Going Global: Establishing a Team and Office Abroad | Kelly Vaughn

0:00Some of the best advice that I got from my boss or head of engineering is don't expect to get it right 100 % of the time when you're starting a new office. and be okay with getting it wrong. Because if you're entering into a totally new country, a totally new culture, a different way of working, different work ethics, different styles of communication, you're not going to nail it every single time on your hires. That is a natural course of management is that you're not going to get it right every time. But this is really, really important when you're expanding internationally. Are you an engineering leader and tired of constantly being asked, when will it be ready?

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1:32well on downloads. So of course we want to have you back. It's because I bring the hot takes. It's cool. That's simply part of it. But I think for those in the audience who maybe aren't familiar with Kelly yet, haven't been introduced, part of the reason we really value her is that it's hard to bring that level of insight. And Kelly's experience as a host, a speaker, and a leader, who's also been an entrepreneur herself, brings these really interesting lenses to her approach here. And today we're going to have the opportunity to talk a bit about something that I think is relevant both as an internal engineering leader and an entrepreneur, which is setting up an office in a foreign country, a different area from where you're living, brings unique challenges.

2:07It's something we've done with Linear B. And in the past, you've had some of these other fascinating conversations that I think are informative of this as well. You've leveraged your background as a trained therapist, discussed how to build healthy dev teams. You joined us for a panel discussion on how to treat developers as creative problem solvers, not cogs in a machine. And these are cultural pieces and understanding of your team that I think is highly relevant, particularly when you're trying to work across cultural lines. Highly recommend folks check out both those episodes. We'll put links in the show notes.

2:39As I mentioned, they're two of our most popular episodes of all time. But let's dive into this incredibly interesting, but I'm sure also exhausting process of setting up a company that has a foreign office. How do you even arrive at the idea and kind of get started. Yeah. You know, when you're thinking about expanding your team, you know, when you work in a remote environment, you know talent is everywhere. And that is one of the major trade-offs you experience when you have an in-house or hybrid team versus a remote team is, you know, the remote team has the added benefit of being able to hire from anywhere.

3:15And, you know, we have some engineers who are already based in Europe. So this is not a new concept to us to begin with, But we are definitely very keen on expanding internationally because there are a lot of benefits that we're absolutely going to be getting into shortly from a cost standpoint, from a culture ad, like value ad standpoint, that we were just we were ready to make that move and expand into another country to continue to build on our team. And I remember the last time you were on this podcast, you recommended a couple of great books to me about kind of dealing with leadership across cultural lines.

3:50I want to say thank you for that. I actually started the culture map and have really enjoyed it. I think it's a great example of understanding some of the different unique challenges or just unique perspectives that countries bring and how those business cultures can interact. But it goes a lot deeper than that, as you mentioned. I think there's that kind of clear example of recruitment in a remote work environment. I'll share that I now live 90 minutes south of the city I was hired in originally because I'm in a remote work environment. My wife likes to joke, she imported me to her hometown. now.

4:23And then also, of course, as here at Linear B, here at DevNar Update, we have team members who are all over the United States. We have some in Europe, and then we have a large office in Tel Aviv, Israel. And it's absolutely been a huge benefit to us on recruitment, as you mentioned, but it has brought some unique challenges. I know you were part of the process at Spot of kind of making this step. How did you come to the conclusion that you said, hey, we want to really set up a kind of hub elsewhere than our current team? I think a lot of it ended up coming down to cost. I think that was the major, you know, as we're a startup, we're a growing startup, but we still have to stay within our means of being able to hire, you know, really talented engineers.

5:07And we can only scale our team as much as we can to, you know, be respectful of the runway that we currently have as we're continuing to grow from a customer standpoint as well. As we have made this move from being more SMB to more into mid-market enterprise, there are different needs that these enterprise customers have. And we needed additional hands to actually build out a number of these features. Not only that, but from an architectural standpoint, from the roots of our dashboard and our appliances and all the infrastructure that we have in place, what got us to where we are today is not going to get us to where we are in that next phase.

5:44And our team is, we have an amazing, amazing engineering team across the entire board. But there are only so many engineers on our team. And we're able to really leverage additional hires internationally that is significantly cheaper than what we would be hiring for based in the US. So this is really interesting. And I want to dig more into that selection criteria of, you know, why do you pick the country you did? What were the kind of criteria you considered? But you brought up something that I think is interesting here, which is the distribution of work across distributed engineering teams. So I know that you have team members in Poland now.

