Five mistakes teams make with working with a remote team

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit working with a remote team.

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

Where it usually goes wrong

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• Write things down, because hallway context does not exist
• Overlap hours matter more than time zones
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Regular short calls beat rare long ones. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

Making it stick

How to tell if yours is fine

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. Three things worth confirming about working with a remote team before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Write things down, because hallway context does not exist — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.