Microblink's leadership sync went async across four time zones

Microblink's leadership and program management teams held a weekly sync, and it was expensive twice over.The first cost is the familiar one. A recurring meeting pulls senior people out of whatever they are in the middle of, for status that mostly could have been written down.The second cost is specific to distributed teams. Microblink's people are spread across time zones, and finding a slot that works for everyone is a scheduling exercise that gets harder every time somebody new joins. The slot that eventually gets chosen is always wrong for somebody.

Microblink moved the meeting into Slack with Troopr Check-ins.Each person is prompted at a time that fits their day and answers in a few clicks. Troopr compiles the responses into a report and shares it in Slack and in the Troopr dashboard, so the record exists in both the place people work and the place people go to look things up later.There is no shared slot to find, because there is no longer a slot.

Microblink saves roughly 30 minutes per member per meeting, and the scheduling problem stopped existing rather than getting solved.Transparency improved as a side effect. When the update is written and public in a channel, it is visible to people who were never on the invite.