Remote Team Management

Ciara Peter, Soren Abildgaard, Deborah Soye at UXDX Community: San Fran. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0f9CpSQ_0E

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Introductions and where the offices are

[00:00:05] Deborah: ...the intersection. I don't know if it's been an exciting time or a stressful two weeks, moving over literally two weeks ago as Islanders in the Bay Area. I work for an Irish government agency called IDA Ireland, and I'm based here in our Mountain View office, working with companies on the west coast that are looking to establish remote teams in Ireland, and also with companies that have already established teams in Ireland. We partner with them to support them as they establish and grow their entities in Ireland. Perhaps I'll ask the panelists to give a brief introduction to their organizations and their roles within those organizations as well.

[00:00:49] Ciara: Sure, I'll go ahead and start. I'm the head of product design at Gainsight. Gainsight is a company without headquarters, so it was interesting, because it was founded half in India and half in St. Louis, and we've moved some more operations here to the US. I've had two roles. In my current role my entire team is in India, so I'm managing them remotely. In my previous role I was the product leader for an engineering team of a company that we had acquired, and they were in Tel Aviv. Prior to that I worked at an 800-person company that was fully remote. So lots of different experiences and perspectives on that.

[00:01:43] Soren: ...ten years ago, setting up shop in San Francisco. Oh, you can't hear it, sorry. ...thousand engineers globally. We have about a third of them in North America, a third in Europe, a third in APAC. The big development centers are San Francisco, Dublin, Singapore and Melbourne. So we're probably a little different. I would say we don't talk about remote development, we talk about global development, and we try to normalize the whole thing. It really doesn't matter where you are, but maybe we'll get back to that.

[00:02:17] Deborah: Perhaps we could start with that point. Could you give us a sense as to where Zendesk's remote offices, or global offices, are, and the metrics involved in selecting those locations?

[00:02:30] Soren: Like I said, we have about a third in North America, Europe and over in APAC. There are really two ways we got there. We started in San Francisco, and a year or two into it we said, it's really difficult to get talent. San Francisco is either expensive, it's scarce, whatever the reason is. Where can we go? The founders were from Copenhagen; that's a great place to start. We had heard that Dublin was a great place too, so we went there. We acquired a company in Singapore. We had a sales office in Melbourne. You can just add to the story; that's how we got to ten different places around the world.

[00:03:16] The thing we use as a recipe when we set up an office: we need a capable leader, we need a clear mission, and we need to have access to talent. Then there's a bunch of other details, but that's really where it starts. If we can't find a good leader, we don't even do it. We don't have a model where people in San Francisco are managing individual contributors overseas. It's always a senior leader, and then a very clear mission about what that team somewhere in the world is supposed to do. It could be mobile, it could be a voice product, it could be chat, whatever it is we're trying to do. In those offices we then put product management, UX, developers, the whole thing, so it's a self-contained unit. Most of the communication we have is around what is the company goal, what are we trying to do from a strategic point of view, but the actual execution can happen on the ground in a very self-contained way.

[00:04:09] Deborah: Thank you. I guess the same with Gainsight: what are the different criteria that you use when looking for locations for remote teams?

[00:04:22] Ciara: There are definitely different approaches, and I think some companies may say we want to go global. But with us, the two founders of the company had founded a company before. One of them was based in St. Louis, one of them was based in Hyderabad, India, and they said, let's go for this again. I think there were some advantages to hiring engineering there, so the whole engineering function started out of there, and then there was a sales and customer function in St. Louis. So it was a nice synergy. But as the company grew, as many startups scale, they hired a different CEO, and they wanted more credibility in Silicon Valley, in San Francisco, and so then we built out that part of the office.

[00:05:08] We have an office in London because we had a certain level of revenue where we were ready to expand into the EMEA market, so that's when the London office opened, which is more of a sales office. Meanwhile we were still hiring more talent in India, and that's how the Bangalore office opened. Then the Tel Aviv presence was simply because we had acquired a company that was strategic. We were going from being a one-product company to looking for adjacent products that we could surround with ours, and this company happened to be in Israel. We said, great, the team is already there, we plan to maintain and keep this product. That was how that formed.

[00:05:46] I think you have an interesting point about what's a global company versus a remote company. In this case I'd consider Gainsight to be a very global company, because we have these different centers, and we do have a lot of employees that just work from home. But I think there is a difference to be noted between companies that are global, with offices and hubs, and companies that are entirely remote, and the dynamics that go with that, where everybody's in their living room and everybody is working from their house, and things like that.

