A redditor asked the following question about a team with people from different timezones.

Question#

Those of you who work remotely from homes and manage a team or teams from around the world, how do you effectively hold stand-up or retroactive stand-up meetings given that everyone is in a different timezone or part of the world?

My answer#

I got downvoted but I still believe I am right. Here’s the part of a discussion.

Me:

That’s not possible. A team is people working together. You don’t have a team, ergo you can’t use Scrum.

imalittlechai:

Actually no, a scrum team can be a remote team.

Me:

Of course it can. I just said that you can’t use Scrum if people don’t work together. Well, maybe you can, but the implementation will suck. One hour a day when everyone is present is not enough. It will be a massive bottleneck.

Even the Agile Manifesto says that: “The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.”

Of course, that was written more than 20 years ago. Nowadays, we can use Zoom or Teams, but we still need to talk, we need to collaborate, make decisions, plan our work, do pair or mob programming, just work together, etc.

I think in the case of OPs, it’s better to split a team into two, with people working in more or less the same time zone.