How We Make It Work
Timezone overlap, handoff rituals, and documentation standards
4+ Hour Overlap
Guaranteed daily overlap window for standups, planning, and blocker resolution
Handoff Rituals
End-of-day summaries, runbooks, and async updates in shared channels
Demo Culture
Weekly sprint demos keep both teams aligned on progress and goals
Security Built In
SOC2 compliance, NDA coverage, and clear IP ownership from day one
Sample Weekly Cadence
A typical rhythm for US East Coast + offshore team
Monday
- 9:00 AM ET: Sprint Planning (both teams)
- 10:30 AM ET: Architecture sync if needed
- 6:00 PM ET: Offshore standup + handoff
Tuesday-Thursday
- 9:00 AM ET: Daily standup (both teams)
- Throughout day: Overlap window for pairing, code reviews, discussions
- 6:00 PM ET: End-of-day handoff summary (async)
Friday
- 9:00 AM ET: Daily standup
- 11:00 AM ET: Sprint demo / show & tell
- 2:00 PM ET: Retrospective (both teams)
- 6:00 PM ET: Week wrap-up
Documentation & Artifact Standards
Clear expectations for async communication and knowledge sharing
Required Artifacts
- •Runbooks for critical workflows
- •Architecture decision records (ADRs)
- •End-of-day handoff summaries
- •Sprint demo recordings (if anyone misses)
- •Incident postmortems (blameless)
- •Definition of Done checklists
Tooling We Use
- •Jira / Linear: Shared backlog and sprint boards
- •Confluence / Notion: Documentation and runbooks
- •Slack / Teams: Async handoffs and updates
- •GitHub: PR reviews, code comments, CI status
- •Loom / Zoom: Demo recordings and walkthroughs
- •Datadog / New Relic: Shared observability