01
Leadership
Leading technology teams across timezones, cultures, partners, and contexts — and what that takes day to day.
Chris&Sree
Together since 2020 · A Travelopia story
Chris&Sree.
// from inside a technology transformation · real stories · together
We're Chris Storey and Sreekandh Balakrishnan — two technology directors at Travelopia, scaling and transforming a tech organisation that follows the sun across five continents. We write about leadership, transformation, scaling distributed teams, and what AI is changing about all of it.
The Credo
Explore.
Experiment.
Share.
Inspire.
What we're working on.
Four threads run through everything we plan to share here. Some weeks one will dominate, others another — but together they describe how we think about technology, teams, and the road ahead.
02
Transformation
How real change actually happens when tech, process, and people move together — the wins, the plateaus, and what we got wrong.
03
AI in practice
Building with foundation models in production — what's working, what isn't, and the surprises along the way.
04
Scaling tech orgs
Distributed teams, value streams, and the org design behind the engineering. How tech grows up.
From the notebook
Writing.
The Story
How we got here.
Sree joined Travelopia as a consultant in 2011, came on full-time in 2018, and stepped into a group role in 2020. Chris started in 2015 with Travelopia's marine business and moved to the group at the same time. We've been scaling the technology together ever since.
Today we lead a technology organisation that doesn't fit neatly on a single map. Not one office. Not one timezone. Not even one continent. Instead — a constellation of engineers, designers, and partners stretched across the United Kingdom, the United States, India and the wider Asia region, Cape Town in South Africa, and Costa Rica in Central America.
Add to that a network of remote teammates and trusted partners working from places we've never set foot in, and what emerges is a twenty-four-hour engine: when one part of the team logs off in London, another is just opening their laptop in Bangalore; when Cape Town wraps for the day, San José is finding its rhythm.
And right now, all of it is being reshaped — by AI, by distributed work, by what it actually means to lead technology now. New tools, new workflows, new questions about what software development even looks like. This site is where we plan to share what we're seeing — the experiments, the lessons, the things we got wrong, and the things that genuinely changed how we work. Real stories. Together.
Compass
Double engine.
Different backgrounds. Different cultures. United by tech. We can go weeks without speaking — but ask either of us the same question and the answer usually lines up. We don't think the same. We share the same compass. Sometimes Chris leads. Sometimes Sree leads.
— People
01
One team, real partnership.
Different identities, shared compass. We work as a single unit.
02
Co-own the outcomes.
Wins and misses, together. Nobody's on the hook alone.
03
No blame. Deliver and learn.
Hard problems get easier when the room is safe.
— Customer
04
Start with business impact.
Always. The work has to matter outside the room.
05
Do right by the customer.
Internal and external — both count, both compound.
06
Be bold. Prove it, then scale.
Conviction without recklessness. Evidence beats opinion.
— Method
07
Agile by default. Lean by instinct.
Ten Agile principles. Not nine. Plus Lean's clarity on waste.
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Value stream first.
Optimise the flow, not the task. That's where it compounds.
09
Clean metrics where we can get them.
Measure what changes the work. Ignore the rest.
Six places, one team.
Our colleagues, partners, and remote teammates collaborate across timezones, languages, and cultures every day — a twenty-four-hour engine. Here's where everyone is right now.
Live · Following the sun
Idle
San José
Costa Rica
—:—
UTC −6
Idle
New York
United States
—:—
UTC −5 / −4
Idle
London
United Kingdom
—:—
UTC ±0 / +1
Idle
Cape Town
South Africa
—:—
UTC +2
Idle
Bangalore
India
—:—
UTC +5:30
+ Remote · ∞ Everywhere else
Find a meeting time