The Executive Brief
How difficult is it to manage a team remotely? I think all of us got a taste of that during COVID. Whether you were a manager or not, you got to see first-hand how it worked, or, in many cases, didn’t work.
I sometimes wonder if outsourced teams in India, Ukraine, Philippines, and other places had a moment of “You guys finally get what it’s like to be us.”
Absentee leadership is something many of those teams deal with every day. They report to a manager in the U.S. who has minimal overlapping hours and doesn’t know their local culture.
Why? Because companies feel that they should be no different than a remote team in the US. So long as they speak English, everything should be fine.
But it’s not. Teams without leaders become demoralized and under-perform.
The solution, I believe, is to have a leader on-site. Some might disagree with me because they’ve seen it work before. I get it. I’ve seen it work to. But I’ve seen it not work much more frequently.
Btw, before you dive into it, here are the most interesting bits in technology from the last week.
Sisense suffered a breach that resulted in the loss of customer data and credentials. According to Sisense, “Our customers must reset any keys, tokens, or other credentials in their environment used within the Sisense application.” The seriousness of this breach was backed up by a warning issued from CISA.
If you are a Sisense customer, you need to take action immediately if you have not already done so. The list of recommendations from Sisense was extensive. It includes changing passwords, shared secrets, and certificates for every possible integrations with their systems.Google announced a public preview of “Gemini in Databases” at their Cloud Next conference. It is a collection of developer-focused tools powered by Google’s Gemini AI that are designed to assist with creating, monitoring, and migrating databases.
Essentially a copilot for databases. It’s worth looking into for helping out overworked DBAs if your a GCP shop.
Poll of the Week
Let us know how we are doing! We’re always looking to improve our content, so your voice is important. Take a moment to respond to the poll or leave us a comment.
Do I Need An Offshore Team Leader?
Many CPTOs struggle with this question. I’ve also wrestled with it in the past.
A line of reasoning I hear often in favor of not hiring a local leader offshore is that the offshore team is an extension of the U.S. team and therefore “they are just like the rest of the team” and should get their direction from U.S. leadership. “It’s unnecessary to add a layer of management between the two teams,” people reason.
This is very well-intentioned but usually misguided reasoning and only works roughly 10% of the time and when the team is fairly small (< 7).
The main factor at play is that people on offshore engineering teams have a natural geographical, cultural and time zone barrier and regardless of the Zoom-first world we live in this must be mitigated in terms of how individuals experience day-to-day leadership (so not at a CTO-level, but at an Engineering Manager-level).
Is it possible to be a great “Zoom-only” Engineering Manager or Director and rarely meet your team?
Well, just look around, you don’t see too many of those.
Good day-to-day engineering leaders generally need to be physically and immediately interactive & accessible with their teams at some level of frequency. Offshore teams feel much better when their leader is at least sitting in the same time zone and city. Or better yet even a few doors down from them so they can pop in for a visit. You can decide not to have this local leader, but then you will pay a price in overall team performance as those natural barriers I mentioned earlier will be exacerbated and the team will be left rudderless.
The second key factor is that offshore teams need a leader who understands their particular cultural norms & country-specific circumstances. This is a critical part of trust-building between the onshore and offshore teams. With this trust great things can be achieved. The local offshore leader is the bridge between the two groups in the sense that the local leader should representative the U.S.-side leadership, while at the same time having expert cultural / country knowledge, understanding, and know-how to manages the daily ups and downs of the local team.
So, how do you know when to hire a local leader? As soon as you have a scrum team.
If your team is a loose collection of 3 contractors spread across say, Argentina, then don’t worry about it. But if you’re building 1, 2, 3 or more engineering scrum teams (21-ish people), even if they aren’t in one city location, you need a local leader.
There are some caveats to all of this of course.
I’ve seen scenarios where a CTO living in the U.S. but originally from an Eastern European country would constantly travel back home and manage the team while he was there. This could work. But constant travel is hard to sustain.
I’ve also seen a situation where the offshore team were all full-time employees of the U.S. company, but the local leader was hired from a local offshore contracting firm. This was because the U.S. company didn’t know how to recruit & retain an Engineering Manager in that country. So, they just borrowed one. But it worked.
I’ve also seen short-term projects work without a local leader. So, if your project is between 3 and 12 months, I’ve seen it work.
Closing Thoughts
But for most companies looking to build high-performance Engineering scrum teams (and maybe even Product) a local leader is a must have. If you don’t build this into your budget, you will most likely fail to establish a strong foundation offshore.