Remote & Hybrid Teams: The Blueprint for Success

What you’ll learn:

• How to know if someone’s succeeding without watching them work

• How to define outcomes (not tasks) so your team knows exactly what success looks like

• How to design healthy competition so your team execution improves exponentially

• How forcing yourself to pick only 3 priorities reveals will bring needed focus

Who this is for: Founders, VPs, and hiring managers who are building or managing remote, hybrid, or global teams. Especially valuable if you’re hiring internationally for the first time, managing across time zones, or struggling with remote team accountability.

When a team goes remote or hybrid, the old way of managing breaks down.

You can’t see who is at their desk. You can’t walk by and check if someone is stuck. With people spread across time zones, real-time interaction isn’t always possible, and suddenly you’re asking questions that feel reasonable but point to the wrong problem: How do I know they’re working? Should I require detailed timesheets? Install activity monitoring software? Should I have them keep their cameras on?

Here’s what most managers miss. If you need to watch someone work to know if they’re doing well, you don’t have a remote-work issue. You have a clarity issue.

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We developed the Position Blueprint, a one-page document that clarifies what on-the-job success looks like. After watching smart, capable new hires struggle in remote and hybrid teams, this blueprint attempted to improve hiring accuracy. Over time, it became a tool for guiding teams toward tackling the priorities that matter most.

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What we kept seeing was the same pattern. Capable people were working hard but unsure whether they were succeeding. The common failure wasn’t effort. It was clarity.

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The clarity problem isn’t new. Office work just hides it better. In-person work makes “busy” look like progress. Meetings are happening, people look engaged, and everyone seems occupied. But presence doesn’t equal productivity. We’ve all worked alongside people who were online but not really working, who attended every meeting but moved nothing forward.

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Remote work strips that illusion away and forces you to think more clearly about what actually matters. When success isn’t defined, presence becomes the scorecard. And presence is a terrible scorecard.

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The issue isn’t that you can’t see people. It’s that nobody defined what outcomes were expected before the work began.

Why managing by activity fails

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Great distributed teams aren’t built by accident; they’re earned by creating clarity so strong workers can win from anywhere.

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That clarity starts by defining what success looks like for each role. Not tasks, not hours logged, not whether you can see someone working, but outcomes. Most managers skip this step entirely. They copy a job description, hire someone who “feels right,” and hope that performance emerges on its own. When it doesn’t, they manage harder: more meetings, more check-ins, more oversight. They add noise instead of redesigning the system.

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This is why remote work feels harder to manage. It doesn’t create new problems; it exposes what is already broken. Vague roles, unclear priorities, no shared definition of success. The office just made it easier to pretend those things didn’t matter.

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The best remote-first companies don’t manage activity; they define outcomes, assign ownership, and trust strong performers to execute. The Position Blueprint makes this approach explicit and repeatable. One page that clarifies what matters before you hire, before you onboard, and well before you have your first performance conversation. It’s the difference between managing closer and managing better.

What outcome-based direction looks like

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This sounds obvious in theory, but most managers still give direction in ways that are vague, subjective, and impossible to measure, especially with remote teams where ambiguity compounds across distance.

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Consider an Account Executive role. Task-based direction says keep the pipeline full, do regular outreach, move deals forward. That’s not direction, it’s a description of activity that tells you nothing about whether someone is succeeding. Outcome-based direction says maintain a $25,000 monthly pipeline, book 12 qualified discovery calls per month, advance 60% or more of qualified opportunities to proposal stage within 30 days. The difference delivers measurable impact versus trackable activity.

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You might be thinking, sure; outcome-driven goals are easy for sales roles where it’s all numbers. But what about roles that aren’t directly tied to revenue? How do you measure a product manager’s success, or an engineer’s contribution, or whether operations are running smoothly?

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The answer: outcome-based direction works for every role. The challenge is choosing what to measure and track, in a simple and consistent way.

