Design
Process
Two continents, twelve hours apart, and a team burning at 200%.
A distributed design-and-development team was quietly falling apart: an offshore design team in India, an onsite dev team in the US committing work on their behalf across a ~12-hour gap. I built the process, and became the voice, that let them finally work as one.
The loudest symptom: a team at 200% of budget.
On paper it was an Agile team building PayPal’s developer demo portal. In practice, the design team in India was churning at roughly twice its budgeted hours, with no one stateside managing expectations across the gap. The onsite team committed work. The offshore team absorbed it. The burn rate kept climbing.
Nobody was authorized to say no.
It was communication. No one spoke for the offshore team while the onsite team committed work on their behalf, and the offshore team “didn’t say no”, a cultural dynamic no one had accounted for.
An overworked team
~200% of budgeted hours, deadlines slipping, burn rate climbing.
No one could say “no”
No one authorized to speak to real capacity, so the work just kept landing.
So the fix was twofold: reel in onsite expectations, and give the offshore team a way to own and communicate its own capacity. Both halves, or neither would hold.
How do you manage a team twelve hours away?
I started with the onshore product owners and devs to pin scope, then ran three audits to see the real picture before changing anything.
Team
Who was doing what, and who had authority over what.
Project
What was actually committed versus what could realistically ship.
Resource
Found idle collaboration tools. Leaned on prior eBay experience to add the ones missing.
Daily end-of-day standups with the India team, so I’d learn real capacity and could speak to their status in the next morning’s onsite standup, plus a deliberately conservative ceiling of one feature (and a small fixed number of enhancements) per sprint, later dialed back to essentially one feature per sprint. I moved sprint planning later in the US day so India could attend, and became the offshore team’s advocate in the room.
From over 200% of budget to roughly 110%.
The target I set was 95-105% of budget. Landing near 110% was just outside it, 90 points down from over 200%, and the burn rate stopped climbing.
My first real turn on the producer side of design.
The overworked team was the noise. The absence of anyone authorized to say “no” was the signal. This was my first real turn on the producer/PM side of design, leading LeanUX ceremonies, resource planning, stakeholder management, and risk mitigation. 200% to 110%, and it held after I left.