Follow-the-Sun: 24/7 without burning teams out.

Three hubs: Paris, Montreal, Tokyo. Seven to nine hours gap between Paris and Tokyo, six to nine between Paris and Montreal. On paper, the dream: 24 hours of production per day. In reality, most companies trying it end up burning their engineers with forced night shifts and 3 AM daily standups. Here's how we operate without breaking anyone.

Three to four hours of overlap, no more

Paris-Montreal: overlap 2 PM-6 PM CET. Paris-Tokyo: overlap 9 AM-noon CET / 5 PM-8 PM JST. Tokyo-Montreal: near-zero overlap, handled pure async. Every sync fits in these windows. No meeting outside the window without explicit agreement and compensation.

Async-first, for real

Every technical decision lives in Notion or Linear. RFC in markdown, inline comments, tracked decision. No "let's talk about it Friday". Async dailies happen on Slack through a homegrown bot that pings each engineer at 10 AM local time: three questions, free format, public reply thread.

typescript
// Bot async-daily Slack, exemple de payload
{
  channel: 'team-platform',
  blocks: [
    { type: 'header', text: 'Daily standup async' },
    { type: 'section', text: '1. Qu'avez-vous livré hier ?' },
    { type: 'section', text: '2. Que livrerez-vous aujourd'hui ?' },
    { type: 'section', text: '3. Avez-vous un blocage ? Taggez le bon hub.' }
  ],
  schedule: { tokyo: '10:00 JST', paris: '10:00 CET', montreal: '10:00 EST' }
}

Clean end-of-day handoffs

Every engineer closes their day with a written handoff: what's in progress, what's blocked, what can be picked up by the next hub. Tagged in Linear with a HANDOFF_READY label. The next hub takes it or not, but never guesses.

One single source of truth per project

Notion for long docs, Linear for tickets, GitHub for code, Slack for synchronous noise. No duplication, no doc hidden in a personal Drive. A new engineer should be able to onboard a project by reading a single Notion link.

The anti-patterns we ban

• Synchronous daily at 10 PM JST to align with Paris. Guaranteed burnout in six months.
• Decision-makers all in one time zone. The Tokyo hub becomes an executor.
• 24/7 Slack with immediate response expected. Nobody sleeps, nobody thinks.
• Documentation in the tech lead's head. First departure, project frozen.

The measurable result

On our tri-geo projects, the average ticket lead time is 2.3 days, versus 4.1 on equivalent single-zone teams. Engineer internal NPS is 72. Annual attrition is below 6%. Follow-the-sun done right doesn't exhaust, it accelerates.

If you operate or want to operate multiple hubs and 11 PM dailies are starting to wear out your best engineers, our teams wrote the playbook. We run it daily across three zones. Let's talk.