Dinner with the team along the Saigon River, in the rain.
My Vietnam team took me out to dinner along the Saigon River, and halfway through the meal it started pouring. Not a sprinkle — a proper tropical downpour. We were sitting right on the river, open to the sky, and it was coming down hard.
Any reasonable group would have moved inside. Nobody did. We just sat there, watched the rain hit the water, and kept eating. It was one of the best nights of the trip, and it wasn't because of the food.
It was because of the rain.
/ The Roadmap Doesn't Build the Team
When you run a distributed team, you spend a lot of time on the mechanics. The standups, the sprints, the docs, the timezone overlap. All of it is necessary. None of it is what actually makes a team feel like a team.
The team forms in the unplanned moments. The dinner that goes long. The conversation that drifts from the project to something real. The shared experience of getting rained on together and deciding, without anyone saying it, that it's worth staying. That's where the 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 schedule it. You can't put it on the roadmap. You can only make space for it and let it happen.
/ What "Remote" Gets Wrong
The hardest thing about a global team isn't the distance. It's that the default interactions are all transactional. You get on the call, you talk about the work, you get off. Every touchpoint is about something. Nothing is just... being there.
A dinner in the rain is the opposite. It has no agenda. It doesn't advance the sprint. And that's exactly why it matters. The team that has shared an agenda-less moment — that's eaten together, laughed together, gotten soaked together — collaborates differently when the work gets hard. They've seen each other as people, not just as handles in a chat.
/ The Lesson, If You're Leading One of These Teams
Get on the plane. Go sit with the team that's twelve time zones away, not to run a meeting but to have a meal. Let the agenda go. If it rains, sit in it.
The roadmap will get built either way. The team is the thing you can't build without showing up.
Until the next run out — work hard, play hard.