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).
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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.
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