Remote Experience Recreation
Rebuild the valuable parts of in-person work online
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 93%
When a remote team says it misses the office, the useful question is not whether virtual work is identical to being together. It is which underlying benefit has disappeared. The team might miss informal conversation, games, shared entertainment, or another trust-building experience. Once that benefit is named, the team deliberately recreates an online version using audio, video, or collaborative tools. It then evaluates whether the experiment improved closeness, trust, or communication and adjusts the design. This converts a broad complaint about remote work into a specific design problem. The mechanism is benefit decomposition followed by a low-cost virtual experiment, allowing teams to preserve distributed work while recovering more of what they valued in person.
Origin
Extracted from The Foundr Podcast
Core principles
- 01Identify the benefit rather than defending the format
- 02Shared experiences can be designed online
- 03Virtual interaction can build trust and closeness
- 04Experiment before declaring remote work deficient
How to run it
- 1
Identify what is missing
Ask people to name the exact experience they valued in person. Examples include informal conversation, games, or watching something together.
Pro tip Push past the generic answer that being together simply felt better.
- 2
Extract the benefit
Define what the experience produced, such as trust, closeness, or easier communication. This becomes the target for the online design.
Watch out Copying the activity without understanding its benefit can produce a hollow substitute.
- 3
Design an online equivalent
Choose an audio, video, game, or shared activity that could create the target benefit virtually. Keep the first version simple enough to test quickly.
Pro tip Use tools the team already understands where possible.
- 4
Test and review
Run the activity and ask whether it improved the intended outcome. Retain, modify, or replace it based on the team's response.
Watch out Do not declare the experiment successful merely because attendance was high.
In the wild
A distributed team misses the relaxed conversation that followed office meetings. It schedules a short optional video session with a cooperative game, then asks whether participants learned more about colleagues and felt more comfortable contacting them afterwards.
→ The team tests a specific route to greater closeness without introducing an office requirement.
Common mistakes
Recreating the surface only
A virtual copy can fail when it reproduces the activity but not the benefit people valued.
Assuming remote means less trust
The transcript presents trust, closeness, and communication as outcomes that online experiences can also build.
Is it for you?
Best for
It is best for distributed teams that can identify a concrete in-person experience they miss.
Not ideal for
It is not ideal when the task itself requires physical access, equipment, or care that cannot move online.
From the transcript
“look at what you liked about being in person”
“if there's something you miss about being in person try to recreate it online with your friends or your colleagues”
“you can really build a ton of trust a ton of closeness a ton of amazing communication”
From the episode
334: What This Tech Pioneer Is Betting On Next
Matt Mullenweg