Cross-functional hubs and acquired teams

[00:06:18] Deborah: As Soren mentioned, your global hubs are cross-functional. Is it the same at Gainsight, that there's a number of different functions within the different global offices, or is it more that certain roles go to certain offices?

[00:06:38] Ciara: I would agree. I would say yes, it's mostly like that. As I mentioned, a lot of the sales functions need to be in certain cities, but when it comes to engineering teams, I think the only exception is the acquired company. Like with any company or team that's acquired, they need some sort of glue to make sure that they're not having tunnel vision, that they're connected to the broader vision. I think having that lead in that office is very important, and usually that person will step up and take on the role of communicating back, but it doesn't always happen that way.

[00:07:18] So we did bring a couple of people from our India team to work with that team, just to make sure that they were aligned with broader cross-functional initiatives, because we wanted to not only maintain the product that we acquired but also integrate it into the core product. I think it was really hard to integrate it into the core product without having stakeholders on that team that were there every day in the meetings, with a goal to help that.

Time zones

[00:07:48] Deborah: Another challenge you must face: you mentioned you manage a large team in India, so I would imagine time zone issues are a challenge, particularly with design teams. How do you work around that, and how do you work around aligning those teams together, as you said, cross-functional teams?

[00:08:07] Ciara: Good question. I think Soren will probably have an even more robust scenario, with all the different development time zones, because for me it's fairly easy. I'm an early riser, so I have a preference. I think if you're going to be interacting with an international team, you just have to know whether you're going to be collaborating. Are you okay with early mornings? Are you okay with evenings? And then also figuring out what your team prefers.

[00:08:46] One anecdote that I can mention: a lot of the time you're a busy person, you might cancel meetings on the fly. Things happen, it's a one-on-one, no big deal. But what I have to consider is that my team has a very difficult time getting to work because of the infrastructure. It takes an hour and a half each way for many people to come into the office. So if I ask them to do an 8 p.m. meeting and then I cancel it five minutes before, they've now waited two hours at the office. It's not like they're just getting along with their day and it's one meeting where they get a half hour back. It's some of those cultural nuances and details that I think are really important, and maintaining the right spirit in those scenarios.

[00:09:30] Soren: I think this is where you see the difference between a truly global company and a headquarter company. If all the meetings are scheduled in San Francisco time and never accommodating anybody else, that's going to be a signal that you're not really a global company; you're a headquarter company. A lot of those things you really have to be sensitive to. If you say you're global, then you actually are really global. I see us even still sometimes get caught out on that, just because everybody sees the world from their own perspective.

[00:10:05] Like I said, we try to carve out the whole product we're building in ways where most things can happen on the ground, but of course there is collaboration between the platform and mobile and various other things. So we try to find offices where there is some overlap in business hours. I think it's a bit of an anti-pattern if there literally is a 12-hour time difference between one office and another office that have to collaborate, because that's just not sustainable, in my mind. That's going to be bad forever. Nobody's going to change the time zones around the world. It's not like we can say, well, in 2020 the world is going to be better. It's not happening.

[00:10:46] So I would avoid those kinds of things. I know it's not easy, but if you have a chance of building up a company, I wouldn't design for that. Sometimes you acquire a company and you just have to figure it out, and maybe one of the solutions is that over time you move some things out of that place, or you consolidate things, because you have to come up with something that's sustainable.

Culture across locations

[00:11:09] Deborah: I guess that leads on to a common question in this area: how do you manage the culture within remote teams? How do you avoid an HQ versus remote team culture? Is there something that you have found is the most successful approach to managing this culture with your team members as they are spread across the globe?

[00:11:37] Ciara: One thought that I have on that is there are many global situations that work. I think where culture can become problematic is if everybody's in one office except for one person, and they feel like the odd person out. For example, when you're having meetings or brainstorms and you forget to dial that person in, that can just be really... and it's not really anybody's fault. You're in the moment and you forget. But that's where it probably becomes problematic. So it's more on that tone of, is everybody on the same page? That's one thing.

[00:12:14] Soren: Communication is a big part of that. Making sure that the content you're using in a town hall or all-hands is diverse. It's not, here's what we do in San Francisco, let's celebrate that, and everybody else has to listen to that, if a lot of people are remote. What we do is every Monday morning we have a weekly engineering meeting where the whole organization can listen in on what's top of mind for me and my leadership. The way we do that is everybody does it from a Zoom call. There's no being up on a stage and talking to people. It's normalized; everybody is on a computer, including myself. I think there's a lot of tricks like that where you can normalize the thing about whether you're in headquarters or you're remote.

