Can A Startup Do Offshore Development? Part 3
A few months ago I wrote up my thoughts on offshore development within a technology startup context. You may view part 1 and part 2 here. I wrote about how you need to have an alignment of interest and trust in order for your offshore team to work. I also wrote about how company culture and incentives need to be different.
This last part talks about the challenges we faced in Zoecity that really affected our ability to execute.
Collaboration
Believe it or not, the biggest issue we faced as a team, with half our staff in the US and the other half in Malaysia, is collaboration. It wasn’t communication. It wasn’t country culture. It wasn’t a misalignment of interest. It was collaboration.
Offshore startup development, when done right, can be extremely beneficial. For Malaysia, we achieved a cost savings between 70 – 80%. But what we found particularly challenging was that it was inherently very difficult to collaborate on new product concepts and design.
When we first built our engineering team in Malaysia, they were structured to implement the specifications and design requirements from the US team. The Seattle team would work with me to build the spec and the mockups. The KL team would implement them. There was a clear delineation of responsibilities. We initially had some communication issues during the first few months. But it was more so because we had a new team and we had to “learn” from each other. This is not uncommon like a new team of soccer players coming together for the first time. You have to put in time to learn each other’s “signals” and develop the right team dynamics. After a few months we eventually “greased” out the kinks.
In late 2008, Zoecity made a strategic shift in our product direction. We decided to move out of social networking. Facebook had opened up their platform for websites to connect to their users. We realized we could never effectively compete against them. So we “reshuffle our deck” in the midst of the worst economic crisis in the last 80 years. We laid off a number of really great people in order to make our budget work. Because of this, the working dynamics between the Malaysia and US team changed irrevocably.
One of the least acknowledged strengths of technology startup culture is the ability for a small team to come together and brainstorm ideas, design and implementation. Creating a great product is very much an iterative process. If you follow the Agile methodology you will be very comfortable with this concept. You start with a simple idea and the whole team participates to evolve the idea. This process of evolution involves both official and unofficial channels of collaboration.
Official channels are scheduled group meetings, presentations and brainstorming sessions. Unofficial channels are when you go out to lunch and chat in a relaxed environment. It is about dropping by someone’s table to kick an idea and see if it has legs. It is about getting unofficial, read-between-the-lines, back-channel feedback that often go off-the-record. The evolution of an idea to a great product often requires both official and unofficial channels of collaboration.
As we were building the new Sharein.com product, we encountered a great deal of challenges in getting both teams to collaborate effectively. Here is an example. At the beginning, I held an official presentation to outline my vision. I then threw this to my developers and we would set out on a course of action. During this period, I would think more about the concept, start having informal conversations with my team in Seattle and we would across lunch and multiple informal, unscheduled brainstorming sessions evolve the concept at least 10 times before we came to a decision. During this process we followed many trains of thoughts to their conclusion, eliminated many alternatives and developed a system of trade-offs to achieve the desired result.
Once I felt the idea was mature, I’d announce the final concept to the whole team. Unfortunately, often times, our Malaysia team, on seeing the final spec for the first time, could not comprehend or understand why we designed the spec in a particular manner. They had effectively missed out on the evolution of the concept, and on understanding the trade-offs we made. They may see the “letter” of the design but they never gained the “spirit” of the design. And in a cut-throat technology startup world, this cost us tremendously in terms of company morale.
It took me a while to eventually realize the gravity of this new team dynamic. We addressed this issue for the most part by having my product manager/designer and I fly over to Malaysia for many months and collaborating the idea with our key technical architects all under one roof. Once we got the idea to evolve into a mature concept we flew back to Seattle and development was smooth sailing because everyone participated in the evolution and everyone understood the “spirit” of the design.
Colin Wong lives with his wife and three kids in the always sunny, never rainy wonderful land of Seattle.
