When developing your new strategy, why did you decide on the remote working route rather than adopting a hybrid model? 'Through the development process, lots of different models were weighed up. We wanted to truly live that approach of working remotely and to understand what that would mean to have people working wherever they wanted to in the world.'

We don’t want our employees to say: 'I'm going to be in studio, Monday and Tuesday every week,' because that creates a proximity bias, and we didn't want to go down that route.

We replaced our offices with studios so colleagues can come together to collaborate with their teams however, it was important that people didn’t swap coming into the office with coming into a studio five days a week. 'For Dropbox, virtual first means that our primary place of work is remote, but it doesn't mean that we won't ever come together. We didn't just sit down and say: 'We're all remote now, let's keep it that way.' We spoke to lots of other businesses that had been working remotely pre-pandemic, asking what had been successful for them, what was challenging, what processes they had put in place, and from those conversations we started to build our new company strategy. '‘Virtual first’ was a very thoughtful process. Why did Dropbox decide to become a fully remote company and how did you go about developing your ‘virtual first’ strategy? ' We are a company that builds products that enable people to work remotely, so very early on in the pandemic, we decided we needed to live our product truth, by working remotely and learning what works with our own teams before releasing our products into the world. Almost two years later, Andy Wison, director of product at Dropbox, spoke about the experience of becoming a “virtual first” company and what lessons Dropbox has learned along the way. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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