As a first-time product chief, dealing with offshore vendors in 2016 put me on a collision course with misaligned objectives. So, what was so broken that I needed to spend this phase of my career fixing it? A lot, actually.
Conflicting Goals
My initial experience with traditional offshoring really caught me off-guard in ways I didn’t expect. My vendor was one of the best offshoring firms when it came to competency. They were actually the exact opposite of a sweatshop — the company offered competitive salaries, amazing benefits, and first-class salaries.
That said, our working relationship still suffered due to subtle differences in incentives. The biggest disconnects were:
- Priority conflicts: My vendor’s myopic pursuit of billable hours and delivery quotas negatively impacted how we worked together. They often prioritized project completion over the actual quality of the product.
- An empathy gap: My vendor’s focus on contract fulfillment prevented them from considering my need for a product that resonated with its users. It wasn’t even a consideration.
As much as I wanted my offshored team to be "my team," the truth was that they were too steeped in traditional outsourcing culture, where it was all about contact fulfillment and project margins. Those concepts were at odds with my internal team's culture and engineering values. We were forever going to work at cross purposes.
It wasn’t just a problem at this firm, either. It was (and still is) endemic throughout the industry, from small independent shops to the global go-tos. And it was going to continue to be a limiting factor unless someone stepped up to address the culture clash.
A Better Way To Work Across Borders
My experiences really drove home the importance of having remote work rooted in trust and mutual understanding. It didn’t matter how effectively my vendor scoped the work. For true project success, they needed to get where I was coming from as a client. Context was every bit as important as accuracy.
This lack of comprehension is why Jacqueline and I co-founded Howdy.com. We envisioned a new goal for remote collaboration: creating an environment where remote teams aren’t outsiders but integral parts of the team. To enable this, we built a LatAm infrastructure with support teams on the ground to provide our talent with mentorship and assist our US customers with managing their nearshored workforce.
To avoid clients ever being in the situation I found myself in, we’re completely transparent about our margins. We don’t have quotas, and we don’t concern ourselves with billable hours. On the flip side, instead of setting rates here in the US, we let our talent decide what is fair compensation. We feel the best way to be fair and equitable is to ensure it applies to both sides of the equation.
