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Udalenka vs. office for the development team

Former head of the development of custom advertising campaigns and analytics development at Appodeal Konstantin Grabar spoke about the pros and cons of the remote, office and mixed work formats.



Please note: an article on the 2018 report at ProductSense . Some processes in the company managed to change, and almost all employees were moved to Minsk.

Appodeal has been on the market since 2015. The company has offices in San Francisco, Barcelona, ​​Moscow, Barnaul, Lutsk and Minsk. These are large local centers where IT specialists are concentrated. Moreover, most people still work remotely, because they live in other cities.

Over the past few years, the mobile advertising market has grown several times - it is moving by leaps and bounds and has long overtaken the desktop advertising market. Appodeal is also growing: increasing the number of customers, cash flow and advertising traffic.

How to develop products in Appodeal

Sales sell our product as a kind of SaaS solution, so in many respects they have to adapt to strategically important customers. Often this involves individual customization or implementation of certain features. The process of sales and integration often looks quite tough: our solutions and competitors' solutions are tested in the form of A / B tests. The one who turns out to be more productive wins.

Our income is built around a certain core - advertising mediation. A service connected to different advertising networks allows the application owner to show the most expensive ads. All other products either revolve around this core, or provide additional competitive advantages. For example, provide access to advanced analytics and statistics.

The integration period for large customers can last several months. This is due to the very A / B tests and strict direct comparisons with competitors that I spoke about.

We formulate product requirements in several ways:
  • Directly during the sale.
  • With the help of custom research: we find out directly what customers are willing to pay for.
  • We develop products based on our accumulated technical expertise. In practice, this means that we look to the future and try to determine where the market is moving.

Due to the large remote team and complex processes, we do not always get the desired result. Therefore, we try to simplify the chain from the customer to the developer. At a certain point, we realized: in order to maintain the company's growth rate, we need to raise the bar for quality and speed.

Four Remote Development Issues

We faced four main problems that prevented us from increasing speed and improving the quality of development.



The first problem is communication. Our offices and employees work in different time zones - Moscow, San Francisco and Barnaul. There is a rule: everyone should get in touch and interact at certain time intervals, but it does not always work. For example, to talk with colleagues from San Francisco, you need to schedule a call after six to seven in the evening, or before nine to ten in the morning, Moscow time.



We tried to experiment: we brought developers and managers to an office in Barcelona and noticed that with team work in one or two weeks it is possible to solve those tasks that cannot be performed qualitatively on a remote site. But gathering 120 people together is not very flexible, convenient and cheap.

The second problem is related to processes. Ideally, remote work should go like this: the leader set the task to the developer or manager, he completed it on time and reported. This requires a certain degree of training and responsibility from the employee. If there are ten such employees, this is one alignment. But the larger the team, the more difficult it is to build an effective work process.

Initially, there were mixed teams in Appodeal: the same developers could work on different products. But with this approach, the focus of attention was sprayed, so we began to create product teams. Such teams work more efficiently. At the same time, we compared similar teams working on the remote and in the office. It turned out that office give a better result. The concentration of people around the products correlates very well with the idea of ​​their physical being in one place.



To measure performance and compare the results of a remote and office team, we chose simple metrics. Firstly, the number of successful clients that we have attracted over a certain period. Secondly, the speed of completing tasks - it is important here whether we hit the deadlines or not. Thirdly, the number of similar products made on the remote and in the office. Based on the foregoing, we concluded that we need to unite.

The third problem is flexibility.Unlike enterprises, startups are flexible companies. We started as a small team of 10−20 people without product managers, and this did not prevent us from working. But with the advent of more people, we began to lose flexibility. Feedback suffered the most. It is very important for a company where they constantly test many hypotheses, adapt to a changing market and adapt to new customers with special requirements. And if you need to urgently solve a problem, and an employee in another time zone is sleeping, you have to change something. At a minimum, transfer an employee to the same time zone.

The fourth problem is engineering culture.In order for developers to develop, you need to regularly hold meetings and conferences, exchange experiences and write technical articles. This is especially important for the development of new technologies that should be better than competitor technologies. Employees on a remote site often do not associate themselves with the development team and do not share experience. They simply work off the set hours and do the work within the set tickets. This approach may be good, but not for the product team.



Informal communication is almost completely absent or comes down to the exchange of memes in Slack. Some techniques, such as Agile or pair programming, are generally difficult to do on a remote site.

