Designing trust and decision making in cross cultural product teams
Designing a collaboration rhythm layer for Slack to reduce expectation mismatch in distributed teams.
Role
Individual thesis project
Type
Research + Product Strategy + UX Design
Duration
2025 Oct – present
Why This Problem Matters
The Symptoms
When response expectations and working rhythms are left implicit, teams start to experience meeting fatigue, information overload, and more dangerously, erosion of trust. Many conflicts are not caused by what people say, but by when they expect a response.
The Shift
Distributed, cross-cultural teams are no longer an exception, they are becoming the default operating model for product teams. Founders hire across time zones for speed and cost, and teams collaborate without ever meeting in person. Remote and cross-cultural collaboration is now the default.
The tool gap
Today's tools optimize for workflow, not for collaboration psychology.
Communication
Documentation
Coordination
Trust Building
Emotional Context
How Decisions Actually Happen
| They help teams work, but not necessarily work together.
What exactly breaks in cross-cultural collaboration?
Research & Methods
Stakeholder interview
4 in-depth interviews(2 startup founders, 2 remote engineers across US / India / Taiwan)
Problem research
Literature review & frameworks(Erin Meyer, Hofstede, remote collaboration studies)
Research prototype
I created a lightweight research prototype to explore how teams interpret tone, urgency, and response expectations in everyday collaboration.
Problem Concreting
Across different teams and contexts, the same breakdowns kept appearing.
Scenario
Key Insights
Looking across these scenarios, several deeper patterns emerged.
Timing is interpreted as commitment and care.
In cross-cultural remote teams, response time is not just logistics, it is interpreted as a signal of responsibility, priority, and trust.
The same words do not encode the same level of commitment.
Phrases like "OK" or "I'll look into it" carry different meanings across cultures and power relationships.
Urgency is currently invisible and guessed, not designed.
In Slack, a casual question and a blocking request look exactly the same. Teams rely on tone, guessing, and social pressure to infer urgency.
How might we make response expectations and collaboration rhythms visible and negotiable in cross-cultural remote teams?
Coming soon
This project is currently in progress. Check back soon for the full case study!