We had distributed teams with people in different time zones.

The key is to require some defined overlap of working hours. If that's not possible, you divide the tasks as cleanly as possible across timezones so that people in the same timezone can work together.

Trying to force teammates to work together on something in opposite timezones doesn't work unless you have very relaxed deadlines. When someone has to wait until the next day to get a response to any blocking questions, work slows to a crawl.