How to Build Your Network at Work: What 60+ Coffee Chats Taught Me

In my first month at Headway I had about 15 coffee chats. By the end of probation, around 30. By the time I left, more than 60. I never counted exactly.

The company had offices in Madrid, Warsaw, Lviv and Kyiv, but a lot of us, my team included, worked fully remote. There was no kitchen to bump into people in. There was a habit instead: anyone could invite anyone to a 20 or 30 minute coffee, online or in the office, to talk about work or just to meet.

That habit did more for me in a new company than any onboarding document. This post is about why, how I use it with my own teams, and why I think the same thing matters even more outside the company you work for.

What a coffee chat actually gets you

A network is not a list of contacts. It is the set of people you can message tomorrow with a half-formed question and get a real answer.

Inside a company, that shows up in three ways.

You meet the person who can unblock you before you need them. In a product company most blockers sit in another team: a payments question, an analytics event nobody documented, a review from legal. If you have already had coffee with someone there, your message is quick question instead of a ticket in a queue.

You see how the rest of the company works. Twenty minutes with someone from marketing or support tells you what they worry about. As an engineering manager, that is context I cannot get from a roadmap.

You build trust before it is tested. Your first conversation with someone should not be the one where something is on fire.

In an office, most of this happens by accident. On a remote team, somebody has to schedule it.

How I set it up for new people on my team

When someone joins my team, I give them a list of people they have to meet in their first weeks:

• Someone who can mentor them in their domain. For an engineer, that is a stronger engineer, or someone already in the role they want to grow into, like a staff engineer or an engineering manager. For a new engineering manager, it is the head of engineering or the CTO.
• Everyone who makes decisions about their work.
• If they can find the time, someone from top management.

The first two are not optional. They are part of onboarding, the same as access to the repositories.

Everything else is optional. Anyone can book more coffees with anyone, and I encourage it, but nobody counts them.

I keep the two separate on purpose. The must-meet list is how a new person learns who does what. Random coffee is how they meet the people nobody would have put on that list. Once random coffee becomes mandatory, people treat it like one more meeting, and it stops working.

If talking to strangers makes you uncomfortable

It does for a lot of people, and be more outgoing is not advice.

My first coffees were a new format for me, and I did not know how they were supposed to go. So I let the other person lead and show me. After a couple of them I understood the format and what people talk about, and I built my own opener: five to seven minutes on who I am and how I got here. I went first, which also gave the other person a template for their own introduction.

By the tenth coffee I could tell that story without thinking. By the fiftieth I could have told it word for word if someone had woken me at 3 a.m. and asked.

What I tell a new hire who is nervous about it:

• It is twenty minutes, not a friendship. Nobody expects more than that.
• Have your own five-minute story ready, and go first. It takes the pressure off both of you.
• Bring three questions. What are you working on this month? What is the hardest part of it? Who else should I talk to?
• The last question is the one that builds the network. Every coffee hands you the next one.

The discomfort is real. So is the cost of never meeting the people you will need later. Of the two, only the first one goes away with practice.

Automating it, one step at a time

In spring 2025 our HR team asked me to help with random coffee. Until then it was all manual: an announcement in chat, one spreadsheet for 500+ people, a reminder at the end of the week for whoever had not signed up, a shuffle, and then everyone opening the file to find their pair.

I automated it in three steps.

1. Pairs and emails. A script generated the pairs from the spreadsheet and emailed every participant. With an LLM writing most of the code, it took a couple of days between other work, testing included.
2. Everyone, and every team. On my own initiative, I pulled the attendee list from the HR system instead of the spreadsheet, and generated pairs for the whole company plus separate rounds inside each product and service team. The integration was quick. Most of the time went into filtering people, because the HR data had gaps.
3. A Slack bot. It announces the window, takes registrations, sends a last call, generates the pairs and messages each person their match. About a week of code and testing.

By the time I left, it ran once a month. On the first working Monday everyone got a DM that registration was open, and signed up right in Slack. On Friday morning, whoever had not signed up got a last call, and the window closed that evening. On Monday morning, the pairs went out as DMs.

What I took from it: the code was the quick part. Clean data and a rhythm people could predict were what made it work.

Beyond the company

Everything above works outside the company too, and I think it matters more there.

When we started moving towards product engineers, I heard that some other products in the Genesis ecosystem had already started. A colleague gave me a couple of LinkedIn contacts. I wrote to them and invited them to an online coffee to talk about how it was going. I asked four people. None of them said no, and every one of those conversations was useful.

In the Warsaw office, where many other Genesis businesses sit, I had an in-person coffee with someone from one of them. In Madrid, a colleague suggested I meet a local IT founder, and we had coffee too.

Inside a company, a network gets things unblocked. Outside it, a network decides which opportunities reach you at all: the role that never gets posted, the candidate who was not looking, the customer who tries a product because someone they trust mentioned it. For a business, that is often the difference between the idea that gets a first user and the one that never does.

The mechanics do not change: twenty minutes, a few honest questions, and who else should I talk to? at the end. The difference is that nobody runs the rhythm for you. Two things work for me. When I connect with someone on LinkedIn, I invite them to a 20 or 30 minute intro call, and I call it an online coffee. And I ask colleagues to introduce me to people in their network.

If you want to try it on your team

Start by hand. A message in a channel, a list, a shuffle. If people keep showing up after two or three rounds, it is worth automating.

If your team is on Slack and you would rather not build your own, I later built one from scratch that any team can install: CoffeeSlack. People opt in with /coffee, and it tells you whether the chats actually happened, not just how many intros went out. For what random coffee fixes and the ways it fails, there is a longer guide: What random coffee is, and why remote teams run it.

Frequently asked questions

How many coffee chats should you have when you join a new company?

There is no right number. Mine were about 15 in the first month and around 30 by the end of probation. What matters more is who is on the list: the people your work depends on first, then people you would never meet otherwise.

Should random coffee be mandatory?

No. Keep a short must-meet list as part of onboarding, and keep random coffee opt-in. Mandatory random coffee turns into one more meeting.

How long should a coffee chat be?

Twenty to thirty minutes. Long enough for a real conversation, short enough that nobody has to think twice before saying yes.

Does networking at work matter on a remote team?

More than in an office. Remote, nothing happens by accident, so the people you meet are the people you, or a tool, deliberately put in your calendar.