When more than three people are recruited in one city, the idea of ​​creating an office arises on its own. That is, people themselves come to coworking to work together. A good example is the office in Barnaul, where we have a concentrated technical support team. About 30 people work there. It turns out that we were able to create an efficiently working team with low turnover and a good microclimate in a small town.

During the general congresses, we realized that problems with communication, processes and the formation of culture are being addressed. But the more ideas arise, the more difficult it is to unite. Some practices improve local processes, but do not solve global goals. Therefore, often the most correct decision may be moving key development employees to one city.



How we moved key employees

When choosing a city to move a team, you need to consider many factors, including economic and legal. We preferred Minsk - one of the most comfortable million-plus cities, at least in the CIS countries. An office is not cheap, but there are special economic zones around the world, including in Russia and Belarus. For example, the High-Tech Park in Minsk. Such zones give residents a reduced tax rate and simplify legal formalities. They help reduce the degree of pain when moving a few dozen people to the office.

We moved to the Minsk office of managers and developers who participated in the creation of key products. Due to this, we improved processes, began to remodel less, and faster to finish products with which there were difficulties on the remote. It turns out that we managed to cope with the main problem.

The office in Minsk is often used as a platform for general congresses: here we bring employees to meetings, training, and so on. As a result, we managed to get off the ground many difficult issues, for example, technical debt.

But there are also disadvantages, for example, it turned out to be more difficult to find people in the office than to remotely. At first, the remote team allowed us to expand rapidly, to find specialists of any profile for an acceptable time and money. It is much more difficult and expensive to transfer employees to work in Minsk: not everyone can or wants to move. Some cannot for personal reasons, others live by stereotypes and do not want to move to Belarus. Someone is worried about elderly parents who remain in another country, or is experiencing health problems, so they are forced to live where they are being treated.

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I moved from St. Petersburg to Minsk with my wife and two children. I can’t say that the family is somehow stopping the move. The company provides medical insurance, private kindergartens and other things necessary for a comfortable life in a new place. Nevertheless, employees who agree to relocate have to be additionally motivated: to raise salaries and promise different “goodies”.

As a result, we came to the conclusion that the best option is a mixed one. This works for us from top to bottom: there is more benefit from the managers in the office, ordinary specialists can work remotely. Employees with a high degree of responsibility show the best result, working in the office next to the team. If the area of ​​responsibility is small, you can leave the person on the remote. So you get more profit and save money.

What happened 1.5 years after the move

I spoke at the ProductSense conference with this report in 2018. Over the past time, we have made several additional conclusions.

First, we measured very little performance before and after moving to the office. First you need to build measurable processes, and then make a decision about the format of work. This is a non-trivial task, and few can boast of neatly collected numbers.

Secondly, on an intuitive level, we did the right thing. Work in the office allows you to feel team spirit and unite. Employees constantly communicate with each other, share new knowledge and approaches, gather for professional meetings. Engineering culture is developing strongly through informal communication.

Thirdly, in order for office work to lead to good results, you need to organize it at a certain level. The office itself must meet certain needs: convenient workplaces, comfortable meeting rooms, a kitchen and free lunches. The administrative part is one of the most complex. For the Minsk office, I had to hire a CEO, who was under the entire administrative and legal burden. An additional recruiter, an office manager and accountants were also needed to help with the relocation of employees.

Appodeal did not focus solely on office work. Although most now work in Minsk, there are offices in the United States and Barcelona. If the need arises, any employee can work outside the office. The main thing is that the processes are established, and other specialists do not suffer because of this.

If the processes are not established, then it will be like self-isolation. Some companies were forced to switch to remote work, but people don’t know what Slack and Zoom are, how to share a screen or make a presentation on the Internet.

To summarize: it is worth taking the best from both formats of work. It is necessary to focus on the needs of business, processes and people. If you cannot find a suitable specialist in your city, consider relocation or remote work options. For example, for Minsk this is a rather popular story: companies are looking for employees all over the world and build work based on the specific situation.

findings


  • A large remote team and complex processes do not allow to increase the speed and quality of development.
  • There are several problems in remote development: it is difficult to communicate in different time zones, to be flexible and effective with a large distributed team, and to form an engineering culture in the absence of informal communication.
  • The solution may be a mixed version of the work, in which people with a larger area of ​​responsibility work in the office, and with less - remotely.
  • It is better to choose an office in a comfortable millionaire city, taking into account economic, legal and other factors.
  • It’s not always easy to transfer a remote team to an office: some people refuse, some have to raise their salaries, while others leave them on a remote site.

Watch the full performance of Konstantin.
Thank you for preparing the article editor Elena Egin.

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