I recently connected with Leah Sutton, SVP of Global HR at Elastic, to unpack how a truly distributed company operates at scale. Elastic’s fully-distributed employee base, which includes over 2,000 spread across 40 countries and 48 states, presents the kind of complex, real-world constraints that product leaders like me think about every day—signal-to-noise in communication, decision speed, and the compounding effects of process design.
What stood out immediately was Elastic’s “distributed by design” company DNA. Leah’s remit spans HR operations, recruiting, and employee engagement, and the way these systems interlock felt remarkably product-like: clear ownership, explicit interfaces, and intentional defaults that remove ambiguity. As I listened, I kept mapping her operating principles to the way we instrument product teams for clarity and velocity.
One of the most practical threads we explored was hiring and leveling for remote leadership—specifically, how to interview for leaders that can manage well remotely. In my experience, the best signals mirror the competencies we prize in product management leadership: written-first communication, outcomes over activity, latency-tolerant decision-making, and the ability to architect rituals (standups, docs, async reviews) that scale across time zones. I’m a fan of structured behavioral interviews that surface these capabilities with work samples and scenario-based prompts rather than abstract hypotheticals.
We also dove into the operational realities of payroll and compensation across regions. The mechanics matter: consistent leveling, location-aware bands, and transparent principles for how currency, cost of labor, and market movement flow into offers and merit cycles. From a startup compensation strategy perspective, I’ve found that publishing your compensation “spec” (philosophy, exceptions policy, refresh cadence) dramatically reduces friction and improves trust—especially when paired with automation for eligibility, approvals, and audit trails.
Elastic has also invested in tactics to mitigate the language and cultural barriers that often trip up global leadership teams. I’ve seen meaningful gains from a few simple, repeatable patterns: default-to-written with concise summaries in plain language, rotating facilitation to balance voices, timezone-inclusive scheduling with recorded context, and cultural onboarding that teaches teams how decisions actually get made. These are small, compounding design choices that preserve speed without sacrificing inclusion.
Zooming out, Leah describes Elastic’s source code as not so much a traditional list of values but more the things that make Elastic, Elastic. That framing resonates with me—values as operating constraints, not wall art. When teams treat culture as an executable spec rather than a slogan, you get fewer surprises, fewer forks, and far more consistent decision quality across the organization.
The concept that most energized me, though, was the push to treat operational debt like technical debt. In product organizations, we maintain backlogs, SLAs, and roadmaps for tech debt because we know it silently taxes every future sprint. Operational debt—fractured tooling, ad hoc onboarding, unclear decision rights, fuzzy compensation rules—creates the same drag. My playbook is to surface operational debt explicitly, size it with impact metrics (time-to-decision, cycle time, error rates, employee retention), assign ownership, and pay it down on a cadence—just like we do with code quality and reliability.
If you’re leading HR, product, or a cross-functional team in a distributed environment, there’s a durable blueprint here: design for async by default, hire for written clarity and systems thinking, codify compensation principles, and manage operational debt with the same rigor you apply to technical debt. Learn more about Elastic’s source code here: https://www.elastic.co/about/our-source-code. You can follow Leah on Twitter at @leahesutton.
Inspired by this post on First Round.
Leave a Reply