Here's a hard truth most engineering leaders don't say out loud: your team's speed depends way too much on people being in the same room at the same time.
You don't notice this until someone joins who isn't. A senior engineer in Prague, six or nine hours ahead of your US team, will expose every place where your process was actually just "ask Dave, he remembers."
The instinct is to treat this as a problem to manage. Standups get awkward. Someone has to stay late or log in early. Slack threads pile up overnight. It feels like friction.
But watch what actually happens over the following few months.
Decisions get written down. When you can't grab someone in the hallway to settle a design question, you write it in a doc or a ticket instead. That doc doesn't disappear when the meeting ends. It becomes the record. Six months later, nobody has to reconstruct "why did we do it this way" from memory.
