Communication, remote work, and time zones: how CEE tech teams work with US and European companies

In my conversations with CIOs and CTOs, communication is often one of the first 5 questions they ask about engagements with Central and Eastern European tech teams. It’s not that they question this particular region, but these concerns often come from past experiences. Many of them worked with external teams that looked strong during procurement but felt disconnected once delivery started.

Geography matters much less once the engagement is set up properly. In fact, Poland and the wider CEE region offer strong English proficiency, considerable experience working with international companies, and technology experts already used to remote collaboration.

Will language be a barrier when working with a CEE tech team?

Despite being non-English-speaking countries, Poland and other CEE countries rank highly for English proficiency, especially when it comes to the IT sector. This is not a surprise; PARP reports that Polish IT and ICT service exports exceeded $17.8 billion in 2023, with main destinations including the U.S., the UK, and Germany. The fact is that around half of Polish tech experts work for foreign companies, either through a Polish branch or directly for a company without a Polish office. This is also true in our case, as our past and ongoing projects have mostly been with companies in the United States or Europe. It all comes down to the recruitment process and to verifying each expert's proficiency in communicating with clients.

But from what I’ve seen, language is rarely the difficult part. Polish engineers can be quite direct when they see a problem, although I would be careful about making it a cultural rule. What matters more to me is whether an engineer is comfortable saying, “I think we should look at this again,” and can explain why. We actively look for that. If a requirement creates a security, scalability, or delivery risk, I expect the engineer to raise it rather than implement it silently.

How much working-day overlap can you expect with a CEE tech team?

With European clients, time zones are not much of a problem. Poland is 1 hour ahead of the UK and shares almost the entire working day with most of continental Europe. The U.S. requires more thought, but it is far from an overnight handover model. Poland is usually 6 hours ahead of the US East Coast, and in most of our U.S. engagements, we keep at least 4 hours of working time overlap, so there’s still a natural window for conversations. For other situations, we maintain asynchronous communication via Slack to ensure day-to-day information flows smoothly.

It also works for agile teams and for participating in standups, sprint planning, or less frequent meetings. In such situations, our experts can usually extend their working hours on these days to participate. From my experience, this solution works really well for both sides.

But this is something definitely worth clearing up before collaboration starts.

How do CEE teams make remote software collaboration work?

Remote work has been around for a while now, even though some companies have returned to the office. For example, in Poland, most engineers and tech experts work remotely. And this is also the way of working I found very productive and effective - I’ve tested this in many projects and companies across the years. That’s why when starting LLInformatics in 2016, we took the same approach, and now we’re a fully remote company.

To make every collaboration work, we have set various standards, from communication and knowledge-sharing to collaboration throughout the project and the handover process. Project knowledge is particularly important here. Too many times I’ve seen projects stalled and timelines slip just because one person really knew how everything worked.

And this is why we try to make ownership and knowledge sharing part of everyday delivery rather than something saved for handover. The client should not need a specific engineer in the room to understand why the product works as it does.

How should a CEE engineering team integrate with your internal team?

In my experience, integration depends much more on how people are selected and onboarded than on whether two countries are culturally similar. We look for people who will take ownership, communicate directly, and work comfortably with client teams, because those traits matter once they join an existing product organisation.

Business context matters just as much. Engineers should understand why a feature is being built, what the company is trying to achieve, and which constraints matter to the client. Without that context, even technically correct work can miss the business need.

Another thing that makes the collaboration strong is in-person meetings. For one of our American clients, we held quarterly meetings in Warsaw, among others, to discuss more strategic topics, such as setting priorities for the next quarter. This helped our experts integrate more smoothly into the client’s team and really made a difference throughout the engagement.

What should CTOs ask before choosing a CEE technology partner?

I would not spend too much of a vendor conversation asking about national developer rankings. They may tell you something about the talent market, but they will not tell you what working with that company will feel like 3 months later.

Instead, I would ask questions that expose how collaboration actually works:

• How do your engineers raise concerns about requirements, architecture, security, or delivery risk?
• What happens when your engineers disagree with our proposed approach?
• Who will communicate directly with our product and technology leaders?
• How will your engineers join our existing planning, development, and review processes?
• How many hours of meaningful working-day overlap will we have with the people assigned to our project?
• Can the team adjust its working hours when an important discussion requires it?
• How will your engineers learn the business context behind the backlog?
• How are important technical decisions and assumptions documented?
• How is knowledge transferred if someone leaves the project or the engagement ends?

These questions are close to the concerns I often hear from clients. They want to know whether the provider is a safe choice, whether the team will fit with their existing people, whether knowledge will remain accessible, and whether the engineers they work with can speak to them at the same technical level rather than routing every conversation through an account manager.

What does seamless collaboration with a CEE tech team actually look like?

Poland and CEE countries offer several conditions that make collaboration seamless. English proficiency is high, international technology work is well established, remote collaboration is common, and there is practical working-day overlap with Europe and the US East Coast. But I would never choose a technology partner simply because they happen to be based in CEE.

What’s more important is whether engineers ask questions before coding, whether they understand the business behind the backlog, whether concerns reach the right people early, and whether knowledge stays visible to the whole team. When those things work, location tends to disappear from the conversation, and nobody discusses whether the developer is sitting in Warsaw, London, or New York. Instead, the product and business requirements become the centre of everyone’s attention.