Recently we had a discussion w/ a prospective client. They want a pod from us whose members are:
We told them we could only provide 2 out of the 3. Our current pod model has a tech lead who has all 3 but the devs (whom he directly manages) don't. We wholeheartedly believe in this pod model and strongly advocate it to all of our clients.
The whole point of having the tech lead is to abstract away the Vietnamese team so clients don't have to deal w/ cultural/language/management/timezone/etc issues. Instead it is just the tech lead as a single point of contact. He can communicate w/ client's dev team or non-tech stakeholders and will bridge the gap between the client and the Vietnamese devs.
Of course the client's dev team is free to communicate w/ the Vietnamese devs directly as well (and we strongly encourage such transparency) via async communication tools such has Asana/Jira/Github/Clickup/Slack/etc. But to have the Vietnamese devs participate in calls/etc multiple times a day is disruptive and unnecessary. Software engineers are creators. We need uninterrupted blocks of time to concentrate.
Having direct verbal communication with your devs is good, especially when technical specs are unclear and real time white-boarding/brainstorming is necessary. Bu it is better to have that through a single point of contact. Otherwise it will become too much.
