Remote Work Life Podcast
At Remote Work Life, we spotlight successful location-independent entrepreneurs and established remote work professionals. Our interviews highlight their journeys and growth strategies, and their inspiring stories offer ideas for your entrepreneurial and professional ventures and reveal insights on thriving while working remotely.
Remote Work Life Podcast
RWL248 Inside A Fully Distributed Company Building Better Remote Rituals
In this episode of the Remote Work Life podcast, I look at how Parabol operates as a fully remote business. They’ve shaped their culture and day-to-day work around distance, time zones, and flexibility, not as an add-on, but as the foundation of how they function.
Parabol seems to approach communication differently from many companies, and the way they organise their week suggests a conscious effort to protect focus rather than fill calendars. Their hiring philosophy also hints at a distinctive view of what makes someone a good fit for a distributed team, and the way they handle compensation raises some interesting questions about fairness across locations.
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Hey, it's Alex Wilson Campbell here. Welcome back to the Remote Work Life podcast. In this series, I am trying to understand different remote businesses and trying to do a bit of research behind different remote businesses to understand what they do, how they got started, how they position themselves in the wider world of distributed work. And I'm going to publicize this particular episode, the video of the episode, um, in my my group. I've got a new group which I've started on a platform called School. And School, which is spelt with a K, S K Dou L, is essentially similar, it's similar to like a Facebook group, but a bit more interactive, a bit more um community-driven. I'm trying to do that, or I'm doing that because I have started uh a new jobs by email service. It's in beta at the moment, and it focuses on publicising jobs that are advertised as remote jobs. The jobs are mainly growth roles. So when I say growth, I mean sales, marketing, strategy, that that kind of angle. So what I'm doing is at the moment I'm in beta and I'm testing that. So this is all about um bringing attention to remote businesses, not not necessarily businesses that I know, but businesses that may, you know, you may want to know about yourself. You could do go and do your deeper research. And I always I always remind people to do much deeper research when it comes to um when it comes to you know finding out and figuring out which companies they want to work for. So the group and the beta list is very much in line with with that. So, but as I said, today uh wanted to continue with going along the lines of uh introducing you to different remote businesses, some that I've not heard of myself, actually. This particular business that I'm gonna talk to you about today, I don't have any personal connection. Um, and nothing here should be taken as a recommendation, it's just simply me looking at what's publicly available and sharing it with you. And today I'm talking about Parabol. I want to take a closer look at a company called Parabol. They focus on structured online meetings for distributed teams. Now, Parabol was founded in 2015 by Jordan Husney. And according to their origin story, the idea came from his time in management consulting. And he noticed himself that you know something quite interesting to him was that many senior leaders were already working with geographically spread teams, even before remote work had a name attached to it. And that observation seems to be what nudged the company's direction. Instead of trying to replace uh video conferencing or create another broad collaboration tool like Zoom, Parabol appears to have aimed at a fairly specific part of the market and a part and a specific sort of team, so like structured meetings. So they describe their platform as a way to run things like retrospectives and planning sessions with more order and consistency. The features they include high uh include things like uh guided templates, digital cards, timers, and automated uh summaries. The intention, at least, based on how they present it, is to bring a bit of shape to meetings that can easily drift without a framework, and we've all been there, haven't we? And Parabol positions itself as a fully distributed team, fully distributed company. They talk openly about their preference for flexible schedules, asynchronous communication, um, and limiting recurring meetings. They also point out that their team spans multiple countries, which aligns with the fully remote approach many companies have shifted towards. So, looking at the information that I've got available and that they share, the team itself, the product seems built around the idea that certain team rituals, especially in agile and project-driven environments, benefit from structure. Now, I'm not from an engineering background myself, so I can't speak to how these ceremonies typically function inside a technical team, but parabolic materials suggest they're aiming to make these recurring meetings clearer and easier to manage. Terms like retrospectives, planning sessions, and estimation meetings come up quite often in their descriptions. The platform includes things like digital sticky notes, multiplayer contribution, anonymous input options, and automated meeting summaries. From the outside looking in, the goal seems to be reducing the admin burden that often falls on one person and helping conversations move in a clear direction. Now, whether that's helpful or not will obviously depend on the type of work your team does, but it gives a sense of where Parabol places its focus. Now, their growth story is something which is quite interesting. Now, according to what I've seen, what I've researched, signups increased sharply during the pandemic, jumping from around 500 weekly to several thousand at peak demand. They've talked about having to scale their infrastructure quickly in response. Again, I can't comment on the product's effectiveness, but the surge does indicate there was appetite for tools addressing structured online meetings at that time. And I'm sure that, you know, as much as it probably hasn't grown, I think it's probably still still relevant now. Now the hiring approach stood out to me. Parabol describes using project-based assessments rather than typical interviews, which gives a small window into how they evaluate collaboration. They also mentioned providing US-based salaries regardless of location. Very nice, which is a detail some listeners may find relevant given the ongoing debates around location-based pay in remote work. Altogether, Parabol appears to be a company focusing on one piece of remote work and one piece of that particular puzzle, rather than trying to cover everything under one platform. So just to take a step back and summarize what Parabol seems to be offering here, it's a fully remote company built around the idea of adding structure to online meetings that follow particular formats, especially those linked to agile or team reflection cycles. They outline a clear position on flexible work, asynchronous communication, and global hiring. Their origin story points to a simple observation. Teams were already working across distances even before remote work became mainstream, and the platform appears to be their response to that. As with any tool, whether it's relevant will depend on your team's workflow. And this episode isn't an endorsement, it's simply an overview based on information that I've found online. If you're exploring tools in this space, Parabol is one of the companies you may want to look at and assess for your own team and your own needs. For me, the interest always comes back to how remote companies present themselves and the types of problems they're solving. Parabol sits at that category of businesses trying to make distributed collaboration more manageable. How useful that is for your context will be something only you and your team can determine. But I hope this episode is useful for you, even if you're just trying to understand, you know, the types of options you have in terms of fully remote organizations, whether you're looking to work with them or looking to work for them. I'll see you on the next episode.
