Context
Like most large tech companies, Shopify went remote in March 2020 expecting to return. By May 2020 CEO Tobi Lütke decided the experiment had revealed something more interesting: Shopify could be a fundamentally different kind of company if it stopped pretending offices were the center of gravity.
Decision
Lütke announced 'digital by default' as a permanent operating model. The company invested in async-first practices, rewrote its meeting culture, redesigned how decisions got documented, and explicitly tied promotion criteria to written communication quality. Crucially, the company didn't just go remote — it went async.
Consequence
When Shopify went through a painful 20% layoff in 2022, the remaining culture was more resilient than peers because it had been deliberately constructed rather than improvised. Productivity per remaining employee held up. The async investment paid off precisely when the company had to do more with fewer people in different time zones.
“Remote is a location decision. Async is a culture decision.”
— the lesson, in one line
Lesson
Remote is a location decision. Async is a culture decision. If you only do the first, you keep all the meeting overhead and lose all the collaboration benefit. The remote companies that survived 2022 were the ones that committed to async early.
What most retellings miss
The promotion criteria rewrite was the actual unlock — once written communication quality affected pay, behaviour changed. Without it, 'digital by default' would have been a meeting culture in pyjamas.
Sources
- Tobi Lütke internal memo (May 2020) — leaked to The Verge
- Shopify engineering blog — distributed by design
HR Asia case studies are editorial analysis of public reporting and on-the-record interviews. They are not legal advice and do not reflect the views of the companies covered.
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The Shopify case study on HR Asia clarified something I'd been confused about for two years. Remote is a location decision. Async is a culture decision. If you only do the first, you keep all the meeting overhead and lose all the collaboration benefit. https://hrasia.co/cases/shopify-burn-the-boats
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