In December 2014, I became a Product Manager at Invoice2go, an Australian startup that has raised $35m in venture funding with offices in Sydney, Jakarta, Redwood City and Cebu. I have many stories from this experience.
Invoice2go has a thriving, global engineering culture that spans Sydney, Jakarta and Redwood City. There are a number of exciting opportunities in each office.
This post is about the team that supports the product initiatives I am tasked with. For this specific team, we built a product team from 2 to 11 within 2–3 months. The majority reside in Jakarta with the rest primarily in Sydney. Overall, the Invoice2go Jakarta office has experienced tremendous growth, doubling in size from 12 to 24+ since December 2014.
Recruiting
While we introduced some challenges due to remote communication, we strategically grew our team in Jakarta as the office already had a wealth of knowledge from building our mobile products. After all, we are a mobile first company of which all of our development happens in Indonesia.
To learn how to recruit in the region, I absorbed and learned about the local culture as quickly as possible. I lived in Jakarta for a month and gained perspective by meeting locals, expats, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs through my network.
The first step to building a team is identifying the talent you need. We started by creating a comprehensive recruiting strategy document with the skills, culture and personalities we desired. The most important trait we looked for were individuals who enjoyed executing and delivering results. We created job descriptions, interview guides and skill assessment tests centered around this strategy.
A month later, we had sent 200 emails, sifted through 300 applications, screened 100 candidates and invited 15 to the Jakarta office. In the end, we made 5 engineering offers and 3 accepted. It was real.
Employee onboarding
Employee onboarding is the opportunity for both the company and the team to create a strong impression. New hires come into a company and want to feel like they made the right decision.
I believe employee onboarding is so important that I was willing to stall product development and, instead, invest my time in building a solid onboarding program. Additional education was required since the Jakarta startup scene is small so many of them have not been exposed to product management.
We created an effort called “Day 1 productivity”, which means an engineer is able to sign HR documents, set up accounts and install production code on a laptop within the first day. The goal is for that engineer to contribute to the product by Day 1. We also wanted to be united about the culture so soon after the last member started, the Jakarta team was invited to Sydney.
On Friday, May 1, 2015, 8 individuals drove 1.5 hours from Sydney to the founder’s home where we sat together for a 1 day offsite challenging one another on culture, product and Invoice2go. We were now a team.
Teamwork
Fresh from the euphoria of our offsite, the team felt empowered with a clear vision of the product. For two hard weeks, we built and shared philosophies surrounding effective engineering and product development. We started with Agile concepts such as standups, retrospectives and iterations. At the end of the visit, we presented a demo of our work. The founder told us he had chills. We celebrated with a meal and the team flew back to Jakarta.
This early victory was orchestrated to build the team’s collective self esteem. In many ways, I had curated the first two weeks, lifting boulders behind the scenes to guarantee success. This is not scalable and I knew we had a long road ahead. While I was excited about the product philosophies and quality standards that had been established, I now focused on ensuring the team did not become complacent. I packed my bags and went to Jakarta for another two weeks.
Remote communication is often challenging because spontaneous interactions are oftentimes necessary to help refine and clarify the objective. Additionally, body language and non verbal cues are helpful indicators of confusion and when help is needed. Realizing that we did not have this luxury, we focused on accelerating mutual understanding by encouraging constant communication and feedback. We used tools such as instant messaging, video conferencing, retrospectives, 1:1s and demos. We made sure to create an open environment where we could share our sadness, happiness, frustration and everything in between.
To motivate execution, we created strong forcing functions where the progress would be showcased to important surprise guests such as the CEO, senior leaders and power customers of our business.
Lastly, we empowered the team by giving them ownership of the work. Since building the product would require hundreds of tasks, there was no way one person could fully articulate them all. We also needed a team that could fend for themselves since not everyone was in the same physical location. We developed a consistent language around the product vision. This way, anyone could say 3 words and we would all instantly know the meaning. This was particularly helpful as the bulk of our conversations were through Skype video calls or Slack messages. We set biweekly goals and built a timeline. This was supplemented with daily team communication.
As a team, we used to complete 10 tasks every 2 weeks. We now accomplish 100+ tasks, with time for unexpected features, code refactoring, polish and the numerous Indonesian Holidays.
Suffice to say, we are setting new standards and we couldn’t be prouder.
Conclusion
Many of the team building strategies described in this post are relevant in many different markets. It’s important to realize the nuances of the region and cater your strategy appropriately. In summary:
- Understand the market and create a relevant recruiting strategy
- Develop an employee onboarding strategy to create alignment
- Foster teamwork through communication and forcing functions
Next Installments
I wrote this piece to explain how we built a world class team in Jakarta in a short amount of time. I also brought about several other concepts in this piece that will be expanded upon in future writings. This includes:
- Organizing product management
- Creating alignment and vision within the team
- Creating an environment for productive engineering
If you are curious about product management, my experiences or opportunities at Invoice2go, feel free to contact me.
Props to Lou Grumet, Sonya Lai and Donald Lau for reading early drafts.