6:22I know you have team members in the United States and elsewhere. How are you distributing teamwork? Is it team members in Poland and team members in the U.S. are all working on the same feature? Is it distributed so that the folks in Poland are doing a particular feature while folks in the U.S. are focusing on other pieces of the architecture? How are you handling that distribution? It's really important to establish those swim lanes because if you don't have clear swim lanes of who is working on what, you're going to get crossover and you're going to end up with the, you know, as any engineering team skills, when you add more people to the team, it gets really confusing about who's going to be working on what.

6:55And so the way that I've approached splitting it up is I know where the interests and the strengths lie in the Poland team. So when I'm thinking about what I'm going to assign over to the, so to back up a little bit. I am director of engineering over what we call our core experience team. So we own the dashboard, we own our API, we own the cloud infrastructure, and we own the mobile apps as well. So we have a pretty broad spectrum of what we're covering. And one of the things that was really important to me for the Spoolin team is in order to really get them more involved on the team and not feel like they're siloed because they're literally separated by an ocean as well, is we need to start bridging relationships, not just within the core experience team, but with other teams as well.

7:38And one of the really easy pathways for that is to work with what we call our embedded video team, which is more on the firmware and the clients and camera side. Now, both teams have to deal with observability and monitoring and uptime. These are very, very important things for any company, but it's also one of those areas where we're currently looking at right now, where we definitely need improvements in order to continue to grow. And so I decided from a swim lane standpoint, let's have them own those types of items from observability and monitoring and deployment process. Because again, this is also what the team is interested in working on out there.

8:13And then they can start building relationships with the folks who are working on that embedded video team. The one thing I wanted to still make sure of is I didn't want them to feel like they're only working on internal tooling and back office tooling, that they're also able to work on direct customer impact type projects where they know they can see and they can talk to the customers and they can see that direct impact that they're having that the US team gets. And so when I'm thinking through, you know, splitting up those tasks of the major projects that they're going to be taking on with the major initiatives, there's a little bit of both.

8:43You got the backend work, you got the frontend work, you have the internal work, you have the customer facing work to give them that nice little mix. So you've had this very intentional distributed work strategy, but you're also building hubs, it sounds like, right? It's like, oh, you know, we have a hub in Poland, we have a hub in the US somewhat Exactly. Yeah, we have various hubs within the U.S. since it's, you know, this massive country. But we also have this hub that we're building in Poland. You know, as we're thinking about our long-term growth as a company, we will be expanding into Europe for our customer base.

9:16So why don't we start establishing that hub somewhere in Europe? And Poland is a really great opportunity for that, which we can also dig into since I know we're also going to be talking about why we chose Poland in the first place. Let's jump right in. Why Poland? Cool. Yeah. So we had narrowed our search down to basically four different countries, and they're really spread out all over the world. We have Chile on the list because we do have some investors who are based there, and we also have some employees who are already based in Chile. Poland, because there's a lot of crossover from working styles between Eastern Europe and the Americas.

9:51And that was something that was really important to us, as well as the tech density as well. So the amount of talent and the caliber of talent we have there. India was also on the list for a lot of those same reasons. And then Mexico was on the list too, with the added benefit that it's sort of the same time zone that we're already working in now. So we took that and we started thinking we had this long list of items that we're comparing, you know, from an HR standpoint, from just a cost standpoint, from tech density, from travel, how long is it going to take us to actually fly to one of these locations and how much is it going to cost us?

10:25So not just the how much is the talent cost there, but the everyday cost of living there as well and getting to and from this country. And then lastly, language barrier. That was a very important one that we had to think about because, you know, you have Chile and Mexico, you've got Spanish, Poland, obviously you have Polish. And while all of these countries do have English speaking engineers, years, you do still run into some cultural and language barriers that could absolutely hinder the working experience across a team. So we cross up Chile from a tech density standpoint. It does take a fair bit of time to actually fly down there.

11:03We eliminated Mexico because of the language barrier. I'm learning Spanish right now, but not many of our team does speak Spanish. And I didn't I didn't want that to be a barrier there. And then so we narrowed it down to India versus Poland. And both of them have their pros and cons. And I spent a long time, and so did our chief product officer, talking to various people on our network. I was in various Slack orgs being like, hey, if you've expanded a team to either India or Poland, or especially if you've considered both, I want to talk to you. And I was just getting on 30-minute to an hour-long calls and just telling me like, what is it?

11:39What worked well? What did you think about your experience working with this? What are some gotchas that I should be thinking about as we're making this decision? And what it ultimately came down to is knowing that we are eventually going to be expanding into Europe. Poland makes the most sense. I have a note here that you also looked at retention rate of employees within the different countries. Can you explain that a bit? Yeah, so this one was a particular topic around India. I spoke with a number of folks who have expanded offices into India, and that was one of their biggest complaints that they had, that the retention rate is significantly lower.

