will be exciting.

**Cate Huston** (1:29)
Yeah, I know. It's a really exciting time to have joined. I joined like five months ago, and so we've had iOS 14, we have all this growth.
And DuckDuckGo has always been a distributing company. And so the current world situation is an opportunity for us, is kind of more people look for that kind of work.

**Dan Lines** (1:53)
Yeah, so yeah, you're saying even before the COVID stuff hit everybody around the globe, was everyone at DuckDuckGo already fully remote?

**Cate Huston** (2:05)
Yeah, yeah, totally. Like there's a little office and I think it's called Pioley in Philadelphia, I wanna say, my US geography is not strong.
But like it's, you know, there's a few people there. I think people go to the office if they want to, but like otherwise, we're based all over the place. My team's mainly in Europe, but all over Europe, you know, somebody in Slovenia, somebody in Scotland, I'm in Ireland. And then we also have somebody on the West Coast of Canada.

**Dan Lines** (2:36)
Oh, that's amazing. I love your setup.
And yeah, I think a lot of our listeners are now in that remote type situation, regardless of if they're distributed, you know, all over the world, still just going remote is a really, you know, big change for everybody. And, you know, that kind of leads to the topic that we wanted to get into here around asynchronous communication. I think in one of your blogs, you titled it like re-architecting communication, but what does asynchronous communication mean to you?

**Cate Huston** (3:11)
So it's text-based and it happens when it makes sense to the people involved, you know?
So at DuckDuckGo, we use Asana a lot. So, you know, if somebody has kind of like, so one example, for example, is we have a product review process, right? So I was looking at one right before I joined this call and, you know, the guy who's writing this feature, he's based in Poland. And so in his morning, he put together this product review feedback and he's like, this is the feature, this is how it's going to work. And he asked for feedback and then, you know, the product manager weighed in. She's on the East Coast.
You know, the head of product weighed in. I think he's also on the East Coast, but I don't really know. A designer weighed in, he's in the Netherlands and everybody just did it as it made sense in their day. And like, then it kind of pushed forward to towards a conclusion and an approval.

**Dan Lines** (4:06)
Yeah, that's interesting. So I guess one of the key components of it is, it's all, you're saying it's all tech space. So you do that like in Asana, or you're doing it over Slack, or where does that text communication happen?

**Cate Huston** (4:21)
Generally in Asana, like we don't use Slack, we use Matamost and actually all our conversation disappears after seven days. Like we really do treat Matamost as like a transient channel. And then Asana is the record, you know? So Asana is a test space management system, but you couldn't, it turns out, really use it for literally anything, right?
And so that's how we use it. But before I joined DuckDuckGo, it was automatic and they like essentially use an internal blogging system that I think you can buy now called P2.
And then it was the same kind of thinking and then anything that mattered went on P2, right? So there was a saying of like P2, it didn't happen. And so even if that chatter takes place in there, we use Slack, like if it's important, it should go to the kind of long-term storage or like whatever hive mind, which is this kind of different form.