You can't deploy cohesion
I was an offshore outsourcer. For years, my job wasn't to govern delivery centers from afar: it was to go set them up, then fly back — physically, regularly — for a reason no SOW could ever put into words. Cohesion. Making the team over there and the team over here feel like they belonged to the same project. You don't steer that from a dashboard. You get on a plane.
Eleven years ago, I resigned. Not out of weariness: out of clarity. I could see DevOps, the twelve-factor app, the cloud and containerization dissolving the very problem I was paid to solve. Distance was becoming cheap to cross. Proximity — co-located squads, you build it you run it, the product owner in the room — was winning the war. My job, the guy you send to rebuild connection across the boundary, was becoming a relic. I was right to leave. I'm starting to think I was wrong to believe the muscle had died with it.