As a Kindling reader, you know I've been building a software product (ShoreUp) to help offshore teams do amazing work.
I'm looking for Beta users! Are you (or anyone you know) interested?
The Beta software is free - learning is more important than revenue at the moment. In its current state, ShoreUp enables managers to:
Find, vet, and onboard the right talent through streamlined screening and onboarding
See the team's real-time capacity through sophisticated capacity monitoring and forecasting
Plan, document, and replicate multi-step projects through "journey" mapping
Accelerate the team's skill development through gamification, peer-to-peer editing, and adaptive learning tools
Reward and retain top performers through integrated bonus management
The software is perfect for any team with 4+ offshore team members, at any size business.
Curious? Book time on my calendar and let’s talk:
Last post, I wrote about my plan to create a flywheel (this particular kind of flywheel is known as “dogfooding” in start-up speak). The idea was to hire my own team, and use ShoreUp software like this:
That’s been my last month. Building this flywheel.
I’ve hired and retained 7 teammates scattered across Vietnam, the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, and other nations. 4 were hired to support my consulting work; 3 were hired to develop software.
TLDR: hiring was a good decision:
Learning velocity increased: I’m learning far more from true users than from theoretical users
Learning surface area expanded: Hiring offshore teammates is hard! It wasn’t part of the initial “problem space.” Now it is
Gross hours working increased: If I don’t unblock team members before I sleep, we lose an entire day of productivity. This is a huge motivator. And a sharp retort to the voice that says, “You’ll do it tomorrow”
Focus improved: There are not enough hours in the day for me to do everything. Hiring enables me to focus on the big picture
But, as I said: hiring an offshore team is hard! In this post, I want to tell you what I’ve learned:
Vet with tests, not the traditional resume+interview method
Keep onboarding simple and ask for feedback
Starting out, live “in the weeds” and pay simply. Later, live “out of the weeds” and pay based on performance.
Getting started
I used Upwork, a freelancer platform, to post my two job positions.
Upwork is the gorilla of gig work: it was an early mover, everyone knows the brand, and it benefits from massive network effects. The company is publicly traded (NASDAQ: UPWK), valued at $1.5-1.6 billion, and has ~750,000 active customers. Upwork doesn’t disclose how many freelancers are on the platform, but estimates from 2018 point to ~16 million.
Upwork provides escrow protection as well as flexible contracting (hourly or project-based, with bonus options along the way). The site also handles all payroll logistics no matter where your teammate lives.
Truthfully, I didn’t try other sites. And Upwork is not perfect. It’s expensive (charging 20% of all payments under $500) and its freelancer ratings feel generally misleading.
But it’s a large platform and it works fine: 3 stars.
Vetting
Vet with tests, not the traditional resume+interview method.
In the US, interviewing candidates is a tradition. With offshore teammates, it’s a mistake. Why?
Spoken English is a poor indicator of ability. Language is a social construct. There are 1000’s of different versions of “English” throughout the world. And we’re highly sensitive to unfamiliar word use, syntax, and idioms - anything we code as unusual feels “uncanny”. Interviews are a trap: you’re almost guaranteed to confuse familiar English with job competency.
Spoken English is a poor indicator of communication ability. Because of timezone differences, most of your communication will likely be written, not spoken. This might not be true if you're working with a team in Central or South America.1
Resumes are a poor fallback. Schooling, job experiences, and job titles are hard to compare across geographies.
My solution: pay candidates to take a small test. The test is a self-contained, challenging, detail-oriented piece of work. Developers are asked to build a single feature; consulting support staff are asked to draft a small proposal.
Here is what my hiring pipeline looked like:
Onboarding
Keep it simple and ask for feedback.
It’s tempting to send new team members an onslaught of context documents. Don’t! The Boy Who Cried Wolf is the right way to think about all communication, not just warnings about forest creatures. If your requests lead nowhere, at some point people stop following you. Make everything tight and purposeful.
I onboarded candidates with a single Loom and Google Doc. Onboarding documents should cover:
The Mission
Resource and tool mapping
Communication norms
How to get started
FAQs (keep adding to these along the way)
Here is a snapshot of the first few pages of my onboarding document for developers:
You’ll notice that I have an anonymous feedback form at the bottom of every single page. This has been critical.
The employer-employee power dynamic is steep and that power dynamic disincentives open communication early on. My feedback form was invaluable in the early days because it allowed me to understand what frustrated new team members. It pushed me to improve my wireframing, build a formal testing stage within our development cycle, and write a coding conventions document - all of which increased the velocity of the team.
Working together
Starting out, you should live “in the weeds” and pay simply. Later, live “out of the weeds” and pay based on performance.
In the beginning, if you are working on a technical product, own the data model and QA the work. Put yourself on stories so you are staying sharp on how the software architecture is evolving.
With non-technical teams, ask new teammates to edit your work - and edit theirs. During this early period, pay by the hour or by the milestone. When trust is thin, it's critical to telegraph “we are collaborative and straightforward.”
As time goes on, and trust builds, you should delegate more and pay based on performance. This is not about philosophical purity: it's about flexibility and incentives. You can accept performance variance and reward performance improvement by simply paying for value. You can also do this by adjusting pay rates over time but that's really cumbersome.
More to come later, but hope this is helpful, and please reach out if you’re hiring offshore team members and you need guidance!
ShoreUp software will soon offer auto-translating chat, so that your offshore team can message you in the language they prefer. But right now, Google Translate and other services are fine solutions. AI is making huge strides here - both in text and speech translation.