Everyone’s sold on distributed hiring these days. Fewer people have actually done the math on what happens after you make the hire.
I recently spoke with World News Research about the part of global teams nobody wants to talk about: coordination cost. Here’s what stood out.
The talent argument is easy. The coordination argument isn’t.
I’ve said for a while that there’s no good reason to limit a company to local talent when specialists who’ve already solved your exact problem are sitting in a different time zone. That part’s settled. What’s less settled is what happens once that person is actually on the team. Strong individual hires don’t automatically add up to a team that functions well together.
Where things actually break
A question gets asked at the end of someone’s day. The answer doesn’t come until twelve hours later. What should’ve been a one-hour decision stretches into two days, not because anyone dropped the ball, but because the people who needed to weigh in were never awake at the same time. Multiply that across a sprint and velocity quietly disappears.
Velocity doesn’t mean rushing
That’s the line I gave the reporter, and it’s become something of a north star for how we build our systems. It means removing friction, not asking people to work odd hours to compensate for bad process. Time zone misalignment is one of the most common friction points in distributed teams, and the fix is almost always structural, not cultural.
The overlap window is smaller than founders think
One number from the piece has stuck with me: the real-time overlap between someone on the West Coast and someone in Eastern Europe might be two or three hours on a good day. Everything urgent has to fit in that window. Everything else needs a process that doesn’t depend on it. Teams that map this out on purpose build healthier operations than teams that discover it through missed deadlines.
The full piece explains how we measure this differently: tracking decisions that move forward without waiting on a specific person, rather than hours logged. If you’ve been thinking about going global with your own hiring, it’s worth a read.
Talent access was never the hard part. Building the systems that let that talent actually work together is.
