Working as a Global Team in a distributed tech company

Roberto Manca is a Senior Software Engineer @ Adevinta, Backend Tech Lead of the Resonance Global Team.

In the first part, I’m going to explain what I mean by Global and Local Teams, giving some context about my team and what we do.

Then, I’ll describe the two models of collaboration that my team adopted and why we ended up choosing one over the other (for now).

Lastly I’ll talk about the main learnings, describing the challenges and positive outcomes that we identified retrospectively by analysing the work we carried out over the last couple of years.

First things first, let’s define what I mean when I talk about Global and Local Teams.

In the context of a distributed company such as Adevinta, we can define a Global Team as part of our Tech Hubs, where people are responsible for accelerating, building and/or fixing functionalities for our marketplaces. The marketplaces’ teams can be defined as Local Teams and are usually distributed and located remotely.

At Adevinta, there are several Global Teams, including MADS, the team I worked in. MADS specialises in building functionalities in the domain of the ad lifecycle management within marketplaces, bringing in our expertise of the domain and relevant technologies. Over the years, MADS expanded the scope of its work to other domains and changed the way it collaborates with marketplaces.

Although working with external teams hasn’t always been easy, it’s been insightful. Let’s explore two different approaches we’ve tried out to collaborate with marketplaces.

Based on our experience, we can define two different collaboration models:

In the Independent Team Mode (ITM), the Global Team is in charge of defining product requirements, working with its own development process and releasing the deliverables as soon as they’re ready. The Local Team then starts to adopt the deliverables when it suits them best.

This model is widely adopted whenever the Global Team is responsible for a specific product, from the creation to the monitoring in production. In this case, the Local Team is the client of this service that offers the product.

The challenges and benefits of ITM from the Global Team perspective are:

In the Embedded Team Mode (ETM), the Global Team is actually embedded within a Local Team and the product is defined collaboratively by both teams. The Global Team needs to adapt to the technology, development and deployment processes of the Local Team. In order to achieve this, the desired outcomes are discussed, agreed and pursued together.

The challenges and benefits of ETM from the Global Team perspective are:

A few years ago, we had our first opportunity to collaborate directly with a Local Team.

We began trying ITM, but soon came across gaps between the teams in terms of knowledge. These gaps were hard to fill working separately and we didn’t feel like we were working towards the same goals.

However, we acknowledged that the work wasn’t flowing at the speed we wanted so we decided to try something different. We put aside the team’s concerns and initial scepticism, and embraced some of the Adevinta core values: “Act for max impact” and “Experiment bravely”. We decided to give ETM a try.

This resulted in splitting our Global Team in two, having team members embedded in two different Local Teams, each one focused on a specific domain. Soon enough, things started to improve drastically in terms of achievements: we better aligned on the priorities, features and ways of working with the Local Teams. We strengthened our relationships and finally came together as one team, working to achieve the same outcome.

In the last section, I’ll discuss the takeaways of our experiences working with Local Teams.

Disclaimer:

Generally speaking, when it comes to choosing a collaboration model there is no right and wrong approach. Instead, there’s a better approach that depends on the specific case and situation. We’ve decided to be pragmatic and choose the best approach on a case-by-case basis. So, we’re still open to adopting ETM in the future if it better suits the situation.

At this stage of the article, you may be wondering “How do I choose the right way of working?”. As you probably assume from the ‘disclaimer’ above, the answer is “it depends”.

That said, I’ve made a short list of questions you could try to answer with your team in order to choose the most suitable approach:

On a final note, I’d advise you to be flexible and prepared to adapt, depending on the situation. Sticking to your way of doing things, no matter what may create friction between the teams.

Once we were able to understand and reciprocate the other team’s communication styles, things began to improve. Soon, this was reflected in the decreased time to market and increased quality of our deliverables. In our case, adopting ETM had a hugely positive impact on the communication between the teams.

This is one of the core values in Adevinta and we were able to put it in practice in our collaborations with Local Teams. The different point of views coming from the Local Teams enriched our knowledge, giving us nuances that we probably wouldn’t have caught on our own. According to team feedback, this happened on both sides, which is a very desirable outcome from a business perspective. This becomes even more interesting when you start grouping ideas and identifying potential synergies to solve the same problem across the different marketplaces.

Working with local teams that were outside our country also gave us the chance to experience different cultures. Meeting in person is very important, especially at the beginning, to define the common grounds of the collaboration and to avoid misunderstanding. Making sure we were all on the same page was key in helping us create a strong foundation for a successful working relationship.

Our experience showed us that there could be the risk of losing the team identity if you work for a long period of time embedded in Local Teams. This is especially true when you split your group across different Local Teams working on separate domains. Because of this separation, it becomes really important to organise regular team events. This could be a structured offsite activity or a simple social after work. Also, it’s important to celebrate the achievements within the team. Too often, people tend to focus on constructive feedback and forget the positive outcomes.

From our experience, influencing changes in a Local Team can be hard, depending on the area impacted. If from one side you “Use your voice” to speak up and raise concerns, from the other, it’s possible that not all the proposals are accepted and this can be disappointing even if this happens for valid reasons.

We’ve learnt that it’s best to be open and as pragmatic as possible. It’s unlikely that you get everything you want, so focusing on the right actions and choosing your battles where you can really have the most impact can be a good strategy.

Collaborating with other teams can often be challenging and in this blog, we went through two different approaches towards creating a successful inter-team relationship and outcome.

We found out that every situation is different and there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach. Start the collaboration with clear communication between your team and theirs to find out their ways of working and ask yourself the questions written earlier in this article. As I said, there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ path to take and if there is a better one, this may change over time. Be open, adapt and discover what you can learn from working with other teams.

Related posts:

The carnival came and went in less than a week in the middle of June. But the elephant ear stand was still parked and open for business at the corner of 8th and Lenniman well into July, luring…

Are you tired of putting things off and feeling unproductive? You’re not alone. Procrastination is a common problem that can have negative effects on your career, relationships, and overall…

Most Business in India often deals with the problems of not having much quality leads for their revenue. Although there are many options available for B2C business, when it comes to B2B business only…