Hey All, This is a very interesting discussion. Thanks. I definitely have some reflections from our experience at Pollenizer. We formed Pollenizer India 2 years ago with 2 guys. We now have 60 engineers working out of that office... in fact, I am sitting there right now.
I believe there are two important dimensions for a startup: speed of learning and cost. Speed of learning. The faster an engineering team can iterate upon measured customer impact of their work on the product, the more likely the product will succeed. This means that the team needs to understand what they are building and there needs to be systems in place to take action as the work develops. If your choice of team (local or offshore) depends upon a big spec, you are less likely to succeed. We have needed to: - Implement common tools for fast distributed communication. Our weapons of choice: Jira, Confluence, Yammer and Skype. - Implement processes for rapid communication. We have daily text huddles in Skype, weekly detailed sprint planning calls, weekly sprints, continuous integration to staging servers with every commit, unit testing, feature flipping (http://code.flickr.com/blog/2009/12/02/ flipping-out/) - Spend face time. We go every 2 months to India but you may only need to go once. It makes a HUGE difference to get to know the people. You can work faster and with more honesty. - Start every projects with a big session to describe what we are trying to build - what the goal is as well as some of our initial ideas for execution... Cost. Developing with an offshore provides a required economy for a startup. You can put on bigger teams to get things done faster. You can flex the team up and down to be responsive to the inevitably volatile world of your business. There are some things to be careful of though. I'll say this, if someone is half the price and the work takes twice as long, that person is not cheaper. Hiring an offshore team to anything material is a big commitment. The worst mistake I have seen people make is: - Look on the web or oDesk or Freelancer for a team - Hire them based on price - Send them a spec - Wait for the deliverable - And wait - And wait I've seen it happen a lot. You can outsource the engineering effort but you can't outsource the accountability for getting it done. Spend time on it daily... hourly, like the team is in the same room as you. Treat them as mates because its easy to think someone remote is an idiot and its probably because you don't understand each other's context. Its not been all smooth sailing for us, we have had to work bloody hard... but I know that we could not have delivered any of our products without our shared commitment with Pollenizer India. I hope this helps Cheers Phil On Nov 15, 2:42 pm, Jeromy Evans <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 15/11/2010, at 5:35 PM, Michael Guilfoyle wrote: > > > > It it will be the way of the future, many st... > > > Citation needed. :D > > I know the guys at Pollenizer have formed offshore teams based loosely > on this concep. Hopefully Pollenizer or one of their clients will pick > this up and comment on how they set up their teams and lessons > learned. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Silicon Beach Australia mailing list. Guidelines on discussion: http://tr.im/ujKF No lurkers! It is expected that you introduce yourself: http://tr.im/ujMm To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/silicon-beach-australia?hl=en?hl=en
