Shipping fast across four time zones
Our engineering team works in Dubai, Damascus, Istanbul, and Tallinn. Here's how we use that as an advantage instead of a coordination tax.
Distributed teams default to either 'pretend we're co-located' (8-hour overlap meetings, async work rots) or 'hard handoffs' (work freezes overnight). We do neither. Three rules make it work.
Rule 1: One overlap window, not many
Every team has a 90-minute live overlap each day. UAE–EU teams overlap 12:30–14:00 GMT. That's the meeting window. Everything else is async by default.
Rule 2: PRs cross zones, not blockers
A PR opened in Tallinn at 17:00 is on a Dubai reviewer's desk at 19:00 their time — so they read it next morning. The work doesn't stop, but no one is up at 3 AM either.
Rule 3: Decisions in docs, not chat
Every architectural decision lives in a markdown doc, not a Slack thread. The Tallinn team waking up should be able to catch up on yesterday in 15 minutes of reading, not 90 minutes of scrolling.