Default to writing
In a co-located team, context spreads through conversation. Distributed, that mechanism is absent, and anything not written down is known only to whoever was in the call.
Write decisions, reasoning, and status in a place everyone can read later. This feels slower and is substantially faster once the team is spread across hours.
Protect the overlap and spend it well
Agree a committed window where everyone is available, and treat it as genuinely committed rather than best-effort.
Use it for the things that need conversation — decisions, disagreements, design discussions — and push status reporting to writing. Overlap consumed by updates leaves nothing for the work that actually needs synchronicity.
Give everything one owner
Shared ownership works when people are in a room and fails at distance, because the cost of checking who is doing what is high enough that nobody checks.
One named person per piece of work, visible to everyone. Collaboration still happens; accountability does not get diffused.
Make progress visible passively
If the only way to know the state of the work is to ask, people either interrupt constantly or stop asking. A board that reflects reality, and short written updates at a known time, remove that entirely.
The goal is that anyone can answer "where are we?" without waking anyone up.
Be deliberate about relationships
The incidental contact that builds trust in an office does not occur remotely, and trust is what makes difficult conversations possible. It has to be created on purpose.
Occasional unstructured time, and where budget allows an occasional in-person meeting, pays back disproportionately in how easily problems get raised.
Watch for the quiet ones
Distributed teams make it easy for someone to be blocked or struggling without anyone noticing, particularly across a language or seniority gap.
Regular one-to-ones and an explicit route for raising problems matter more here than they do in person, because the ambient signals are missing.