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Not all metrics are worth measuring. The best outcomes track things that matter to the business and not things that are easy to count. Lines of code, number of commits, and hours logged are easy to measure but tell you nothing about whether the work created value. Before you define an outcome, ask yourself if we hit this number, and the product degraded, would we still call it a win? If the answer is no, you’re measuring the wrong thing. The goal is to track impact. When you measure what matters, the metric becomes a tool for focus rather than a source of gaming.

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This takes practice. You won’t nail it the first time, and that’s fine. The exercise itself is focused on sitting down and asking: how will I know I’m successful this quarter in this area? If you don’t have a baseline metric yet, make the outcome define the baseline: decide what to measure, start tracking it, and capture a starting number by quarter-end.

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We’ve created 12 Position Blueprint examples across common startup roles because most leaders move faster with real examples than abstract frameworks. [Download them here] Use these as a starting point, then tailor them to your team.

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What the Position Blueprint is

The Position Blueprint is a one-page document you write before the job description, especially when hiring remote or global roles. It makes success clear before you hire, so you attract the right person and manage outcomes rather than guesswork.

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Think of it as the missing layer between company goals and day-to-day work. It answers four questions that most job descriptions never address: Why does this role exist? What does solid performance look like? What should this person care about more than anyone else? And how will we know they’re succeeding without sharing a room or time zone?

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The framework is inspired by OKRs, Objectives and Key Results, but simplified and adapted for real-life teams. Research on OKR implementation in software organizations found that more than half of managers don’t feel effective at translating leadership’s goals into actionable work for their teams. That’s the gap the Position Blueprint fills. It’s a goal-setting tool and a translation layer that turns “we need to improve customer retention” into specific outcomes an individual contributor can own and measure.

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Where traditional OKRs start with objectives and then define key results, we’ve found most people work better starting with what we call role buckets which are the domains of responsibility they already know they own. It’s easier to ask, “what needs to change in this area?” than to write an inspiring objective from scratch. Once you’re comfortable with the system, you can add objectives if you want. But the bucket-first approach gets people unstuck faster.

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Ideally, you start with a clear strategy and write role blueprints from there. But many founders are building the plane while flying it. But sometimes when strategy isn’t fully mapped yet, priorities shift weekly, and clarity emerges through execution rather than upfront planning. If that’s your situation, the Blueprint can help you. As you work through the sections, you’ll discover whether what matters most to you today is actually translating to other areas of your team. It’s a tool to surface misalignment, get clear on priorities, and tighten your strategy as you go.

The Position Blueprint framework

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Build a Position Blueprint in 30–40 minutes for any role. Download the free template and follow along. Prefer to start with examples? Get 12 completed Position Blueprints for common startup roles, delivered to your inbox—plus simple guidance on how to put them into action.

Start with context

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At the top of every Position Blueprint, include three things: the company goal, your core values, and the shared team goal.

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This creates alignment. Most people want to do good work, but without a clear view of what the business is actually trying to achieve, they’re left guessing what’s most important next. When context is missing, people default to activity instead of prioritizing how they will make an impact.

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By starting with context, every role is grounded in where the company is going, how decisions should be made, and how this team contributes to the bigger picture. Then outline the quarter’s top 3 outcomes for the role. Not 4, 5, or 10, just 3. Selecting 3 outcomes will force you to think about what matters the most right now. Success comes from doing a few things exceptionally well, not everything adequately. What you leave off the list is just as important as what makes it onto the list.

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Write the role mandate and what this person should obsess over

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The Role Mandate is one to two sentences that answer a single question: why does this role exist?

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For example, a role mandate for a VP of Engineering might be: build and lead an engineering team that ships reliably, deliver the roadmap with quality and consistency while building a culture of ownership across a distributed team. It should be simple, clear, and written to inspire forward momentum and growth. This is a long-term statement that grounds everything else.

