Teams Are Built One Dinner at a Time

A distributed team is a group of people on a call until something agenda-less happens to them. For my Vietnam team, that something was a dinner along the Saigon River — and a tropical downpour halfway through it.

Any reasonable group would have moved inside. Nobody did. We sat there, watched the rain hit the water, and kept eating. It was the best night of the trip, and not because of the food.

The roadmap doesn't build the team. You spend most of your time on the mechanics of a distributed org — the standups, the sprints, the docs, the timezone overlap. All necessary. None of it is what makes a team feel like a team. The team forms in the unplanned moments: the dinner that runs long, the conversation that drifts from the project to something real, the shared experience of getting rained on together and deciding it's worth staying.

That's where trust comes from, and trust is the only thing that makes a distributed team more than a group of people on a call. You can't put it on the roadmap. You can only make space for it and let it happen.

The hardest thing about a global team isn't the distance. It's that the default interactions are all transactional — get on the call, talk about the work, get off. A dinner in the rain is the opposite. It has no agenda and doesn't advance the sprint, and that's exactly why it matters.

If you're leading one of these teams, get on the plane. Not to run a meeting — to have a meal. And if it rains, sit in it.

The field-notes version is on WanderingCTO.

Think this argument fits your event? Tell me about the room — the calendar is selective.