Setting up a daily handoff between ANZ and Jaipur
Working with a team in Jaipur from Sydney or Auckland has one constraint that shapes everything else. The round trip on a question is either minutes (inside the overlap) or about a day (outside it). Design around that.
The clock
IST is UTC+5:30 with no daylight saving. Sydney is UTC+10 (AEST) or UTC+11 (AEDT). Auckland is UTC+12 (NZST) or UTC+13 (NZDT). The gap runs from 4.5 to 7.5 hours and changes twice a year, because only your side moves.
Assuming a 9:30 start in Jaipur:
| Jaipur | Sydney AEST | Sydney AEDT | Auckland NZST | Auckland NZDT |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 9:30 | 14:00 | 15:00 | 16:00 | 17:00 |
| 11:30 | 16:00 | 17:00 | 18:00 | 19:00 |
| 13:30 | 18:00 | 19:00 | 20:00 | 21:00 |
Inside a normal working day that is roughly 2.5 to 3.5 hours for Sydney and 1 to 2 hours for Auckland.
The daily loop
Five fixed points, same times every day:
- Your morning: read the team's end-of-day note, answer every question in the thread before lunch.
- Start of overlap: 15 to 20 minute call. Shipped, blocked, next. New work is briefed here, with the written brief already sent.
- Middle of the day: the team builds. You do not get pinged unless something is blocked.
- End of overlap: 20 to 30 minute review of what is on staging, on a screen share. Approve or send back with specifics.
- End of the Jaipur day: the team posts the note below.
End-of-day note
A plain template is enough:
Done:
- ... Next:
- ... Blocked:
- ... Questions (numbered, each answerable in one line):
- ...
- ...
Numbering matters. You reply by number, so every answer maps to a question and nothing gets lost in a long paragraph.
Decision log
After each call the team posts what was decided: date, decision, owner. You confirm it or correct it in the thread. Keep it next to the specs, in the same wiki or repo, so it can be found later.
Treat a decision as made once it is logged. Before that, two people can leave the call with different versions.
Call or thread?
If a question needs more than two or three round trips, it goes on the call. Each round trip outside the overlap can cost a day.
On the call: scope trade-offs, unclear briefs, edge-case behaviour, what to cut this week, reviews of working software.
In writing: specs, acceptance criteria, bug reports with reproduction steps, anything someone will look up in three months.
Bring the question with the options listed. Whether refunds can be partial takes ten minutes. An open question about how payments should work takes the whole call.
Outside the overlap
The end-of-day note arrives in your evening or overnight and waits until morning. Agree what counts as urgent, such as production down or customers unable to pay, and give it one named channel. Everything else waits for the next window.
Common failure modes
- The call grows past 20 minutes. Cut the agenda back and move detail into a written doc.
- Questions arrive as one long paragraph. Number them.
- Decisions happen in direct messages. Move them to the thread and log them.
- The calendar breaks when your clocks change. Check both clocks that week, since the Jaipur side does not move.
- Nobody posts the note. Name one owner per thread on each side.
Thread layout
One thread per part of the product: payments, onboarding, admin, and so on. It follows the way DL splits teams, one small team per domain, and it keeps each note short enough to read in a couple of minutes.
Originally published at decipheringlogic.com
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