[00:13:03] Ciara: One little thing that I thought of is we've started something where every time we get on a call, no matter who it is, we say "good morning, good evening."

Integrating acquired employees

[00:13:12] Deborah: A similar question, for remote teams that have been acquired into the organizations. How do you go about integrating those acquired employees, engaging them and onboarding them, so that they're learning the values and the culture of your organizations?

[00:13:33] Soren: We give them a big giant bear hug, and I think it feels overwhelming. That's what we do, I understand. But I think we try to figure out what are the things that are universal that are worth hanging on to in our culture, and what are the new things that the company that we acquired is bringing in that we actually want to add on to our culture. Over some reasonable amount of time we balance it out and they get assimilated. I don't know if there's an exact recipe, other than a lot of it is people meeting people and figuring it out.

[00:14:07] We went through an effort about two years ago where all of product development wrote down what we call our operating principles, which is a layer on top of our company values, where we talked about how do we resolve conflict, how do we engage with each other, how do we have a respectful disagreement, those kinds of things. That's our global way of doing things. Below that there's lots of room where individual teams and groups own their own details around how they want to do things, but there are certain things where this is how we do things.

The cost of bringing people together

[00:14:41] Ciara: On that note of giving a big hug, and on the people note, this will probably lead into another topic, which is around cost. We visit a lot. I go to India every six weeks. It's something I signed up for and agreed to and embrace as part of my job, and it's not cheap. There's one thing you can say: fly everyone to HQ, or get everyone together once a year, and that's important; that face time is important. But showing that you're willing to go where they are, that "I'm part of your team, I'm here to collaborate with you," I think is also an important approach to consider.

[00:15:22] Soren: It's a good point. What we do in my leadership team is every single quarter we meet as a leadership team to align. Beyond that we try to be loosely tied together, and mostly the VPs do their own thing. But we always pick a new office every time we have one of those quarterlies. So we spend the money, but we go, and we don't just have our meeting and be secluded; we actually go and talk to all the people that are in that local office, so they feel like we actually care about what they do, and we take that feedback with us.

[00:15:57] The other thing about cost is that sometimes what drives going overseas, or outsourcing, whatever word you want to use, is cost. It's a good thing; I have a budget too, so it is a thing that I have top of mind. But the thing you don't want to save is the budget that you have available to bring people together to do workshops and align on what the heck they're really trying to do. Because hiring the extra engineer, if you're not clear on what you're trying to do and the design isn't ready, is a complete, utter waste of money. You're better off having, frankly, fewer engineers or fewer designers or less of whatever. You have to spend the money getting people together.

[00:16:36] Ciara: Yeah, and the lower cost outsourced teams, many times, are contractors from an agency, and there's less integration into that core culture anyway. So it's just a trade-off to be made, I think, with any outsourcing, even if it's local or in the US with a contract agency. It's typically going to be a different product that you get in the end.

Hiring for talent and remote workers

[00:17:05] Deborah: Moving on then to another topic, around talent. With the increasing war on global talent, and the squeeze on global talent as organizations seek to find the best employees globally, more organizations are adopting homeworking policies and remote workers working from their homes, like the WeWork scenarios. Is this a model that you think is the way forward for organizations to win this war on talent, and is it a model that your organizations utilize to attract and retain top talent?

[00:17:39] Ciara: I think people have to be conscious when they take a job. If they are a remote person and they're working from home, they should really think about what are the implications of that. Many people try working from home and they get depressed and isolated. Someone that I used to work with had a great quote. He said, "My goal is to have one meaningful interaction with a human per day." That was his way of staying sane. He'd leave the house, he'd go to a sandwich shop and ask the person a question, and he's like, okay, cool, and that's what kept him sane. But some people aren't happy in that environment.

[00:18:21] Another thing, though: people have family situations, and people need that flexibility. There are a lot of people that are just being alienated. There are companies that say you must be on site every day, you have to be here for X amount of hours. There are plenty of talented people that just can't do that, but they still want to work and they still want to be productive. I think just from a human perspective, it's an important thing to consider.

[00:18:55] Deborah: More and more we're seeing people being recruited into organizations because of their talents, not where they are, so they can be remote regardless of where they're physically based. Is that a model that your organizations are beginning to adopt?

[00:19:15] Soren: Yes, definitely, for the reason that you mentioned. We're even thinking about whether we want to go as far as having dedicated remote teams. Actually, I caught myself; I shouldn't have used that word. We're really trying to avoid the idea of remote, because whether you're in the office or you're working from home, you need to be engaged and develop your skills and be in tune with what everybody else is doing, and all those things. So if you work from home, if you're hired remote, it still needs to include that budget to travel once in a while to whatever your home team is.

