Bringing a multicultural team together
summary
Built a banking app from scratch across multiple countries (Dec 2019–Mar 2021), the project moves from a confused, partly collocated group to a 20-person high‑performing team that ships multiple releases per week instead of six‑monthly drops. Practices used: one-to-ones for follow-up, documented onboarding (tech and non‑tech), Confluence for decisions, temporary seat‑swaps between teams, and explicit handling of high/low‑context communication and upgraders/downgraders. COVID forces remote onboarding and revealed where the tooling and cultural assumptions break; outcome: successful production launches and faster cadence.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00Introduction and speaker welcome
- 1:09Building a multicultural team from scratch
- 8:12Communication challenges in diverse teams
- 10:43Strategies to improve team dynamics
- 21:46Education and onboarding best practices
- 33:28Understanding cultural communication styles
- 35:35Results and team growth outcomes
- 36:18Q&A and closing remarks
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