Three Cities, One Car, Same Room

My core design team is split across three cities. For years, that meant we could never really review a design *together* — and design review is exactly the thing you cannot do well apart.

We tried everything. Video calls where someone shared their screen and rotated a model while everyone else squinted at their own flat monitor, seeing the same object but never sharing the same view, never able to point at the same spot and have it mean anything. Flying everyone to one city for the important reviews — expensive, slow, and so disruptive we did it rarely, which meant big decisions waited for the next time we could all be physically together. The distance imposed a tax on every collaborative decision we made, paid in travel or in misunderstanding.

A shared virtual room collapsed the three cities into one.

Now my team meets *inside* the design. Same room, same model, same scale — except one of us is in Pune, one in Chennai, one in Pune's satellite office, all standing around the same virtual car at the same time. When someone points at a panel, everyone sees what they're pointing at, from a shared frame of reference. We walk around it together. We discuss it the way you can only discuss a thing when you're all genuinely looking at the same thing, together, in space.

The distance tax is gone. We don't fly people in for a review anymore — we just meet in the room, today, from wherever we are. The big decisions that used to wait for everyone to be in the same city now happen whenever we need them to, because "same city" stopped being a requirement for "same room."

What surprised me is that it's not a worse version of being together. In some ways it's better — nobody's lost the good seat, everyone has the same view, and we can be inside the model at full scale in a way you can't even do clustered around a physical prototype.

Three cities used to mean three separate teams pretending to collaborate across a screen. Now it's one team that happens to sleep in three places, meeting every day inside the same car.