[00:19:56] Because I think if we just hire people and we don't keep them engaged, they're going to lose out, we're going to lose out, and over time they just drift away from what the rest of the group is really doing. Their skills might be stale, and there's the social aspect of not really interacting with your peers, and all that. So I would say that at this point we have some ideas of what we want to do, but we've got a lot more work to do there. I don't think we as a company know exactly what it looks like at scale and how to make it super productive, but it's something we definitely want to do.

Going where the talent is

[00:20:31] Deborah: I know some of the drivers for setting up remote offices or global offices are global growth, the location of customers, acquisitions, but a lot nowadays is driven by the availability of talent as well. Have either of you found it easier to set up a new hub where there is a talent cluster, rather than to try and attract that talent back to your head office? Is it easier to set up where the talent is, as opposed to trying to get that talent to move to where your head office is?

[00:21:08] Ciara: There might be where the talent is, but there also might be another thought, which is where the tech companies aren't. For example, Gainsight has an office in Phoenix, Arizona. It's not the biggest tech city. I think Arizona State is there; a lot of people go into sales jobs, but typically they leave. Our former CMO moved back there after being here for a while, and it was great, because there were a lot of people that wanted the opportunity to work in tech and couldn't really find a job unless it was remote. So that strategy worked out really well for us, and I see some other companies doing that too.

[00:21:50] Soren: I would say for us it's a multi-prong approach. Like I said, for every location we have, there's a main mission and a focus, so we will hire into that, because that's what we need to do those things. But we'll also sometimes decide to go to a new place because it looks like maybe we could be the first kid in town, the coolest kid in town. We have set up shop over the last couple of years in Madison, for instance, and that's grown pretty big, rapidly. It's not more than seven or eight years ago we hired our first person in Dublin, and that's now four hundred people. Sometimes you do have to plant a new seed and help nurture it to grow to something bigger.

[00:22:32] Ciara: I think in both Zendesk's and Gainsight's cases, it's not that it happened haphazardly, but it's letting the guard down around "these are the rigid reasons why we go into these specific places." Maybe there was a dynamic person that could hire really well in this one city, so let's try that. Or there's an acquisition here, let's try that. Maybe companies need to consider being a little bit more flexible with their reasons why they would open up these offices.

Setting up an office and hiring the first leader

[00:23:05] Deborah: I guess that leads on to the discussion we were having earlier about how you actually go about setting up these offices: the actual logistics of setting up an entity in a location remote from your head office. How have your organizations gone about that? Apart from Zendesk using IDA [?] when you established in Dublin, I suppose. How do you go about that, and how do you go about recruiting your initial employees?

[00:23:36] Soren: One way for us, obviously, is we do acquisitions. That's a huge jump start. But the other thing: when we decided to set up shop in Dublin, for instance, the most important thing for us was finding that initial leader. You ask yourself, how do you get a very senior engineering leader to manage a team of nobody, maybe, with the goal of getting to 20? That's really difficult. So one of the tricks we used was we propped up the job. We said, well, you can be the managing director for the country, you can build the whole office. Who knows all the things we added to the list to make it sound good.

[00:24:16] I think that was one of the tricks we used: you're going to play a bigger role than just managing developers or engineers; there's a bigger role for you, so that's why this is attractive. I'm sure you can come up with some other ideas, but you have to think beyond what you're going to need for the first six months, because if you're successful, you're going to need a lot more than managers to manage those 10 or 15 people. Like I said, Colm [?], who was the guy we hired, is still here seven years later, and he's now managing a 400-person team. I don't think he ever imagined that when he got to the company.

Collaboration and working models

[00:24:55] Deborah: In terms, then, of something we did touch on briefly earlier: managing collaboration and working models. How do you manage remote agile teams when you're based here in San Francisco but they are based globally? How do you manage that collaboration, and what tools do you use to manage that?

[00:25:16] Ciara: I think there's the software tools and then there's the operational tools. This goes back to basics, but setting clear goals, OKRs, KPIs, whatever it may be for your organization, so that everybody's on the same page. Me as a manager, if everybody that I work with is in front of me, I'm typically not the type of manager that asks for, let's say, a weekly report. I just talk to you. But in managing this team, the one thing that I require everybody to do is just send me, every Friday morning, what happened this week, what's coming next, and is there anything else that we should know. Send it to me and a couple of people.

