What we talked about
Manisha Sahni joins Federico Ramallo to unpack the real challenges of managing global engineering teams:beyond time zones and into the “hidden work” of leadership.
Manisha explains why distributed teams don’t run on autopilot: leaders must intentionally build unity, ownership, and belonging across cultures. She shares how trust is created through consistent connection:not only through work meetings, but also through lightweight social moments that turn “avatars into friends” and reduce friction in daily collaboration.
Show notes
Manisha Sahni grew an engineering organization from five to seventy globally distributed people at Pantheon, and the lesson she takes from that experience is not about tooling or process, it is about the volume of quiet, unmeasured human work that makes a distributed team actually function as one unit instead of a collection of people each doing their own thing.
What we covered
- The hardest part of managing global engineering teams is not time zones, it is the intentional cultural work of helping people from different backgrounds understand each other well enough to collaborate without friction. At Pantheon, teams spanned Eastern Europe, India, Mexico, the US, and Canada, all contributing to a single shared goal.
- A small group of two or three engineers across drastically different time zones set Manisha’s highest bar for async handoffs: their end-of-day messages were so detailed and specific that the team achieved a genuine 24-by-7 development cycle, each person picking up exactly where the last left off.
- Cultural differences in engineering teams are not abstract, some engineers from certain educational backgrounds excel at open-ended, ambiguous research problems, while others do their best work when the problem is clearly scoped and they are trusted to execute with precision. Treating these as weaknesses rather than different strengths is where managers go wrong.
- One concrete example: a senior engineer was delivering quick-fix solutions that frustrated his manager, but a one-on-one conversation revealed the engineer was new to the team and trying to show speed to make a good impression. The fix was coaching the manager to give this engineer ownership of a problem, let him research it, and present options to the team, which he did, and the manager said he did not recognize the same person.
- Anonymous feedback only works when trust is already established. Manisha described her own early-career experience of not trusting that anonymous surveys were truly anonymous, and therefore not giving honest answers. The solution is building enough of a relationship in one-on-ones that people feel safe saying what they actually think.
- Organizational changes need time to bake before results can be evaluated. Resetting team structures repeatedly in a fast-moving startup burns out both the team members and the leaders driving the change, and prevents any signal about whether the previous change was working.
About Manisha Sahni
Manisha Sahni is a full-time and fractional engineering leader with a track record of scaling globally distributed teams and improving platform reliability. She most recently led the data layer organization at Omni, where she cut integration delivery time from months to weeks, and previously spent several years at Pantheon building platform capabilities at scale.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/manishasahni
- Website: https://appomni.com
Episode 101 of the PreVetted Podcast.