I moved back from San Francisco to London when our son was born — the distance felt more pronounced than ever, and Brexit was making the logistics of staying increasingly complicated. The bulk of my engineering team stayed in San Francisco. Liz and Ophelia (QE) were in Shanghai. Guru was in Pune, India. I was eight hours behind one group and eight hours ahead of another, so early mornings and late evenings became the routine. The work never stopped — weekends, bank holidays, there was always on-call staff keeping the platform running.
The bigger challenge wasn’t the time zones — it was morale. I inherited a team with severe issues from prior leadership. They were directionless, didn’t feel heard, didn’t feel valued. Within my first three months I organised a week-long team summit. Roughly 40% was simply getting people in a room together to appreciate each other. The other 60% was building a 12-month roadmap through interactive sessions — sticky notes, soapbox presentations where individuals could pitch ideas and voice frustrations. It was the turning point.
We introduced engineering effectiveness metrics — mean time to resolution, change failure rate — and built dashboards in Looker. We steered clear of sprint velocity and story points, which I’ve never found useful for driving the right behaviours. For shared development environments (20–30 teams competing for 5–10 environments), we introduced a basic lease management system — essentially a spreadsheet and a biweekly return-to-pool cadence. Not glamorous, but it worked.
The thing I got most wrong about remote work: assuming that video calls could replace in-person connection. Pub quizzes and Friday drinks on Google Hangouts never took off — they felt forced. When we’d been co-located, the thing that worked was regular lunches (many of the team didn’t drink, so after-work drinks had never been the answer anyway). Remotely, the equivalent turned out to be Slack — relaxed, amiable, low-pressure communication throughout the day. That did more for team cohesion than any scheduled social event.