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Just below the Role Mandate comes a short section we call “Obsess over.” It’s a small addition to the template but surprisingly powerful. This is where you name the one thing this person should care about more than anything else. If everything else competes for attention, what must never get dropped? What do you want them to think about when making decisions, prioritizing work, or pushing back on requests?

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As a leader, this forces you to think about how each role’s obsession fits alongside others. Great teams aren’t built by having everyone optimize for the same thing. They are built by designing healthy tension where different people are intentionally focused on different purposes. To build great products, you need designers obsessing over usability and craft, engineers obsessing over speed and reliability, product leaders obsessing over features and outcomes. The leader’s job is to adjudicate healthy tension that exists.

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This idea comes from Peter Deng, former product leader at Meta, Uber, and OpenAI, who explains in a conversation with Lenny Rachitsky how he deliberately builds teams this way. The “Obsess over” line should be simple, human, and memorable” acting as a long-term reminder of what matters most in the role and what this person is here to protect.

Define role buckets

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Next, break the role into 4-6 role buckets which are the big areas of responsibility this role owns. Start with the main domains of work. For a VP of Engineering, you might include team leadership, delivery and execution (shipping the roadmap), quality and reliability (bugs, uptime, performance), technical direction and scaling (architecture, tech debt, tooling), and cross-functional alignment (tight partnership with product and design).

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These buckets organize everything else and prevent the role from becoming a 25-item laundry list that overwhelms rather than clarifies. They also make the next step of defining outcomes much easier. Instead of staring at a blank page trying to write objectives, you’re looking at a domain you already understand and asking: what needs to improve here?

Write outcomes and accountability

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For each bucket, ask yourself: how will I know this person is successful? Keep it tight and aim for 2-3 outcomes per bucket. To answer this well, you need outcomes, not tasks.

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There’s a difference between saying I want to lose weight and saying I want to lose 10 pounds by the end of the quarter. One is vague, and the other is specific, measurable, and time bound. That’s the core idea behind SMART goals which are specific, measurable, achievable but with stretch, and time phased.

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The goal is to manage problems. Technical debt, for example, will never be “fixed.” It’s an ongoing reality of building software. Every team has technical debt, but the question is are you managing it intentionally or letting it accumulate until it breaks something? Outcomes should reflect this reality, so “reducing critical tech debt incidents by 30%” is manageable. “Eliminate all tech debt” is fantasy. Good outcomes are ambitious but achievable, and they acknowledge that the most important work is continuous, not one-time.

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Here’s what this looks like in practice. Bad outcomes sound like this: conduct weekly one-on-ones, review code, attend sprint planning. These are tasks, not results. Good outcomes sound like this: team reports 85% or higher clarity on priorities in quarterly surveys, pull request review time under 4 hours with zero critical bugs shipped to production, 90% or more of committed work ships on time with predictable velocity. The rule is simple: if it’s a task, rewrite it as measurable.

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For an engineering team, a bucket like “Platform Health” or “Engineering Excellence” might include outcomes that build on each other within the quarter. The first outcome could be: identify and ticket the 20 worst tech debt offenders by end of month one. For the second outcome: resolve 10 of those 20 tickets by the end of the quarter. Notice how the first outcome creates the work for the second, and you can’t refactor what you haven’t identified. This sequencing forces the team to start with clarity before jumping to action, and it makes progress visible along the way. You’d add one or two more outcomes under that bucket, up to 3 total, each addressing a different aspect of platform health.

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For remote teams, pressure-test every outcome with this question: could we measure this without watching them work? If the answer is no, you’re measuring activity rather than impact.

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Each outcome should include what will change, how you track it, and when. Outcomes can be about increasing something (improving activation from 32% to 40%), reducing something (cut incident count by 30%), maintaining a threshold (maintaining 99.5% uptime), or hitting a milestone (ship the onboarding redesign by February 28).

