How Three Multinational Teams Built An E-Commerce Website Builder
It all started when Duda made the strategic decision to acquire Canadian headless eCommerce company Snipcart to create a platform for building eCommerce websites.
Three squads were allocated to work on the project: two in the Duda Tel Aviv office and a Snipcart team in Quebec, Canada.
In this article, I’ll tell you the story of intercultural communication and how we overcame the challenges connected with it, while developing a complex product from scratch.
Project kickoff
For a product manager to start the project from scratch was the best thing anyone could have ever wished for. I was in heaven.
But as a product/project person, I knew that we first needed to establish processes to help us work together.
We set up weekly meetings and a Jira project with boards per squad. We used a methodology called Nexus for managing multiple scrum teams.
And that’s how we started sprint #1.
First sprints
In the beginning, the teams were independent, and each developed the foundations of integration. Each team had its own sprint, and we all synced on what we were doing in our Nexus meetings, usually in the middle of the sprint. After a few sprints, when we needed to connect the pieces, we faced all kinds of integration challenges.
Integration challenges
Challenge 1: Lack of communication
At the beginning of the project, we agreed that since Snipcart was a bootstrap startup, we would not flood them with meetings, as usually happens in bigger companies. We would give them as much independence as possible.
But then, at the point of connecting the pieces, we realized we had made some technical decisions on both sides of the project that contradicted each other.
Moreover, the time difference between Israel and Canada, and the absence of developer meetings, made it really hard to debug the integration. We started to see that the culture of total team independence and no meetings did not work.
Solution
We realized that over-communication is better than lack of communication.
Since we could not change the difference in time zones between Canada and Israel, we decided to have much more async communication: via Slack.
We established a few Slack channels for different purposes:
- Organizational channel: for timelines, sprint goals, etc.
- Channel for dev collaboration: developers discussing integration plans, issues, bugs, etc.
- Updates channel: each team would write in a few sentences what they accomplished during the week/sprint.
Apart from that, we decided that we would schedule some additional meetings in order to sync between the teams:
- Product manager’s 1:1 meeting;
- Weekly developers’ forum;
- Sprint demo where each team showed the progress of what had been done in the last sprint.
Challenge 2: Lack of work synchronization
As I mentioned earlier, we wanted to give squads as much independence as possible, so each squad could decide by itself what it would work on in the next sprint.
But since the foundations of the product were interconnected, when it came to integration, we had a few gaps that were supposed to be closed by other squads but were not. This was the moment we realized that we had to sync our sprint goals before starting the sprint.
Solution
We started to communicate sprint goals to one another before beginning each sprint, using the classic Agile process definition.
This allowed us to sync between the goals of different squads and adjust them if needed.
Challenge 3: Cultural differences
After some time together, we realized that Israeli and Canadian work cultures are different, and we had to take them into consideration.
We started to discuss intercultural communication issues openly:
We already knew we had a good relationship and the same vibe, but to tweak the differences, we decided to talk openly about those issues. It helped in a way that you could not imagine. We use retrospectives for that, as well as 1:1 talks about how things were going.
In these meetings, we often reviewed and changed the processes: for example, the Slack channel for updates did not really work, so we decided to archive it.
We also tried to visit each other so we could meet offline because nothing compares to real talk. Also, building relations in person really helps in communication when you’re back home. In fact, I just came back from my trip to Quebec.
We also started to have more ad hoc meetings, because nothing substitutes talking between people.
And guess what? We built a product and released it back in November 2022!
Main takeaways
Even though in the beginning, we had all the possible types of challenges that a multinational team could have — lack of communication, synchronization, and cultural differences — we managed to overcome them using Agile best practices and establishing a feedback process that allowed us to constantly improve and evolve our methodology.
Of course, we are still different. It’s still not easy to work with three squads, three product managers, two designers, and two different mentalities; but at the same time, we know that we have the same goal. We are all united by our love of great user experience and exceptional software that helps people around the world grow their businesses online.
All the rest is just a matter of good process!
