A few posts ago, I promised you something related to chess. Today’s the day.
I want to tell you about the domain (“problem space”) I’m exploring: offshore team productivity, and chess is part of the story.
But first, I want to take your pulse. These past few weeks, I’ve been curious: what do you, the reader, want from Kindling? What will spare Kindling from your spam folder? If you could fill out this single-question, anonymous survey, that would be awesome:
Ok, back to it:
In spring of 2019, I found myself living for several months in Gurgaon, India, a city southwest of Delhi. My goal was to improve the way Parthenon’s US and India teams worked together. I gave trainings, interviewed team members, led a study of the hair straightener market, and, of course, found myself in constant awe of India — the millenniums of history, the sheer size of it.
Even before this project, working with Indian teams was a big part of my Parthenon experience. The firm focused, at that time, on commercial due diligences (“CDDs”) for private equity clients. Think about CDDs as the Tour de France of consulting projects: 3 weeks of sprinting. Mountains of slides.
As public and private market valuations vaulted over the last 5-10 years (Shiller price-to-earnings ratio index rose from 16 in 2009 to over 35 in late 2021), the Tour de France got shortened from 3 weeks to 2 weeks... but with the same terrain and miles to ride.
The appeal of offshore teams was that the CDD work could “follow the sun.” When US teams collapsed into bed, Indian teams could pick up the project. With this baton pass, teams transitioned from working 10 hours per day to 20 hours per day.
But there were challenges. Training materials were scattered across emails and personal computers, with no central nomenclature to tie real work to “how-to” documents. We didn’t collect feedback on a day-by-day basis. We communicated in 5 paragraph emails or 9 pm phone calls to accommodate different time zones. Painful.
As a member of the offshore development leadership team at Parthenon, I spent several years wrestling with those challenges and even built a low-grade ticket software to help us measure what was going well and what was going poorly. But there was no playbook to follow. There was no such thing as “offshore ops” — like development ops (e.g. “agile development”), or sales ops. And there wasn’t software that supported the unique hurdles that offshore teams face.
And then I left Parthenon; I moved on. But the challenges of trans-Pacific work remained in the loam of my consciousness.
Then, on a fateful July 22nd, my buddy Zach introduced me to Chess.com. And little sprouts erupted from that loam.
First, let me say: Chess.com is a magnificent software product. Once you have an account, the site pairs you with similarly skilled players at any time of day or night. And when you finish a game, you are delivered a bounty of data. And I mean bounty.
Chess.com gives you a timeline of your likelihood to win and categorizes each move by comparing it to the machine model:
The site provides a move-by-move review in which you can replay critical moments:
It also shows you which pieces you played better or worse with:
Chess.com even provides you with specific lessons and puzzles based on your weaknesses:
And on and on and on! If you want to experience the full bounty, check out Hikaru Nakamura’s insights page.
So I started playing more chess, and slowly improving.
At the same time that I was exploring Chess.com, I was also noticing a tectonic shift in our comfort with audio and visual communication. Plumes of second-hand Tik Tok. My girlfriend’s boss sending her edits via audio message. A VR art museum. And all of it, far easier to consume than paragraphs of prose.
The confluence of Chess.com and these new “learning” modes brought me back to Gurgaon. I wondered how much better offshore teams could perform if they had:
Units that bridged learning materials to project-activity
Adaptive learning plans based on performance
Context rich asynchronous communication tools (e.g. first-person audio or video, screen share recording)
So, in late October, I began to re-explore the offshore space.
What had changed since I lived in India? Did an “offshore ops” framework come into existence? Are there tools specifically designed to support offshore teams? If not, what tools do these teams end up adapting for their needs?
I started talking to anyone I could find who worked with offshore teams. Tell me about your experience. What was your workflow? What tools do you use? How is training and development? How do you provide feedback? What was good? What was bad?
I also started consuming podcasts, research papers, and books related to offshoring — on topics ranging from the enforcement challenges of offshore tax penalties to how small trucking businesses offshore their fleet management.
I came away with one main conclusion: very little had changed since 2018. All of which seems particularly troubling, considering that offshore teams are all but certain to be the future.
Some perspective: there are ~95 million college grads in the US. 70-75% of them participate in our labor force. So the US currently has a “supply” of 65-70 million degreed workers.
In Asia alone, by 2030, there will be ~240m students enrolled in higher education. That implies that every 4 years, Asia will increase its college degreed workforce by 2-2.5X the entire US degreed economy. By 2040, 415 million students will be enrolled, eclipsing the US by 4.5X every 4 years. Forecasts say US student enrollment will barely move.
US companies want to work with robust and growing talent overseas, and will be left behind if they don’t.
The trick is helping offshore teams reach their full potential despite the challenges of timezones and clunky communication.
And the right approach may be creating a learning environment that feels a lot like Chess.com.