A strong answer. “The first thing I would do is find the critical path, because with six teams most of them are not on it at any given moment and treating them all equally wastes everyone's time including mine.

Concretely: map the dependencies as a graph rather than a list, and identify the longest chain. My attention goes almost entirely there. The teams not on the critical path get a lightweight check-in; the two that are get me daily if needed.

Second, I would replace the status meeting with a written update that people read before we talk, and use the meeting only for decisions. A six-team sync where each reports in turn is five teams listening to things that do not affect them.

Third — and this is the one that actually determines whether it lands — I would go and validate the two or three handoff dates that everything hinges on. Not 'are you on track', which everyone answers yes to, but 'what exactly are you handing over, in what form, and what would have to happen for that to slip'. Most programme failures are a handoff that was understood differently by the two teams on either side of it, and that is discoverable in a thirty-minute conversation months before it bites.

Across time zones I would be deliberate about the overlap window: it is the scarcest resource, so it is reserved for decisions and unblocking, never for status.

And I would be explicit about what I am tracking: not percentage complete, which is unfalsifiable, but whether each dependency has been delivered and accepted by the team that needs it.”