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If you don’t have a metric yet, make the outcome inform the baseline. Figure out how to measure it and record a starting number by quarter-end and choose outcomes that stretch the team. The point is to drive high performance and focus. Pick outcomes ambitious enough to force prioritization, better decisions, and real improvement.

Add cadence and scoring

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This is critical because the Position Blueprint only works if it’s a living document, not something you create once and then file away. We include a footer on every template as a reminder.

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Monthly, spend 30 minutes reviewing progress on the top 3 quarterly outcomes and discussing blockers. Record these sessions for team members in other time zones. Quarterly, spend 45 minutes scoring outcomes (hit, partial, or miss), extracting lessons (what worked, what didn’t, what would we do differently), and setting next quarter’s top 3 priorities.

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Some teams use numerical scales, scoring each outcome from 0-100%, or tracking progress against a specific number. That works once you’re confident with the system, but we recommend starting simpler. Hit, partial, or miss is enough to measure progress, and the point or measuring is to allow for reflection. Did we achieve what we set out to achieve? What got in the way? What would we do differently? You can add sophistication later. First, build the habit.

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Between formal check-ins, keep the outcomes visible. Mention progress in standups. Post updates on your Teams channel. One engineering team we know reduced their linting errors from over 14,000 to 2 by showing a simple bar graph at every weekly meeting. There was no major initiative, no dedicated cleanup effort. Just consistent visibility that reminded the team that this mattered. Eventually, people started fixing issues on their own, a few at a time, because they could see the progress and wanted to contribute. Visibility creates accountability without surveillance. When people see the same outcomes week after week, they want to participate, so they start thinking about how to move the needle.

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Print the Blueprint and keep it visible by pinning on your wall, saving to your desktop, wherever you’ll see it daily. The exercise of writing it out crystallizes your thinking and keeps you laser-focused on where you’re headed.

When to use the Position Blueprint

The Position Blueprint can be used for the entire lifecycle of a role from hiring and onboarding to ongoing performance.

Hiring

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During hiring, clarity about outcomes changes everything. When you know what results you need, you start hiring based on capability and not proxy.

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We often use the ideas behind the Position Blueprint with clients to gain clarity around the real needs of a role and to set us up for hiring success. One client was adamant about hiring only people with startup experience as he’d been burned before by someone from a large corporate environment who couldn’t adapt. But “startup experience” is a proxy. So, we asked what he meant by “startup background.” He said: someone who can work autonomously, move fast with little direction provided, wear multiple hats. Once we defined those capabilities, we stopped searchint for startup backgrounds and started evaluating candidates for that. We ended up placing someone whose recent experience was mostly large enterprise, but at a previous company he’d worked on startup-type projects and wanted to get back to working that way. He cleared every behavioral question tied to on-the-job performance. The hire worked. The lesson was to never lower the bar on performance. Do adjust it on credentials.

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The other way to think of this is that you might find someone with startup experience who still isn’t suitable because you never evaluated the actual skills you assumed startup experience would bring. The same goes for years of experience, education, “good team player.” These are all proxies. What outcomes do you expect from someone with these things? That’s what you need to define and evaluate.

Onboarding

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Share the Blueprint on day one. It answers questions important to new hires, like what am I responsible for? How will I be evaluated? What does success look like? Structure their first 90 days around the quarterly top 3 outcomes, with the first 30 days focused on understanding context, meeting stakeholders and learning systems. By 60 days, start contributing to quarterly outcomes and identifying quick wins. At 90 days, team members can take full ownership of outcomes and deliver measurably. For global remote teams, new hires need to understand how to manage their managers from day one, how to create visibility into their work, surface problems early, and communicate progress without relying on physical presence.

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When we present this to new hires internally, they light up. When we made this change to our hiring process, our hires ramped up at least 25% faster because we’d taken the time to define what success looks like for the role. Here’s a pro tip for new roles where you don’t yet know enough to define clear criteria, make that part of the job. “Define core success metrics before end of month 3” can be the first outcome.

