Many people believe that practicing agile approaches on a distributed team is not possible, but with three mindset shifts you can achieve the benefits of agile. The first shift is managing for change through experimentation. If the team has freedom and guidance to experiment with everything they do, they can adapt their way of working. The second mindset shifts us toward communication and collaboration as emphasized by agile approaches and away from micro-silos so common with distributed teams. The third shift emphasizes a mindset focused on agile principles over practices. Most agile practices were designed with colocation in mind. Distributed teams need to consider their effective hours of overlap and adapt or create new practices based on agile and lean principles. These mindset shifts enable distributed teams to find their most successful way of delivering value.

Facilitating distributed team meetings can feel like having one arm tied behind your back and one eye covered, but you can free yourself of these virtual constraints using other agile practices. We struggle with meeting tools and keeping people engaged online, but what if we collaborate with our teams to get the most value out of their meetings? If we leverage pairing, mobbing and other practices, we can co-facilitate successful outcomes with our teams.