The Loom video that replaced the meeting.

Process · 4 min read

I had a client who worked FIFO. Two weeks on, one week off. When he was on site, the internet was barely functional. Video calls dropped constantly. And when he was home, he was catching up on everything else in his life. Finding a clean sixty-minute window for a design meeting was almost impossible.

So I stopped trying to book one. Instead, I started recording five-minute Loom videos. I'd walk through the latest designs, explain what changed, point out the decisions I needed from him, and send the link. He'd watch it when he could. Sometimes at 10pm. Sometimes on a Sunday morning. And he'd reply with his thoughts in his own time.

The project kept moving. No calendar gymnastics required.

Not everyone works nine to five

Look, most of my clients don't sit at a desk from nine until five. They're tradies on job sites. They're shift workers. They're running a business during the day and thinking about their app at night. Their schedules don't line up with traditional meeting blocks, and pretending otherwise just slows the project down.

A live meeting requires two people to be available at the same time, with a stable internet connection, for long enough to cover everything on the agenda. That's three constraints at once. Remove any one of them and the meeting falls apart. Async communication removes all three. I record when I'm ready. They watch when they're ready. The information transfers either way.

Research from Yang et al. at Microsoft found that when remote teams shifted to asynchronous communication, they didn't lose productivity or project quality. The work still got done. It just happened on a different schedule. That matches exactly what I've seen with my own clients.

What goes into a five-minute walkthrough

I keep it tight. I open the latest designs, share my screen, and talk through what the client is looking at. Here's the screen we worked on last time. Here's what changed. Here's why I moved this button. Here's the two options I need you to pick between. Done. Five minutes, sometimes less.

The beauty of video is that the client can see exactly what I'm pointing at. There's no confusion about which screen, which section, which element. I'm literally showing them. And they can pause, rewind, and rewatch if something doesn't click the first time. Try doing that in a live meeting.

The client replies however suits them. Sometimes it's a text message. Sometimes they record a Loom back. Sometimes they jot notes and we cover it all in a shorter, more focused call when the timing does work out. Either way, the project isn't sitting idle waiting for a calendar slot that never opens up.

Your process needs to fit real life

I used to think every project needed regular scheduled meetings. Weekly check-ins. Fortnightly reviews. But that's my schedule talking, not the client's. Some clients thrive on regular calls. Others need flexibility. And the ones who need flexibility shouldn't get a worse outcome because their roster doesn't line up with mine.

If you're building an app and your work schedule is unpredictable, ask your designer how they handle async updates. If the answer is "we'll just find a time," that might not be realistic. A good process adapts to the people in it. Not the other way around.

That FIFO client shipped a great product. We had maybe four live calls across the whole project. The rest was Loom videos, voice notes, and the occasional text. The work didn't suffer. If anything, it was more considered because both of us had time to think before responding.

Sources
The Effects of Remote Work on Collaboration (Yang et al., 2022, Nature Human Behaviour) - Async communication replaced many meetings without reducing team productivity or project quality.

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