I was on a coaching call yesterday. One of the early questions was related to tools. The question was:

What sorts of tools do I recommend for a new team?

I pulled out my standard pitch related to agile tooling. I tried to convey that tools are less important in agile teams. I explained that I typically want to drive collaboration over “following a tool”, particularly for new teams. Then they brought up the dreaded next question:

But what about distributed teams? Are you saying that they don’t need tools either? What if I have team members in India, California, Philadelphia, Zurich, and Singapore? You can’t be serious that these folks need to somehow work on a whiteboard and use cards as their ultimate tool?

And I clearly backed off a bit while trying to explain. No, I’m not saying to use zero tooling or a webcam on a singular whiteboard in Antarctica. But…