Companies working with Indian teams for the first time expect the time difference to be the hard part. It rarely is on its own. The difficulties that actually surface are decision latency and handover quality, and both have practical fixes that have nothing to do with asking anyone to work unsociable hours.
Decision latency is the real cost. When an engineer hits a question only you can answer and you are asleep, that is not an hour lost - it is potentially a full working day, because by the time you reply their day has ended. Two or three such questions a week quietly halves throughput. The fix is to reduce the number of questions that need you: clear acceptance criteria written before work starts, an explicit list of decisions the team is authorised to make alone, and a standing rule that a blocked engineer moves to the next item rather than waiting. Most blocking questions turn out to be things the team could have decided if anyone had said they were allowed to.
Handover quality is the other half. Written asynchronous updates that state what was completed, what is in progress, what is blocked and what decision is needed beat any status meeting, because they survive the time gap and can be read when you wake up. The discipline that makes this work is that anything important is written down - a decision reached in a call that never reaches a document did not happen, as far as anyone outside that call is concerned.
On overlap, be realistic about the geography. India and the UK share a workable afternoon. India and continental Europe more so. India and the US east coast get an hour or two at the edges if both sides stretch. India and the US west coast have essentially none within civilised hours, and pretending otherwise produces a team that is permanently tired and eventually leaves. Where overlap is thin, invest in asynchronous practice rather than trying to manufacture synchronous time.
Two or three hours of genuine overlap is plenty if it is protected. Use it for the things that genuinely need conversation - demonstrations, design discussion, unblocking - and never for status, which belongs in writing. Rotate the meeting time occasionally if the burden falls entirely on one side; teams notice who is always the one dialling in at ten at night.
One last thing that matters more than any process: visit if you can, or bring someone over. A few days in the same room early in an engagement changes how people interpret each other's messages for years afterwards. Terse writing reads as rudeness between strangers and as efficiency between people who have met. It is the cheapest thing on this list and consistently the highest return.
