Yep, it can be. So there is a requirement to occasionally work later hours if you liaise with Germany - which is mainly our management and proxy product owners. But with solid backlog groomings, the need to speak to Germany is minimised - if you're grooming a story for next sprint two weeks ahead, any questions can be resolved by email. We run proxy product owners who have responsibility for understanding stories sufficiently to act in the product owner's stead.

That said, the time-zone is an advantage when it comes to deployment - a 4am deployment German time is happily within normal 9 - 5 hours in NZ.

Admittedly, when we travel to Germany for quarterly planning, you realise that being able to walk up to the product owner's office and discuss things in person is far more efficient and far better for resolving things faster. But at the end of the day, we can run 3 Scrum teams in NZ for as much as it cost us to run 1 Scrum team in Munich when we tried it as an experiment - the business team accepts the downsides of distance and time-zone simply for the efficiencies in euros.

I guess that's an upside of being a low-wage economy - we're still competitive despite our stupidly high dollar.