If you want to influence decisions, you need to get in the room. At a remote company, the room isn’t always visible.
There’s no boardroom. No after-work drinks. Instead, decisions happen in private Slack channels, shared docs, and recurring calls you didn’t know existed. By the time you hear about the meeting, it’s already over.
Finding the room
First problem: which room? Remote companies have lots of spaces that look important. Big meetings. High-traffic channels. All-hands. But real decisions happen in smaller groups that form around specific projects, not job titles.
Watch where blockers surface. Watch where people spend their energy. That’s usually where things actually get decided.
Remote makes this harder. “The room” moves. Sometimes it’s a Google Doc that turns into a decision while you’re asleep. Sometimes it’s a Slack thread that quietly becomes next quarter’s project. Sometimes you won’t know you were in the room until your idea comes back to you, filtered through three other people.
Getting invited
The people already in the room don’t have patience for spectators. Show up with something useful: a solution to something that’s been stuck, data nobody else has looked at, context from the edges of the business. People forget who attended the meeting. They remember who unblocked it.
At a remote company, written work is how you get noticed. Not by talking the most in meetings, but by leaving a trail of useful documents behind you. A summary that moves things forward gets you invited back. A hundred status updates don’t.
The notes you write, the issues you close, the feedback you give: these stack up. They become a body of work. That body of work is your invitation.
Building trust
None of this matters if you’re just a name in a doc. The people in the room got there by being reliable over time. They don’t dominate conversations. But when things get unclear, someone asks for their take.
This is slow. Being in the room means being the person who can untangle a mess or ship the next piece of work. You get there by solving what needs solving, even when it doesn’t have your name on it. This is the human side of stakeholder engagement, one of the four pillars of my view on engineering leadership.
In an office, relationships happen by accident. You bump into people. Remotely, you have to be deliberate: reach out for catch-ups, share context, follow through when you say you will.
If you feel on the outside, don’t take it personally. Most people in the room started there too.
Staying there
Time zones and overloaded calendars make inclusion expensive. Make yourself easy to invite. Work asynchronously by default. Keep things brief. Offer flexible ways to collaborate. If you lighten the load instead of adding to it, more rooms open up.
Once you’re in, don’t overstay. Make your points. Clarify next steps. Summarise decisions afterwards so things don’t get lost. The goal isn’t to be seen everywhere. It’s to make your presence count when it matters.
Start with the work. Leave a clear trail. That’s what gets you in.
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