As companies scale across time zones, the real risk to business outcomes is the ambiguity that can seep into how work is prioritized and how decisions are made. This problem tends to emerge as organizations grow beyond co-located teams and informal communication, particularly in early-stage companies moving into their next phase of scale. What once worked through proximity and personal relationships begins to break down when teams operate asynchronously and across functions.
When leaders fail to define what cannot change, teams lose a shared sense of direction and only realize something is off once time, effort, or customer trust has already been lost. Missed launches and quality issues are often symptoms rather than root causes, while leaders absorb the hidden cost by working across nights and weekends to reconnect fragmented efforts. “If you don’t align all the pieces of the company at a high level, you are not going to be successful,” says Rose Hecksher Schamberger, VP of Engineering at Vertafore, a long-standing technology provider in the insurance industry. “You can have the best product that nobody can sell, or the best sales team with a bad product. Those things have to come together.”
At scale, this alignment allows organizations to deliver reliably, respond faster to customers, and grow globally without depending on constant executive intervention.
A framework that connects Point A to Point Z
Schamberger’s adoption of SAFe, the Scaled Agile Framework used to coordinate agile work across large and distributed organizations, began in the early 2000s as companies shifted from waterfall to more iterative approaches. It provides a set of interoperable components that help leadership align strategy, delivery, and execution at scale, while still allowing teams to adapt to their local context.
“There is a misconception that agility belongs only to engineering teams,” she says. “SAFe enables you to go from point A to point Z. Nothing happens in a vacuum. You have to understand how to sell, how customers experience the product, how it is deployed, and how it is maintained.”
That enterprise view is central to her leadership profile. Schamberger has scaled teams from zero to 100+, led organizations of 350+ engineers, and delivered modernization and cloud optimization programs across North America, Europe, Asia, and Latin America. The through line is cross-functional alignment that survives distance.
Psychological safety is clarity
For Schamberger, safety isn’t a soft add-on to delivery frameworks like SAFe, but a direct outcome of how they are applied. Psychological safety comes from knowing where decisions sit, what success looks like, and how work connects across teams. “There’s this idea that you have to be nice. You don’t have to be nice; you have to be objective.”
Her approach starts by separating culture from commitment. Local working norms should be respected, but delivery expectations should be explicit. SAFe operates on “train releases,” and the same logic applies to global operations. Different teams may run different trains, carrying different “materials,” but the system still needs shared safety standards, stations, and schedules.
“You have to establish what is nonnegotiable,” she says. “That becomes the framework you apply across the organization.” Once those boundaries are clear, leaders can give regions latitude to decide how to execute. That autonomy is not a perk; it is a requirement for sane, scalable leadership. “Teams need the ability to make decisions on their own so leaders don’t have to be awake 24 hours.”
The other failure mode is structural: splitting work so that every team depends on every other team. “If everything that I do depends on you and everything you do depends on me, we never have the autonomy to move forward,” she says. The fix is ownership by design, with crisp deliverables and measurements that reduce ambiguity.
Visibility, signals, and rhythms that reward truth-telling
Visibility is key for leaders trying to move from talking about safety to embedding it. “You have to make the work and the decisions visible,” she says. That means a single source of truth for priorities, ownership, and decisions, with a structure that prevents competing “P0s” from multiplying until nothing is truly urgent.
She pairs visibility with monitoring that supports action rather than theater. Dashboards should behave like control rooms. “It’s not for fun; it’s really to make decisions,” she says. Metrics should show trends early enough to intervene, not merely declare failure after the fact. “You need to find the right metrics that will give you the signals,” she says, so leaders can spot when “this green is getting a little light” and adjust.
Then comes cadence: the operational rhythm that makes transparency normal. For global teams, this is less about surveillance and more about continuity. “Transparency is critical,” Schamberger says. “One team is in India, one team is in the US. They are working while I’m sleeping. I don’t know what they’re doing, and I shouldn’t—but when I get home in the morning, I should understand what they did.”
The goal is a culture where it is safe to disclose risk early, ask for help, and offer help when capacity frees up. In regulated environments, those rhythms may be more structured; in less regulated settings, lighter-weight ceremonies can work, so long as the nonnegotiables hold.
Demos, retrospectives, and the discipline of value
Schamberger is a strong advocate for demos, particularly because software progress is invisible until it is shown. “Demo is the proof,” she says, arguing that frequent demonstration is both an alignment mechanism and an early warning system when integration is drifting.
Retrospectives matter for the same reason, but she pushes beyond the standard playbook. “Winning or losing, we would sit down and learn what went well and what didn’t,” she says. The nuance is that wins can hide weak signals, so “winning is even more important than losing” for reflection, because good behaviors must be named and repeated.
SAFe isn’t a promise of transformation. It’s a mirror. It “shows you the good and bad signals,” she says, and exposes where the operating system is broken. Leaders still have to act.
Follow Rose Hecksher Schamberger on LinkedIn or visit her website.
