How I think about offshore teams

I’ve said before that adding people to a high-friction org makes it slower, not faster. Offshore is where that mistake gets expensive — and where it hides. The friction is baked into how most companies set it up, and the distance covers for it, so you end up blaming the time zone instead of the design.

So before the how, a little homework. If your org is slow because of tech debt and fuzzy ownership, a team eight time zones away will not fix it. It’ll spread the confusion further and hand it a slower feedback loop. Fix the friction you can name first. Then, if you still need people, be honest with yourself about why.

Why are you really doing this?

Most companies say “offshore” and mean “cheaper.” Cost is the weakest reason there is, and the most fragile. Wage gaps close. And if cost is the only logic, you’ll under-invest in the relationship and get exactly what you underpaid for.

The durable reasons are different. You can’t hire fast enough at home, so you go where the engineers are. Or the time-zone spread genuinely buys you something — coverage, cycle time — when the handoffs are designed and not just hoped for. Most of the dysfunction I’ve watched comes from wanting one of those while managing as if it were the cheap one.

Doing nothing was the decision

Here’s a smaller story that taught me the same lesson from the other side.

At one point ezCater ran a sudden fire drill: figure out, this week, how many people each team could absorb from an offshore firm nobody had vetted yet. What we were actually solving for was never quite clear. So most teams did the natural thing — they started trying to add people — and the interviewing and onboarding went about how you’d expect from an unvetted firm under a deadline. Mixed, on a good day.

A few of us did nothing. I was one of them.

My team was finally starting to gel, I’d already done the friction homework, and I knew that dropping a batch of unknown people into it would cost me more than it gave me. I already had two offshore engineers, and stacking a third geography on top was a real question, not a free one. So I sat it out.

That’s the kind of call a middle manager gets handed and has to sort out alone, usually without a clean read on what anyone above actually wants. Everybody, at every level, was trying to do their best. But some decisions carry consequences nobody fully thought through — and part of the job is absorbing that ambiguity yourself instead of passing it down the org as more headcount.

Engineers, not resources

The one thing that predicts whether any of this works: do you treat the offshore team as part of the org, or as an outsourced order-taker?

You can’t rent ownership. A body-shop contract with people rotating out every few months behaves nothing like a team that owns a product area and expects to still own it next year. And ownership doesn’t show up because you asked for it in a pep talk. It comes from handing over a real surface — a service, a domain — with the roadmap and the on-call and the technical calls attached. Hand someone an under-specified ticket queue and grade them on throughput, and you’ll get junior output no matter who you hired.

What we actually did

We onboarded two engineers, one in Egypt and one in Ghana. Slowly, on purpose. And then we did the part most companies skip.

We expected everything of them.

Full team-member expectations — not “offshore” expectations, whatever those are supposed to be. They owned their work and, before long, led projects. We ran real 1:1s, which a few people found odd, as if a weekly conversation about growth and blockers were something you only did for the folks in the building. We coached them on taking feedback, and then we actually gave it — the same way we gave it to everyone. After a while they weren’t “the offshore engineers.” They were engineers on my team who happened to be in Egypt and Ghana.

That’s the whole thing, and it isn’t a trick. Same bar, same attention, real weight to carry. People rise to what you expect of them. And they can feel it when the expectation has been quietly set lower.

The two things that actually hurt

Distance is manageable. Two things aren’t, unless you design for them.

The overlap window. Decide how many hours you genuinely need together, then guard them for the things that need synchrony — the design argument, the unblocking — not the status you could’ve typed into a doc. And watch who keeps taking the 10pm meeting. If it’s always the same team, that reads as second-class, because it is.

And context. The offshore team usually has less of the customer, less of the “why,” and none of the hallway. Close that gap on purpose. Put them on customer calls. Give them the strategy straight, not filtered through a proxy who turns into a bottleneck and a game of telephone. Write decisions down where they can actually see them.

Keep one bar

A few structural habits will quietly undo everything else.

Splitting the work so onshore thinks and offshore implements builds a hierarchy that caps growth and breeds resentment — split by domain instead, so each team ships on its own. Routing all communication through a single onshore manager strangles the very speed you were trying to buy. And the quietest killer of all: two sets of standards. A lower review bar. A “we’ll let it slide for that team.” Keep one bar. The moment there are two, everyone knows which team you actually trust.

One thing the cost model always forgets: attrition. Every departure resets the context you spent months building. If you’re doing this for talent, then keeping the talent is the job — which means real growth where they are, and local leaders with actual authority, not just a salary that looks good on a spreadsheet in another currency.

The gut check

Here’s the test I keep coming back to. If I moved this exact team onshore tomorrow, would I manage them any differently? Different tone, lower expectations, less ownership, less trust with the context?

If the answer is yes, I just found my dysfunction.

The goal is for the answer to be no. They’re my team. They just happen to be somewhere else.