12:17That, you know, especially for American companies who are expanding into India and building a hub in India, you don't see that same level of loyalty that you might see in Eastern Europe or especially in the Americas. And so, you know, somebody might start a new job and then three days later, they get a better offer elsewhere and they'll go. From a cost standpoint and from a team stability standpoint, that revolving door is a major point of concern. And in making this decision, it sounds like you worked with a couple other internal stakeholders. Who all was involved in the process and how did you incorporate that input to make a final decision?

12:50Yeah. So our team of founders was definitely involved. Our VP of people was involved and our VP of finance was involved. So I think everyone had their special area of expertise and opinion to bring into this conversation. You know, our VP of Finance is, of course, thinking from a cost standpoint, but also how much does it cost to have a business entity there and how difficult is it going to be to set up? Our VP of People is looking more from a retention rate. You know, what are the employment policies that exist in these certain countries? How does it compare to what we currently offer in the United States with our U.S.-based team?

13:23And then, of course, I guess the executive team is just also thinking broadly from a growth and skill standpoint. And I'm thinking from a tech density and engineering talents and how is this going to expand our engineering team, not just my core experience team. But I'm the only one who's currently hiring in Poland. That's not going to be the case forever. So how is this going to impact from a talent viewpoint? Are there firmware engineers? Are there AI engineers out there? And so that was another consideration that I was thinking through as well. So we all had our different areas of focus that we were bringing to the table to discuss these options.

14:02Was there eventual overall consensus or was it kind of a controversial decision in the end where it's like, oh, half the folks are for India, half the folks were for Poland? How'd that kind of come about? I don't think it was really controversial, but I know our chief product officer who I used to report to, which is why we were working so closely together on this. he and I were both very much like, do we do India or do we do Poland? They both have their added benefits. And I think we had our individual reasons for, you know, why he might want to prefer India and why I might want to prefer Poland.

14:30But it was a definite, like, it was a consensus at the end. Like we both saw that this was the best path forward for us for this time. And I think I hear from you this thing that we've talked about previously in conversations on this podcast where you really zero in on what's the long-term implications of this decision and how does it align to the internal company culture where we want to build? Because you're thinking about not only, okay, are there AI and firmware engineers we can hire long-term to scale this engineering org and want to have it be 200 people in Poland versus 10. And you're also thinking about what are the projects and the features that these people want to work on?

15:11Because when we mentioned retention rates, that's a key part of employee happiness of people delivering their best work is like, does this align to what they want to do? And if you just pick a random country and say, this is the cheapest potential country, but the type of talent there isn't aligning to the type of engineering you're doing. Like, yeah, it's great if I have a great React engineer, but if I need them doing something entirely different, then maybe it's not the right fit. So I think that consideration of both internally, like this is what we're having working on, and scaling is really important.

15:42But it does bring to mind another option that I'm sure you may have considered. What about using an agency or acquiring a software house, given all the logistical and operational challenges of that? We actually did talk about this as well as a potential option. And there are definite cost implications. There are benefits to, let's say, acquiring a small dev house and embedding them into their team because they already all know each other. And so that really adds to making, you have your overall company culture, you have your engineering culture, and then you have your subcultures that exist within that from a team perspective, from a location perspective.

16:20And so they would already have this established internal Poland culture, let's call it, that would have to then embed into our team. So one of the things that kind of gave me pause, a number of reasons from a legal logistical standpoint, there are definitely key considerations to make there. But one of the interesting things that I was encountering when I was exploring Poland as an option is dev houses are very, very popular there. And there is a big difference between being an engineer who works on projects and being an engineer who works on a product. And I know this from experience because I used to run an agency.

16:57And so I know how service minded engineers think in that it's usually like they have a start and end date, I'm working on this very specific task. Whereas on the more product side, you have to think much more broadly. How are customers going to use this product? How are they thinking about the user flow from start to end? But also how are our 250th customer and our 10 ,000th customer, how are they going to have different experiences? Are they going to have different experiences? And so bringing that product mindset is a very different way of thinking about the work, the engineering work that you're doing from a long-term capacity.

17:32It goes from, I just need to build this thing to how is this going to bleed into and impact everything else that I'm working, not just now, but any of the other engineers on the team and also into the future as we continue to scale. And so that was one of the things that kind of gave me pause about going the hiring a dev shop route because you'd have to train product thinking as well. Absolutely. And I think it's, you know, we talk about product thinking, but I think it's also just a strategic lens where a lot of teams maybe don't embed that passion into them about the product if it's just something that we're like, hey, I'm doing a project here.

