Complexity and Cross-Geo Teams

Locate complexity inside teams so that you can have short feedback loops. Complicated things can span teams. There are some transitional strategies to get from where you are to a cleaner match between time zones and complexity.

Our standard advice is that we should structure teams to contain complexity. Complex work is inherently emergent, and you need close collaboration with team members to address that emergence effectively.

This is much harder to do when a team spans time zones. The feedback loop to get all team members aware of and adapting to the new information can be up to a full day, a glacial pace compared to that of a co-located team. In this episode, we share a few strategies that we’ve seen companies use to transition over time to better locate complexity within team boundaries, resulting in much faster feedback, better decisions and outcomes, and higher engagement on those teams.

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