Wayward

Wayward is a fully remote product studio with 120 people distributed across four continents—North America, Europe, South America, and Southeast Asia. They build digital products for clients in healthcare, logistics, and education, typically running three to five concurrent client projects with cross-functional teams of designers, engineers, and product managers. The remote-first model has been core to Wayward’s identity since its founding in 2018, giving them access to exceptional talent everywhere and a genuine 24-hour work cycle.

But the same distributed structure that gave Wayward its talent advantage also created a persistent communication problem. With team members spread across 14 time zones, decisions were scattered across Slack threads, Notion pages, email chains, Linear tickets, and Zoom/Loom recordings. There was no single place where someone could go to understand the current state of a project—or even a single conversation. People spent a surprising amount of their day just searching for context they knew existed somewhere.

Before Intelo, Wayward had tried nearly every async communication framework in the book—structured Slack channels, mandatory Notion updates, weekly Loom check-ins, RFC processes. Each one helped temporarily, but none solved the fundamental problem: information was fragmented across too many tools, and no human could synthesize it all. The team needed something that could work across every platform they used and stitch it all together.

The fragmentation problem manifested in three distinct ways. First, there was the context-search tax: team members reported spending 45 to 60 minutes per day just looking for information—searching Slack, scanning Notion, scrolling through email, checking Linear—to find context they needed to do their actual work. For a 120-person company, that added up to roughly 100 person-hours per day of pure overhead.

Second, there was the timezone gap. When a team in Berlin made a decision in their afternoon that affected a team in Portland, the Portland team often didn’t find out until they stumbled across it the next morning in a buried Slack thread. This led to duplicated work, conflicting decisions, and a growing sense of frustration among team leads who felt like they were always one step behind. Cross-timezone handoffs were particularly painful—critical context was regularly lost in the gap between one team signing off and another coming online.

Third, there was the new-hire onboarding problem. Wayward’s remote model meant that new hires couldn’t absorb context through osmosis the way they might in an office. Getting a new engineer or designer up to speed on a client project required pinging five different people, reading through months of Slack history, and piecing together Notion documents of varying quality and recency. The average ramp time for a new hire to become fully productive on a project was four weeks—far too long for a studio that moved at the pace Wayward did.

Wayward’s leadership team evaluated Intelo specifically because of its multi-tool integration capabilities. They needed a solution that could connect to every platform their team used—Slack, Gmail, Notion, Linear, Google Calendar, Zoom, and Loom—and synthesize information across all of them without requiring anyone to change their existing workflows. Ivo was deployed company-wide over a three-week rollout, starting with the operations and project management teams before expanding to all engineers and designers.

The core of Wayward’s Intelo deployment was what Head of Operations Tomás Herrera calls the “single-stream model.” Ivo ingested activity from every connected tool and maintained a continuously updated, unified view of each project. When a project manager asked Ivo for a status update, it pulled from Slack messages, Linear tickets, Google Calendar events, email threads, and Notion documents to assemble a single, accurate picture. When someone missed a meeting, Ivo provided a summary with the key decisions and their assigned follow-ups. When a designer in São Paulo needed to know what the engineering team in Manila had shipped overnight, Ivo had the answer in seconds.

The team also implemented Ivo-powered daily handoff summaries at each timezone boundary. When the European team wrapped up for the day, Ivo generated a concise summary of everything that had happened—decisions made, PRs merged, client feedback received, blockers raised—and posted it to the relevant Slack channels before the Americas team came online. This eliminated the timezone gap almost entirely and gave every team member a reliable morning briefing, no matter where they were in the world.