To keep growth aligned with product, foster a shared culture where everyone loves the product and customer. This isn't about formal meetings, but a baseline agreement that makes collaboration inherent. When this culture exists, the product team actively seeks marketing's input, creating a unified engine.

Create a public document detailing your company's operating principles—from Slack usage to coding standards. This "operating system" makes cultural norms explicit, prevents recurring debates, and allows potential hires to self-select based on alignment, saving time and reducing friction as you scale.

Some CEOs encourage tension between sales and marketing. A more effective model is for the CRO and CMO to build enough trust to handle all disagreements—like lead quality or follow-up—behind closed doors. This prevents a culture of finger-pointing and presents a united front to leadership.

Creating a strong culture in a remote or distributed team requires more than virtual social events. It demands a structured system of defining core values for hiring and firing, and then relentlessly over-communicating important information across multiple channels to ensure alignment.

To manage stakeholder expectations and create predictable workflows, collaboratively create Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with each internal team. This approach builds mutual understanding and buy-in, making it easier to enforce timelines and address deviations from the agreed-upon process later on.

To break down silos between sales, channel, and field marketing, partner marketers act as a central hub. This is achieved by operationalizing transparency, establishing a formal communication cadence that replaces informal check-ins, and conducting blame-free reviews focused on future actions.

'Politics' is simply the set of unspoken rules and unstated norms governing how things truly get done. To remove their negative power, PMs should surface these norms—like an expectation to work on vacation—and facilitate an explicit conversation about whether the team wants to continue operating that way.

To foster productive debate, teams must move beyond simply encouraging disagreement. Implement specific, pre-agreed rules of engagement, such as using a neutral mediator or applying a 'two-minute rule' that grants a person uninterrupted speaking time. These protocols transform potential fights into structured, truth-seeking conversations.

To make Slack an effective 'office,' leaders must create and enforce an explicit communication rulebook. This includes defining response time expectations for different channels and, crucially, teaching employees how to manage notifications to protect their focus. Assuming etiquette will emerge organically is a recipe for failure.