A dedicated team in the region works when somebody genuinely leads it. We put in a technical lead who distributes the work, reviews what gets delivered and shows up when something slips; you talk to that person instead of to six. Delivery runs in short blocks that each end with something you can open and try, because at a distance the only proof of progress is working software.

• Teams are often built from more than one country, which forces decisions to be written down instead of settled in a hallway.
• National holidays do not line up between Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Chile and Peru, so they are planned at the start rather than discovered later.
• We work in Spanish inside the team and write documentation in English whenever your own staff needs it that way.