The Visibility Gap

David Parker spent more than fifteen years leading engineering and product teams across three continents, most of them split between offices in San Francisco, London, and Bengaluru. When his teams were forced fully remote in 2020, he discovered the problem this book is about: the people who did the best work were not the people who were best known, and the gap between the two was quietly deciding careers. He spent the next five years studying how high performing distributed teams assign trust, attention, and opportunity, interviewing hundreds of employees, managers, and executives, and testing the practices described here in his own organizations. His writing on remote work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and Forbes, and he speaks regularly at conferences on distributed leadership and the future of work. He is the founder of Parker & Company, a consultancy that helps technology and services firms build cultures where good work is actually seen. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and two children, works from a home office that he insists is not also a storage room, and keeps his own weekly update ritual alive as a matter of principle.