Distributed companies require strong product and project management cultures - if it's a product that's sellable by sales people, there might be a dozen tweaks a day that might flow in engineers' direction - TSV export on top of CSV, change the gradient schema to a darker blue color, find out why two records are missing from a large customer's account, etc.

In tight shops where sales sits next to engineers and personal relationships are built, those small issues tend to get resolved rather quickly, leading to happier parties on both end, happier customers and higher product quality.

In distributed shops request must flow through a gatekeeper, such as project manager, who then keeps and prioritizes a list of such requests. Sales people then complain that nothing ever gets done, and requests go into a vacuum, while engineers complain about too much bureaucracy and inability to concentrate on large projects with all the pesky requests streaming in.