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I spent my early childhood in Northwest China, where I developed a love for lamb kabobs and Lanzhou noodles. At age 10, I moved to the US, where I longed for kabobs and noodles for the next 20 years! Now, I am back in China, and I can eat to my heart's content!

The World is Not Flat
 
This morning, I had a conference call with my co-workers in Shanghai, San Jose and France. Thomas Friedman would have been proud. Team members from three countries at a multi-national company connecting on the phone, or via Skype, to revolve critical issues in a timely fashion. Kudos for globalization, off-shore development and the information highway! We could be a case-study in his next book!

Underneath the picture perfect case study, you’ll find a few disgruntled employees. Our important conference call was held at 2:30am Paris time, 8:30am China time on a national holiday, and 5:30pm PST. Like every multi-time-zone conference call that preceded this one, someone always has to suffer.

Such is the glamorous life of working in today’s global environment. I have experienced the various ups and downs of working in a truly multi-national company. When I worked at our headquarter, having virtual teams in India and China meant endless email threads clarifying and re-clarifying requirements. Due to the language gap and significant time difference, miscommunication was inevitable.

For my less fortunate product managers who didn’t speak Chinese, getting resources abroad meant additional communicating responsibilities and additional risk. It was “easier” to just communicate over and over again via email. The amount of communication required for a successful project w/ off-shore resources overwhelmed some product managers. The off-shore development model was a factor in more than one product manager’s decision to leave the company.

Compared to our coworkers in China, however, we actually had it easy. I have had to find this out the hard way since setting up a Product Management team in China. On this side of the wall, you have to claw your way up to get a glimpse at what the heck is going on back in headquarters, and then come crashing back down again just when you’ve taken a peek. While our counterparts in San Jose feel the strain of over-communication, the team in China never gets the full picture. Roadmaps waver, decisions change, strategies shift all the time. On the receiving end of all these changes, it is completely mind boggling and impossible to plan proactively. But it doesn’t stop me from trying!

In effort to stay in sync with the rest of the organization, I have started to do things like setting up meetings on holidays, at midnight, or 2:30am for my French colleagues. My boyfriend is not amused, and I am sure my French coworkers aren’t either. I would like to stop being so neurotic, but I know just how quickly that old adage “out of sight, out of mind” will become a reality if I stop trying.

Does this mean that the off-shore development and globalization doesn’t work? No, it doesn’t. The challenges vary depending on the design of the organization. The challenges that my company faces is indicative of the off-shore development model that we adopted from the beginning.

We adopted a more traditional off-shore development model, which is based on off-shore call center model. In the off-shore call center model, resources in Asia are leveraged by taking advantage of the time-difference. The type of work involved could be more easily off-shored. Each call is distinct. A sophisticated call routing program can route overflow or after-hour calls to additional resources in Asia. A strong CRM system can then help manage all customer contacts, regardless of where the contacts actually take place.

Applying the same model to software development, especially Internet development, doesn’t necessarily work. “Overflow” development is difficult to manage, because codebase has countless dependencies. Code merge process is difficult enough when there are 100 developers. But when there are thousands of developers worldwide, it introduces a tremendous amount of risk. In order to minimize risk, communication between developers and with Product Managers is critical for off-shore development.

In order to fully utilize the resources abroad and mitigate risk level, product managers need to be sitting next to the development resources in China and India either periodically or full-time. Collocation makes such a fundamental difference that it makes everyone involved happier. PD knows why the features are designed the way they are, and PM’s have greater transparency into the issues and concerns and can manage them appropriately. The “surprise” factor decreases for all parties.

Furthermore, instead of dividing development resources like call center agents, there needs to be clear product ownership by development centers. “Overflow” development model cannot scale when >20% of your resources are abroad. To fully utilize their manpower, entire domain areas need to split out to be owned by one country vs. another. For sites like Yahoo, I would recommend splitting out entire products, like Yahoo Finance or Personals. Those entire products should be owned by one team, not split up into countless teams across 3 countries and at least 3 time zones.

I am still a believer in the benefits of off-shore development and globalization, but it’s entirely too simplistic to believe the world is somehow flat. The same processes that work when resources are managed locally cannot be used when resources are spread out in different countries. Globalization presents a lot of unique challenges. If not managed effectively, not only will risk and inefficiency increase, but so will frustration and general dissatisfaction. Without addressing the root problems, attrition will undoubtedly follow. 05/06/2008
 

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