Growing a distributed team across three time zones

Growing an engineering team distributed across three or more time zones is different from growing a co-located team. The coordination costs are higher; the tools and rituals matter more; some things that work for a 5-person distributed team stop working at 15.

Written January 2025 from experience scaling a team from 8 to 24 across three zones.

What worked at small size

• Daily async standup in a shared channel.
• Meetings in a small overlap window.
• Documents as the primary communication channel.
• One-on-ones weekly with the manager.

What broke at medium size

• Daily standup channel became noise. 24 people posting daily produces a wall of text nobody reads.
• The overlap window filled up. Between all-hands, team meetings, cross-team meetings, and one-on-ones, the overlap became a meeting marathon.
• Documents scattered. Each team had its own conventions; finding anything required knowing who wrote it.
• Cross-team coordination broke. The team-level rituals didn't extend to cross-team work.

What we changed

• Standups moved to sub-team channels. Each sub-team of 4–6 has its own standup channel; sub-teams sync less frequently at the team level.
• Meeting-free days. Two days a week with no meetings, protected across zones.
• Documentation homes established. Every team has a designated documentation location; a search across those locations finds most things.
• Explicit cross-team liaisons. Each team has someone whose job includes coordinating with adjacent teams.

What still doesn't scale

• Ad-hoc decisions across zones. Anything that can't be async has to fit the overlap window, and the overlap window is finite.
• Team-wide relationships. At small size, everyone knows everyone. At medium size, most people know each other's names and not much more.

Distributed teams scale, but not by doing more of what worked at small size. The rituals have to evolve with the size.