I'm curious if a separate "design review" phase could have helped with your challenges with the team halfway around the world? I worked at one company where, d

I'm curious if a separate "design review" phase could have helped with your challenges with the team halfway around the world? I worked at one company where, due to the nature of the business, you really couldn't reasonably expect other teams to do code review in a timely manner. But most inter-team code review challenges had to do with high-level design, interface protocols, stuff like that. And they had to do with tasks that we could usually see coming down the pipe weeks ahead of time. So we developed a culture of just finding a time that worked for everyone to call a meeting with one or two stakeholders from each affected team, in order to hash out those design decisions before starting on the actual implementation work. It would stay pretty high-level - if any concrete work product came out of it, it would be an ADR or two. We did code review, too, of course. But agreeing on a plan ahead of time greatly reduced the risk of code review turning up problems that led to costly rework.