Eight timezones, one cohesive team

Leading a globally distributed engineering department that spans eight different timezones is no walk in the park. It takes a lot of effort and intention to make it all work. With this talk, I want to share some of the strategies we use to help make this globally distributed team successful and still feel like a cohesive unit.

One practice we lean on is async stand-up posts. I publish a weekly internal blog post on Sunday evening (Monday morning for our Thailand folks). The body of the post contains my updates for the department and then engineers leave their status updates in the comments.

While async standup posts are great, the team still needs face time with each other. We do this via weekly roundtables. These roundtables are optional one-hour long zoom calls that occur on a four-week rotating schedule to accommodate all of our different timezones.

During the roundtables, the team can chat about anything that is on their minds. We record these roundtables and I take notes. After the roundtable is over, I post the recording and the notes so anyone who could not attend can catch up on what was discussed.

Finally, to make a distributed team work well your culture has to be async first. To start, set the expectation that PRs and Issues should be open for at least 24 hrs for review to allow all team members a chance to weigh in. Treat Slack as an async tool and not a synchronous one. When you do this, folks become a lot more thoughtful in their written communication. People begin to think and plan ahead better. The stress of walking away from your computer during the day completely goes away. Lastly, record your meetings so folks never feel left out because they can always catch up with the recording later.