the 700-mile hallway

One characteristic of MacBU is that we're a distributed team.  I work in Mountain View, California.  Part of the team is in Redmond, Washington; another part is in Dublin, Ireland; and another part in Beijing, China.  Between the two American sites, we refer to it as "the 700-mile hallway".  

One thing that I really like about MacBU is a strong commitment to being a distributed team.  While the team in each geography has its own culture, that culture is part of the overall MacBU culture.  To ensure that our MacBU culture is strong and doesn't break down, we communicate a lot, and we get together frequently.  I come up to Redmond to talk with my UX counterparts here, I do video chats with the team in Beijing, I comment on the Facebook status my team members in Dublin.   

This morning, I traversed that 700-mile hallway, coming to Redmond for a bunch of meetings with my fellow members of the UX team.  This morning, I sat down with the other researchers and our designers and talked about our next steps and our shared goals.  This afternoon, the whole UX team came together to talk about our future.  Tomorrow, before I go home, I'll meet with my manager, as well as some colleagues on other teams in Microsoft.

In early December, I'll traverse that 700-mile hallway again, this time accompanied by the rest of my teammates in California, and the rest of the technical team is coming from their sites too.  It's a great opportunity to get everyone together at once, to have those serendipitous hallway conversations that are so important, to break out into smaller groups, to talk in person with people I only get to see via video chat, to drink margaritas with a different crowd than the usual.