Retrofitting China — Why it should not be the case !
Years ago, I worked for an organization where we had international having research, development, product and business all colocated for the most part - one such region was China. There was a strong reason why in the first place the team was setup as founding team in china on its own — the language. Needless to say the product had a lot to do for Chinese speaking population, so it made complete sense to start there, instead of USA having major development and research and china being the operative counterpart.
Without taking the side of any particular part of the world, I would like to emphasis my experiences with this organizational decision :
- The chinese team was independent and atomic, and they knew that — It was communicated.
- The team knew the market very well and was set up operationally to prioritize and meet the needs and demands of fast pace evolving market.
- Historically, the issues that would have been ignored and not anticipated by the core parts of the organization were proved to be critical in that part of the world.
- The operations and product strategies that were working in one part of the world would not work for other. However, China was more volatile and had larger impact because of the size of user base.
- The dynamics of the skills market also made a large dent in any operations.
- The product placement strategies involved partnerships with locals complexities around the laws and regulations that are local.
- Regardless, there are commonalities between any two people from different parts of the world — desire to grow, individual’s family values and passion for the problem they are working on — this way given a choice, China team had no desire to move out of their world to seek any better.
- The China operations controlled their success and rewards and there was very less churn rate for the same reasons — We are talking about the population of mixed age groups, backgrounds, size and gender.
In various capacities, roles and responsibilities, I learnt the same thing — for remote teams to succeed, clear business goals and autonomy is very important. An individual should think that they have only one hierarchy of supervisors and chain of commands.
What used to work as the onsite-offshore model with people in offshore just taking the requirements and executing on them, would still work for some but very small portions. In order to lead though, businesses would benefit from most capable local people.
When hiring for the remote teams, think if you have filled the technical director and chief of product positions on your remote teams.
Following framework might help in understanding how to look at it from the execution point of view.
Communications
- Making each team member familiar of different communication styles.
- Setting rhythm of communication — Technical leaders, operations and finance leaders, culture stewarts are expected to set core framework for communiations — communicate challenges, business goals, revenue, resources and business critical factors on regular basis.
Product
- Product metric — The goal for MAU and DAU and CPA, revenue increase, maintenance cost, engagement and Net Promoter Score, user actions and engagement etc.(depending on the industry and type of product) will have different targets from region to region, hence have separate tracking benchmarks between those teams.
Operations
- Isolating the problems — given a situation the insider’s view is as important as outside in. Let your gut and pre-bias not tell you what is wrong. Depending on the situation, a targeted user or market study, insider’s and outsider’s view for that market and region could help focus on the right problems.
- Sensitivity analysis — external factors that affect one population are quite subtle for other population to react to, however all of them have some knobs that are too sensitive. Entering into the international team setup, one would benefit from knowing what you will be dealing with and setting up the experts within the teams to handle those knobs.
Business
- Make best use of monetary, business and growth tactics for the local markets.
- Brand management and speak to values of locals.
- It’s not about the product, it’s about the problem that you are solving. Users should feel the same, else you need not exist.
- Your most undesired competition would likely be still local.
