GitLab didn’t scale by managing harder—it scaled by designing smarter.

 At the center of that design was Darren Murph, GitLab’s former Head of Remote. He authored the Remote Playbook, created TeamOps, and helped steer GitLab’s transformation from the world’s first all-remote company to IPO.

Darren’s work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and Fortune, and he co-developed GitLab’s Harvard Business School and INSEAD case studies. He also co-instructs Coursera’s Remote Team Management certification and has advised organizations including Dropbox, Vistaprint, and Cleveland Clinic on remote transformation.

With our teams dispersed across different countries and the globe, many of us worry: Are we truly a team - or just a group of individuals working together?

We question whether decisions are moving fast enough, whether trust is holding, and whether culture is anything more than what’s left when no one’s looking.

For life science CEOs, these concerns are structurally real. R&D in Oxford, your clinical partners in Boston, regulatory affairs in DC and a CRM in China – co-location is clearly unrealistic. 

We therefore need distributed teams to operate with cohesion, clarity, and shared accountability.

GitLab didn’t go remote by necessity—it was built that way from day one. What began as a scrappy open-source project grew into a venture-backed startup and eventually a publicly traded company [NASDAQ: GTLB], all without ever having a physical office. This wasn’t an experiment—it was a strategic choice. From the start, GitLab committed to designing for remote scale: codifying decisions, documenting workflows, and building a culture where outcomes—not optics—drove performance.

The results speak for themselves: surveys consistently placed GitLab in the top quartile globally for team effectiveness. The model has since been studied in business schools and boardrooms alike—Harvard Business School developed a case study on GitLab’s remote operating model to explore how deliberate organizational design can replace proximity as the foundation for performance.

That success wasn’t accidental. It was the result of intentional systems design: a handbook-first culture, clear decision rights, asynchronous workflows, and accountable autonomy. 

In this session, Darren will share the leadership principles and operating systems that turned a globally dispersed workforce into one of the most effective teams in modern enterprise.