Performance Reviews

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During one-on-ones and team check-ins, the Blueprint becomes your coaching and alignment tool. But here’s what we’ve found: don’t tie it directly to formal performance reviews or compensation. When goals affect pay, people tend to play it safe. They write easier outcomes, avoid risk, and scale back ambition. The Blueprint is designed to stretch your organization and help people do their best work, and that only happens when people feel safe aiming high.

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Instead, use it to drive better conversations. Ask what your team’s top objectives are this quarter, or which outcomes they contributed to most and how? What feels unclear or blocked right now, and what support is needed to move the most important outcome forward? What was learned this quarter that should change the Blueprint next quarter, and if we can only push one outcome forward this week, which one matters most? These questions create focus, surface problems early, and keep everyone aligned with what truly matters.

How to roll out Position Blueprints across your team.

Start with the founder or CEO and leadership team first, so that the company's goals, values, and shared team goals are consistent across every Blueprint. Then create one shared folder, have each leader fill out their Blueprint, and schedule quick one-on-one reviews to tighten the outcomes and ensure alignment. After that, it becomes a simple quarterly habit to take 30 minutes to review progress monthly, 45 minutes to score and reset quarterly.

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Keep it tight by picking 3 quarterly outcomes per role and limiting the Blueprint to 4-6 role buckets with 2-3 outcomes per bucket. Constraints force clarity so if you can’t fit something on the page, it’s probably not a priority. Ownership usually sits with the functional leader (or CEO for leadership roles), with support from HR, People Ops, or RevOps if you have it. A strong first draft takes about 30-60 minutes per role. After that, the ongoing investment is light: a few minutes each week to surface progress, 30 minutes monthly to review and unblock, and 30 minutes quarterly to score, reflect, and reset.

Final thoughts and why this matters for team performance.

Strong people don’t quit because the work is hard. They quit because they can’t tell if they’re succeeding.

This is especially true for remote workers. The distance is amplified by every bit of uncertainty. Without clear outcomes, remote employees are left guessing whether they’re succeeding, whether their work matters, or whether they’re meeting expectations. And great people won’t stick around for that.

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Here’s what most people don’t expect: research studying over 4,000 engineers found that remote teams actually scored higher on goal-setting maturity than co-located teams. The researchers hypothesized that teams without regular face time need to be more explicit about what they’re doing, how it relates to the organization, and how they’ll demonstrate progress. If a remote team is unclear on priorities, they could go off course for weeks before anyone notices. That pressure forces clarity. Co-located teams can rely on hallway corrections and serendipitous check-ins to stay aligned. Remote teams can’t, so the ones that succeed build stronger goal-setting muscles out of necessity. Remote work doesn’t make goal-setting harder. It makes the absence of goal-setting more visible.

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The Position Blueprint solves this problem. It gives people the one thing they need to do their best work, clarity about what success looks like, whether they’re working from your office or halfway around the world. It shifts you from monitoring activity (are they online, are they in meetings, do they look busy?) to managing results (are they hitting their outcomes, what’s blocking them, what do they need to succeed?).

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We’ve built this framework for global remote tech teams because that’s the space we work in, but it applies regardless of how you operate. Whether your team is in the office, distributed across continents, or somewhere in between. Any company or individual can use this to bring clarity to any role or team.

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Do your best to keep it to one page. There’s something about that constraint that helps the information stick. The exercise of writing things out helps with thinking and gets you laser-focused on where you’re headed. Don’t get too hung up on perfecting every metric, just do your best based on the information you have today, then keep updating and refining as you learn.

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If you’re building a global team and want some help with finding the right talent or with setting up the team to succeed, reach out. We’ve spent years helping companies navigate exactly this challenge, and we’d be glad to share what we’ve learned.

Download the Position Blueprint Starter Kit. Includes the fillable template, 12 completed examples across common tech roles, step-by-step implementation guide, remote team adaptations, and best practices for distributed teams.