Patriots of the Periphery — Mastering the Art of the Global R&D Office
This year, I celebrated a decade of leading product teams located in the Israel offices of great American companies — EMC, Google, Facebook, and Intuit. It’s a good opportunity to pause for a moment and reflect on what I’ve learned in those years that I can share with anyone who seeks to have an impact while working from an office far, far away.
First, recognize that success in this endeavor is hard. Many factors, from cultural differences to geography, conspire against you. If your office is in Europe or APAC, and you work with a company in Silicon Valley, it is all but certain you have no overlap in working hours with your partners and colleagues at the mothership. You will never be as accessible to them around the water cooler as their local peers are. Worse, in all likelihood your knowledge of baseball and the game Americans insist on calling football, is going to be insufficient to understand the language of casual conversation.
But we’re not here to whine about the obstacles … we’re here to give some pro tips on how to succeed in spite of them! So let’s get to it. Here are some strategies and tactics that will help make your remote office a success.
Solve for Ownership and Autonomy
It is simply not possible to succeed if the team or teams located in the remote office are just augmenting bigger teams at headquarters, working on the same products or services. Beginners in this space often think a fully-open contribution model, where people can work on any project from anywhere, can be successful. It’s the easiest mistake to make because we can be fooled by our collaboration tools and HD video conferencing. In my experience, it doesn’t work like that. You can start by picking bits and pieces here and there, but at some point, if you want the remote office to succeed, there needs to be a very clear vision for what the remote team actually does — and it needs to be clear not only in your head as a leader, but also when you stop a random employee at the mothership and ask them.
Remote teams thrive when they have both actual ownership and autonomy, and a sense of having them, which has the added benefit of keeping them highly engaged and productive over the long haul.
Sometimes this area of ownership is created naturally when the remote office is established via an acquisition and continues to work on what they were acquired to do. If that is not the case, the leadership team has to work hard to find that area of ownership. Bonus points if that area is an actual profit center for the business. For example, our Intuit Israel team fully owns data encryption as a domain, which has not only led to great progress in our achievements in that important space, but high levels of engagement, long-term success for the team, and additional responsibility. And, our India Development Center team has full ownership of the complete Mint product line at our Bangalore site — not just the engineering, but also PM, XD, and all functions needed for Mint to deliver awesome.
Play to Your Unfair Advantage
Now that we know the remote office needs to have an identity and ownership, the obvious next question is, Ownership of exactly what? Here’s where novices usually go wrong by trying to choose areas strictly by their cool factor, or claiming the business priority du jour. Yes, it’s important to work on an important business priority, and yes, it’s also important to work on a project that gets the team excited and thrilled to come to work every morning. (At Intuit, this is one of our key Global Engineering Principles, and we call it Distribute the fun and the pain.) But that’s table stakes. You have to also make sure that you in Israel, or whatever corner of the world you set up shop in, have an unfair advantage in some way, compared to your US peers.
One example would be working on a product where your own home market would be an early adopter, and a great first place to launch and experiment in. Another advantage could be access to a special talent pool, such as cybersecurity analysts in Haifa, or VR/AR hardware experts in Helsinki. Whatever it is, make sure you really have it — because it will be one of the key levers you use to overcome the additional cost of remote collaboration. It’s how you win. At Intuit, we call this principle “Do the right work in the right place.”
Don’t Skimp on Travel
This one may sound a bit too tactical. It isn’t. I’ve learned that the ROI on a dollar spent on travel in both directions (headquarters people visiting the remote office, and vice versa) is one of the best investments you can make. Long-haul tickets can look like an expensive outlay, and it’s often a tempting expense to cut. But look at it this way: Does it really make sense to pay a strong technical person $150,000 a year (for example), and not allocate 5% of that figure to bring her over for two weeks, twice a year, to co-locate with her extended team? Properly fund your travel budget in advance, and protect it as much as you can in hard times. It will do wonders for collaboration.
Get Good at Hiring
There are many reasons why companies become global and seek to do R&D in many places around the world. It adds diversity of thought and skill set, for starters. But you can’t bring that diversity to bear if you can’t scale. And you can’t scale if you can’t hire with speed and quality to fill your reqs. I’ve written previously about one way to get good at hiring. There are others. Make sure you prioritize them. In tech (and elsewhere), hiring is always job #1.
Work Hard, but Don’t Burn Out
Remote office life can challenge your stamina in unique ways, never mind that working for great tech companies isn’t a walk in the park to begin with. It is often necessary at peak periods to travel more than is perhaps healthy, and stay up late for cross-timezone calls. I’m not going to tell you that these strains can be avoided at all times. But what I will say is that in order to make your work sustainable over the long term, you have to pace yourself and your team, lest you burn out.
Making an impact at a great company is a marathon, not a sprint. Find ways to not burn the candle at both ends. Make sure there are opportunities for teams to breathe and recharge. Intuit’s true north value is to deliver best-we-can results for the current period for each key stakeholder, while building the foundation for an even stronger future. We can’t do that without our employees, and that’s why we consider them to be the first of the key stakeholders. When counting your employees as key stakeholders, remember to include your remote office employees. They won’t be able to deliver that even stronger future if they are burned out.
There are useful tactics and guidelines to avoid burnout, especially when it comes to late-night meetings. The Pacific headquarters can rotate all hands meetings between EMEA-friendly and APAC-friendly times. Remote people should be encouraged to choose at least one day when they will not take off-hours meetings, and block it on their calendars. It’s also helpful to empower people to ask for that Friday meeting to be moved to another day, if your work week is Sunday-Thursday (as in Israel) versus Monday-Friday at the mothership. If leaders demonstrate that it’s okay to draw boundaries, it will go a long way toward preventing burnout.
Conclusion
These rules are far from a comprehensive list. They are just some of the more important ways you can ensure your global offices are successful over the long haul. I’d love to hear other lessons you’ve learned from your own journey. Please share them as comments.
