When David Natroshvili founded SPRIBE in 2018, the company operated out of a small office in Tbilisi, Georgia. Seven years later, the iGaming software developer employs more than 350 people across offices in five countries. This growth forced the founder to confront challenges that most executives only encounter in theory.
The core insight Natroshvili developed runs counter to conventional management thinking: when leading a distributed workforce, communication that feels excessive is usually just adequate. What seems like over-communication in a traditional office becomes the minimum necessary to keep geographically dispersed teams aligned.
The Problem With Distance
SPRIBE now maintains offices in Warsaw, Kyiv, Tallinn, Tbilisi, and the Isle of Man. Each location operates in different time zones with different cultural contexts. The challenge David Natroshvili faced was ensuring that employees across this geographic spread shared a common understanding of company priorities.
In traditional offices, information spreads through what the SPRIBE CEO describes as osmosis—casual conversations, overheard discussions, and spontaneous collaboration that happens when people occupy the same physical space. None of these mechanisms function when colleagues are separated by thousands of kilometers.
The consequence is information asymmetry. Without deliberate intervention, employees in some locations end up with detailed knowledge of strategic direction while colleagues elsewhere operate with incomplete or outdated information. These gaps compound over time, creating coordination failures that can undermine complex initiatives.
A Simple But Revealing Test
Natroshvili developed a straightforward method for diagnosing communication effectiveness within SPRIBE. The test involves selecting employees randomly from different offices and asking them to explain current company priorities and strategic direction.
If answers are consistent across locations, communication systems are functioning. If employees in different offices give different answers—or if some cannot articulate priorities clearly—information is not flowing evenly through the organization.
As detailed by Business Insider Africa, this diagnostic approach revealed early problems in SPRIBE’s growth phase. Employees working near leadership had visibility into decision-making processes, while those in more distant offices received information that had been filtered and potentially distorted through multiple layers.
Strategic Message Reinforcement
The solution was not to communicate everything repeatedly. That approach would create information fatigue and train employees to ignore messages. Instead, David Natroshvili focused on distinguishing between messages that require reinforcement and those that can be communicated once through appropriate channels.
Strategic priorities, major decisions, and organizational values fall into the reinforcement category. These topics need repetition until they become embedded in how distributed teams think and make decisions. Routine operational updates, by contrast, can be shared once in the relevant channel.
Each week, the SPRIBE founder identifies the two or three initiatives that will have the greatest impact on the business and ensures those receive consistent visibility across all offices. This prioritization helps employees understand not just what is happening but what matters most.
Bidirectional Communication Systems
Effective distributed management requires information flowing in both directions. SPRIBE has implemented feedback mechanisms that work across time zones and cultural contexts, including regular one-on-one conversations, anonymous channels for raising concerns, and structured processes for amplifying voices from smaller offices.
The investment in these systems paid dividends during complex projects requiring coordination across multiple countries. Entrepreneur magazine reported on how SPRIBE’s global partnerships with organizations like UFC and WWE demanded collaboration among design, marketing, legal, and commercial teams spread across different locations. This coordination succeeded because teams shared the alignment that deliberate over-communication had built.
Practical Guidance for Distributed Leaders
For executives managing their own distributed organizations, David Natroshvili offers clear advice: the sensation of communicating too much typically indicates appropriate communication levels for geographically dispersed teams. The instinct to reduce repetition—while considerate in traditional settings—leaves distributed employees without the shared context they need to operate effectively.
The SPRIBE experience suggests that building alignment across distances requires treating communication as infrastructure rather than overhead. The systems that enable effective distributed work may feel redundant to executives who remember single-office environments, but they have become essential to how modern global companies function.
