Managing across timezones; A retrospective
summary
Manages 12 engineers across four timezones (San Francisco, London, Austin, New York) and reports six concrete lessons: reserve a weekly golden hours slot, use a daily handover thread bot instead of mandatory standups, adopt an asynchronous-first norm with RFCs ADRs and a big internal wiki, run two-to-three person squads per quarter that own key results, rotate people through projects, keep a 24/7 on‑call rotor to leverage time differences, and hold retros every two weeks with tracked action items.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Time zones and team sync
- 1:23Globally distributed team
- 2:27Protect synchronous meetings
- 3:08Experiment with processes
- 3:49Writing things down
- 4:54Empower teams with frameworks
- 6:38Time zones as strengths
- 7:20Retrospectives drive improvement
- 8:44Six key lessons recap
- 9:25Closing thoughts
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