Some of my teams have spent a week in the same room for the first time. Distributed teams like these normally work across continents, with the product managers and some of the designers on one side and the engineers and the rest of the designers on the other. Many of them had never met in person. They are in Barcelona for two weeks, doing their ordinary work side by side, and I am writing this at the halfway point, so I do not know the ending yet.
Five days in
The first thing I see is where the time goes: far more of it on discussing opportunities, problems and solutions, and far less on people working alone. There is much more teamwork. People who had never met are getting to know each other, enjoying working together, and spending time together after work as well.
One team is shipping a change every day. What has changed is the length of the communication line: they discuss an opportunity, make a quick choice, do the work and measure the impact, all in one room. When teams sit several time zones apart, a question in the afternoon must wait until the next working day for an answer. There is another week to go, so I do not yet know whether the pace holds, but if I were a betting man, I bet for it.
From software team to change agent
Another team has changed how it sees itself. It used to think of itself mainly as a software development team. Now it sees itself as a change agent. The work is to go and talk to people, to understand how the product fits into their work, both to build it well and to win buy-in for the ideas the product carries. Being together means they can get on a plane to visit customers in a nearby country and be back the same day. Remote, and separated by time zones, they could never have done that.
Why the room matters more now
The roles have not changed. There are still engineers, designers, product managers and subject matter experts. The job of the team has changed: engineers still engineer and designers still design, but the day has shifted from producing artefacts alone to deciding together what is worth producing. The work that used to need a specialist alone at a desk, like writing code, producing Figma assets, writing long documents and reading and synthesising research, now happens much faster because of AI. The days people used to spend alone on the artefact are now spent talking to each other about what the artefact should be. What is left is collaboration and collective discussion, so doing it together matters more than it used to.
This is the shift I described in Steering, Not Rowing: as execution gets cheaper, what people contribute moves towards direction and judgement. Direction and judgement are collective work, and they are harder to share when the people involved are a continent apart.
Costs
None of this is free. The costs are very high: the travel, the disruption to the people who travelled, and everything that does not get done while they are away. Those costs are real, and need to be taken into account at the end, when judging for success.
Questions I cannot answer yet
The trip makes me question the economics of where skills sit. For years the logic for recruiting certain specialisms in far-away countries where they are cheaper was clear. Is it still valid when the cost of inputs and outputs is changing this fast, and the nature of the work is changing with it? I do not have an answer. I think it will shape how businesses that build digital products organise next, and it may have mid-term macroeconomic implications: I wrote on Monday about outsourcers being repriced, and the same question applies to any location whose main offer is access to individual contributors at lower cost.
It questions the nature and process of digital product management. When code, assets and documentation are generated automatically, what does a product management team need to be good at, and what should it stop spending its days on? And what is the best organisational architecture to enable them to succeed?
Back to the start
We are back to the start: the value of small groups of highly skilled people with a lot of autonomy, the right tools, and the ability to execute on their own ideas. Being together, with complete human contact, in a room or through technology, is going to become much more important. I think teams are going back to being teams in the sporting sense: who is on them, and how well they support each other, will count for more than the scale, distribution and optimisation of the recent past.
Leave a Reply