Overseas Tech Teams - Lessons Learned

Many US-based companies are building out a hybrid tech workforce with teams in the US and also in overseas locations such as India, Philippines, and China. At Pattern, we were making a significant investment in our technology platform, and determined that building an overseas team was strategically important to scale a stronger tech team more quickly, at a lower cost basis, and to enable 24/7 tech support. Here are some of the valuable lessons we learned as we built a tech operation in Pune, India.?

• Personal relationships matter - As we grew our India tech org, we (Product & Tech leadership) initially tried to manage 100% remotely. We found that people weren’t comfortable speaking up with concerns and questions, resulting in delivery speed and quality issues. There were also organizational and leadership issues that weren’t easily noticeable over Zoom. Over time, we found better success when US leads from HQ visited India for a week or two. Working side by side all day, then teaching each other Bollywood dance routines and American line dances by night, had a magical effect. After these onsite visits, trust and communication was on another level. Productivity for new teams increased significantly, sometimes 2-3x. Bringing overseas leaders to HQ helped as well, as they met business stakeholders and system users, helping them gain stronger domain knowledge and better strategic context.?
• Set a high bar - Some companies already working a hybrid model advised us to keep the important, complex work for US teams, then assign the rinse and repeat work overseas, broken down into bite sized pieces. We had much more success by expecting our India teams to take on complex features. The teams increasingly gained domain and technical knowledge that best leveraged their strong education and technical capabilities to effectively build the more complex features. We trusted the teams to lead and come up with their own innovative ideas. This trust resulted in these teams doing the research and proof of concepts that led to some of our biggest tech improvements, such as greatly reduced page load times.?
• Hire strong local leaders - Many companies are attracted by the idea of rock bottom costs, and initially attempt to hire the lowest cost people. “You get what you pay for” applies overseas too. We made the same mistake initially, but soon pivoted to hire strong tech leadership, combined with high trajectory elite university and finishing school grads. There is amazing talent in India worth paying for. Each new team member increasingly received great, hands-on technical mentorship and was able to quickly contribute. The team didn't simply need people managers, but rather engineering managers who could code side by side, provide architectural guidance, and who could develop the next generation of even stronger technology leaders. In a scenario where your company's aim is to outsource less complex / rinse and repeat back office work, I would recommend a similar approach, i.e. hire strong leadership to ensure great support and process, but adjust the target candidates accordingly, just like you would in the US. For example, you wouldn’t hire a top MIT grad to work on simple, repetitive tasks.
• Provide US support - Beyond local leadership in India, we had a US-based Product & Tech lead assigned to provide dotted line support for each team in India. For example, our UX designers had a local leader, but also had a dotted line reporting structure to a US-based UX design lead, with whom they would closely collaborate.?This was made easier by implementing the same agile processes across all teams in the US and overseas.
• Determine a time zone approach - Given our business and user base in the US, product managers and UX designers were based in the US. With a roughly 12 hour time difference, this was one of the biggest obstacles for us. Some companies set up overseas offices to work US hours, which can work. For tech, we felt that if we were going to attract the very best and scale to an overseas org of 1000 and beyond, we needed a more balanced approach. We split early morning / late evening meetings more evenly between India and the US. The overseas UX designers and, in some cases, product managers, supported teams and answered questions to keep things moving forward outside of US working hours.

These are some of my takeaways from helping build an amazing team in our India dev center. If you have helped build similar overseas orgs and have had learnings along the way, please share in the comments.