[00:26:00] It's not a long thing, but it's a way to not just keep me in the loop. I don't want to micromanage people. You've heard these horror stories of people setting up cameras behind people; I'll never do that. But it also gives that person the sense of accountability as well: yes, I'm part of something, it's important what I'm doing, and it's important to let people know about my progress.

[00:26:24] Soren: On top of that, other than clear goals and all that, is a lot of communication, trying to make it asynchronous. A killer for teams that are distributed [?] is if everything has to be done in conference calls and everybody's waiting for everybody. So using Slack and various other things, where things can happen around the clock, even on different time zones, is super important. We sometimes get into "somebody's waiting for somebody," and things end up taking a long, long time, and so that's something that sometimes has to be designed out of the process.

[00:27:01] Ciara: On the specifics of tools, if we'll call it a tool: if you're going to have a global company, the company needs to make sure that there's a functioning video conferencing system in the room. When people go into meetings, they should default to thinking that there's going to be somebody on the call, versus not, and then remember, okay, no, it's just us, no problem. Not just for efficiency, but letting the teams know that we're all on the same system.

Pitfalls to watch out for

[00:27:39] Deborah: Okay. Then just before we go to the floor for questions and answers: with the benefit of hindsight, from your experience in your current organizations and previous organizations, what are the pitfalls that you could advise the audience about if they're considering going global, or their first footprint out of head office? What would be the pitfalls, or the red flags, to keep an eye out for?

[00:28:07] Ciara: I'd just go back to the cost thing. Everybody thinks that if you have these global teams, you're going to save money. You're not necessarily going to save money. If you want to run an efficient organization, you're going to be spending that money on travel, events, because we're all human, and software to keep it afloat.

[00:28:28] Soren: That should not be the main driver. The main driver should be what are we trying to accomplish, and what are the best people we can put to that task. I'm going to go a little bit around your question: I do think there's a benefit in global teams, by the way, which is if you're trying to build products for the global market, if you have a more diverse team, in any possible way you can imagine diversity, you're going to be in a better position. It might feel a little difficult initially, but you're going to end up with a better product. I'm totally convinced of that.

[00:29:01] So the pitfalls are too much focus on just cost, not having great leadership, and not having clear goals. In some ways it's all the things that could hurt you even with a team that is one single team. It's just that when you're in one single location, it's a little easier to make up for it. When you distribute out the teams, those gaps in process, communication and leadership are going to be much more clear to you.

[00:29:28] Ciara: And I think that out of sight, out of mind does apply. Transparently, a lot of what I do when I visit a global office is just chatting with people and having one-on-ones with people that I wouldn't normally have those meetings with. I think you have to have that personal interaction more; otherwise you're not going to find out what their opinions are on your team or theirs, and what their thoughts are about your performance. And then rumors or buzz can start to emerge, because it's always easy to look for someone to blame if they're not in the room. From a management perspective, that's something that surprised me.

[00:30:08] Deborah: Okay, thank you both very much for sharing your experience. I think your insights have been very informative. I'm happy to open up to the floor for any questions.

Q&A

[00:30:32] Audience: Hello. I work in a distributed organization structure where the team that we work in, in San Francisco, is the satellite office. The parent company has about 250 employees, and the general work culture there is you speak face to face. So what sort of processes would you recommend, given that the norm is to talk to each other face to face, and here you have people in remote offices who oftentimes can't hear what's happening? Even though we have the best, we've got Zoom, things pick up, but people keep forgetting, and it becomes tiring as the satellite office to keep reminding people, "Hey, we're here, we're on the call, please don't forget," and that you need to be able to speak up. What sort of ideas do you have to make sure that there's that shift in mindset, given that we are the minority, and the main company is used to a completely different culture?

[00:31:46] Ciara: One thing that comes to mind, which is a little bit more work for your team, so I'm sorry, is over-communicating: over-communicating successes, over-communicating events that happen in the office. It's just a way to position yourselves as equals. I do think that there are probably other ways to think about better convincing the primary office to integrate you, but just thinking about it from your perspective, I think it goes both ways, because there's probably a lot of outbound communication coming from the other office. Try not to feel like that office, which I know is hard.

[00:32:35] Soren: Maybe another angle: I wonder, when I hear about that, whether leadership has bought in. Is leadership setting the best example? Like I said, some of the things we try to do, if it is truly a global context, is run our meetings in a certain way where the interaction is normalized. It's not like if you sit in a particular location then it's face-to-face communication and everybody else is cut out. There are ways where you can normalize it, and I think it starts with leadership. If the leadership is not setting the example, then why should everybody else do it?