18:07Like, yes, you'll find devs who are passionate and will do that. But like, are they thinking about, to your point, the long-term implications? And do they map to those cultural values and that cohesion you mentioned? I know that's something that's very important to you. how does Spot and in particular your team plan to maintain its cultural values and cohesion as you expand in Poland and elsewhere? So one of the things that we're being very intentional about is, you know, I'm going out there every single quarter because I think it's important for me to get face time with everybody out there from a, you know, I am their U.S.

18:40conduit since I'm directing the expansion of this Poland office. But we're also having engineers go out there too, who are our US-based engineers or European engineers who have been with Spot for a while so they can learn more about how we function as a company, not just as engineers as well. They can bring a lot more historical context in there. But it goes both ways. We shouldn't just be sending folks out to Poland to work out of our Poland hub. They should also be coming stateside. And so this is actually next week is going to be when one of our Poland engineers is going to be coming out for our engineering and company offsite to get the full company experience that's probably going to be totally overwhelming because they're meeting literally everybody else at the company at the same time when they've met me and our chief product officer.

19:27I think that kind of experience is really important though. There are a lot of orgs that went remote during the pandemic and were not intentional about creating async work culture or creating cross time zone work culture and accounting for these different cultural barriers. In particular, a lot of them who said, oh, we don't need to do off-sites. We're talking on Zoom all the time. And it's not the same. And you are really missing some of that in-person team building that you need. Like I'm a huge proponent of remote distributed work, but I do think it's important to get together occasionally and say, hey, we're going to be intentional.

20:02We're saving a bunch of money on these offices. We're saving a bunch of money on hiring. Let's invest it in the culture so that we can not only reap the benefits of having more experienced team members, but also ensure that they are aligning and desiloed the way we need them to be. Exactly. And that is actually if we needed to bring some sort of hot take into this. That is why I decided that we need to start in Poland with a hybrid culture, not with a fully remote culture. Because if we are building a new office in a new country, and we're building a new team out there, it's important for them to work together to define what it is to mean to be an engineer at Spot who lives in Poland.

20:41And, you know, as this team continues to grow, they have the face-to-face interaction of being able to collaborate, which you and I can both spend an entire hour talking about the benefits of that face-to-face interaction, as you literally just alluded to. But it's not going to stay that way forever. It's not going to stay this long-term, you always have to be in the office three days a week. It's a very important thing to establish at the beginning. And then based on how the team is growing and how they're working together, you can continue to taper off. But that is also why we ultimately decided right now, like we don't have a physical office out there, we're working out of a co-working space.

21:19So we have that flexibility to change as we need to, and we're not really locked into this corporate office environment. Can you unpack a bit more how you're thinking about the long term of that? It sounds like you're saying, okay, we're going to start with three days in office, two days remote. Do you see that shifting rapidly? Or is it something where you just have the option to? How are you thinking about it? I think it depends on how quickly we scale that office. I think it's really going to come down to the people who are in that office as well. And that's the other reason why we chose a centrally located co-working space in Warsaw.

21:54but as we're continuing to interview folks and we're continuing to add new engineers to the team we need to understand you know where do they live what's their family life like like how are they getting to and from this office what's going to be most convenient for the entire team as a whole and so from a timing standpoint i don't really know when we're going to continue like going to taper back we currently have one engineering manager and two engineers out there so it's still a very small, small team. And at that size, honestly, it's a little bit easier to work from home because it's not too many of you.

22:26But as you add more people into that office, that's when it becomes really important to help establish what that culture is going to be. I really appreciate you bringing this lens of we're just starting this and here are the kind of the challenges and the positives of what we're doing and how's our larger approach. Because, you know, I've talked to large companies that have cross-filter offices. I used to work at Microsoft, where obviously you have offices in hundreds of countries. And they kind of establish culture. I think people don't think a lot about how do you set this up and get it running the right way.

22:59And that's a lot of the hard work is happening now. How are you managing things like time zone, those language cultural differences we mentioned? What's the approach you're taking as you set up? Yeah. So, you know, we do have the added benefit of this is not our first time hiring in Europe, since we do have some folks who are already there. So our team is already used to working across time zones. But I think as I have thought about working on this international team, we need to have some sort of equal time when we can all sign on. For unfortunately, the West Coast, that is 8 a.m. For East Coast, that's 11 a.m.

23:36For Europe, for a lot of Europe, that's 5 p.m. And then for India, it's late, unfortunately. But we have to have some sort of time when we can all meet together and we can all get that face-to-face time on Google Meet or on Zoom or wherever it happened to be, since you are international and you are remotely distributed. But having that face-to-face time is important for building that culture. But then breaking it down into how do you instill that same level of culture into your asynchronous communications on Slack in having those smaller meetings. So, you know, we have our core experience team meeting that happens every week.