Divi Engine builds premium WordPress plugins for the Divi theme. Their seven-person team is spread across the UK, India, China, Canada, Mexico, and South Africa. They've never had a physical office.
"Before Cosmos, coordinating our global team felt like trying to nail jelly to a wall. We had guys in almost every continent working on complex WordPress plugins without a central place to gather. The setup was clunky. Bouncing between different meeting tools. People forgetting meeting times. It was a mess. That's not touching on the lack of water-cooler chat or being able to bounce ideas off each other quickly."
Peter started looking for a tool that could overcome the remote-team isolation his global team was feeling.
Peter is, by his own admission, a bit old-fashioned. He runs a tech company but pushes back against tech he finds too clever for its own good. The VR office options on the market were not going to work for him.
"I don't really like the idea of virtual reality offices, it's not real life. Whereas Cosmos is real life. It's a happy medium between the two."
Divi Engine's Cosmos office is built around how the team actually works. There's a separate meeting room for each scrum (marketing, dev, documentation), with tables for heads-down work between them. The team logs in during work hours and pops into rooms when meetings start. No links to create, no times to share, everybody knows where to be.
"We were sceptical at first, worried it might be just another tool to manage. But Cosmos felt different. It's easy to use and fits right into our daily routine. We didn't want a VR office or something too out there. Cosmos hit the sweet spot — it's virtual but still feels real."
The Divi Engine day has a shape. Scrums in the mornings for each department, heads-down work at separate desks in between, and a continuous low-level sense of the team being there even when nobody is talking.
"We have our daily scrums here: a marketing scrum, dev scrum, and documentation scrum. We have meetings pretty much every day in Cosmos."
Between meetings, the team works at separate desks. When someone has a question, they walk over and use proximity audio to ask it.
"Proximity is a key element. It works like a real office: if you're sitting across from somebody, you can talk to them. Somebody in another section, you wouldn't."
Cosmos is not only where Divi Engine has meetings. It's also where the team hangs out, and where they play games together.
"It's not just about having meetings; it's about creating a space where we can all hang out. Think proximity chat and virtual games — we have snowball fights in meetings and battleship tournaments going on. It's about making work fun and keeping the team tight-knit, even if we're sitting thousands of miles apart. When Fernando starts a snowball fight in the middle of a meeting, you can't help but feel like part of a community."
What started as Peter's experiment in September 2021 has become how Divi Engine runs. The scrums, the shared desks, the proximity chat are part of the studio's daily rhythm now. Peter, who never wanted a VR office, gets to watch his global team be a team from his desk. It is one way to build culture across a remote team.
"As a business owner, it's nice just to see the team members on there. Maybe seeing two guys chatting together. I enjoy seeing that."
"Cosmos wasn't just a solution to our logistic nightmares; it brought back the team vibe we were missing. It's turned our bunch of remote workers into a proper team again."
Peter Wilkinson
Founder
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