Virtual Product Design Doesn’t Work (Yet)

When I was in high-school a professor of Business told our class that in the future, with the advancement of telecommunications, “virtual organizations” would arise: companies without offices, with team members distributed around the world and with non-core processes being out-sourced. I was fascinated by the idea, and I remember thinking that I would love to one day start a company like that. With the emergence of the Internet and all the telecomunication apps that came along it seemed more and more possible over the years.

So when I founded WeHostels two years ago, I was very excited to build a virtual company. And so I did. Starting from Santiago, Chile I hired our first product developer in Bogotá, Colombia, then a UX/UI Designer in New York, then an engineer in Buenos Aires, Argentina, then a marketer in San Francisco. All super talented guys. The most attractive part of the idea is that you can tap into the most talented people regardless of their location.

We started designing and developing our products and at the beginning everything seemed alright, but soon the friction of the process became evident. After several months of shipping products this way, and feeling the pain, I decided to go to “extreme measures”: I brought the team together for a “Hacking Immersion Camp”. We rented a Bed & Breakfast in the countryside outside of Bogotá, Colombia. We moved the whole team for a full month into the house. And working 24-7 for the month, we re-designed our product from scratch to finish and shipped a new version. (The experience merits a dedicated post about it, maybe I’ll write it later). Having the team together in the same room made a world of difference! We had deeper debates, made small talk while drinking coffee, held impromptu meetings and received real-time feedback, all contributing to a better creative process. Ultimately, it lead to us launching a product significantly better to what we had before.

Unfortunately the experience lasted only a month and after that we had to separate again and go back to designing virtually. Since then we had been making it work but the friction was still evident, especially after having just worked together in-person. So, in a new call of “extreme measures” we decided to sponsor visas to our amazing guys and bring all our product design team to New York. We were very lucky to get three H1B visas selected in the lottery (this is a whole mess that I will write about in the future) and fortunately we will have the team working together again soon! We will keep some engineers down in South America that will continue working on execution of the products while the product design will be fully done from our offices in NYC.

I know that some companies like the 37signals guys have made virtual teams work very effectively, and they have even written a book about it. For us it did work, but was a universe of difference. As telecommunication technologies keep evolving and telepresence gets over the awkward phase, we might get to a point in which virtual human interactions are so seamless that collective creative processes can work. Until then I would advice any product leader to attempt to build his design team in one single location.