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Discussion on: How does your company deal with massive time zone differences between teammates?

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Nick Taylor • Edited

It's tough.

Currently, on my team, the developers are based in Montreal, product/design and QA are in the UK and another part of design is in San Francisco.

We have daily standups, so we find a time where it works for those three time zones. For us, that is 10:30-11am Eastern. It is not always ideal for the developers as we get out of our morning groove (people start work anywhere between 8:30-9:30am).

For getting answers to things, you need to be mindful of people's timezones, so for example, the UK is 5-6 hours ahead of Montreal (depending on the time of year), so we try to get questions about design or product as soon as possible during the start of our day. If for some reason we have questions closer to the end of our day, we just leave a question in Slack or JIRA with as much information as possible. Usually, come morning, for us in Montreal, we have answers.

We use Slack heavily (good and bad), but we also use tools like MURAL which we've found to be quite helpful. For design, Figma is great since you can add comments and it's web-based. And we use GitHub for source control, so once again, web-based with comments/back and forth in pull requests.

It's not perfect, but it's how we've been working for the past little while.

It's not perfect, but it's going to be okay