Post
Our developers in Shanghai were on the chopping block.
Every morning, what came back was way off the mark. And Shanghai got the blame.
I was a Senior Engineer at Popsugar in San Francisco. Our dozen or so developers in Shanghai were fifteen hours ahead.
We handed work over to Shanghai at the end of our day. The handovers were thin and rushed. By the time Shanghai had questions, San Francisco was asleep. Shanghai did its best.
So we got features nobody asked for. Best guesses at tickets written by someone who assumed Shanghai already knew. Days spent on small things.
There was nobody in the middle. Just a VP of Engineering getting louder and more annoyed.
I offered to help. Who better to translate between China and America than a Scotsman!
What fixed it was actually quite dull and obvious.
First, I asked to go to Shanghai for a week to meet the team. A one-to-one with each developer. Their hobbies, their family, how they liked to work. All of them different. Different folks, different ways of working. We ate, drank and shopped together.
Once I was back in the Bay Area, we had a scheduled hour a week. My Sunday evening, Shanghai's Monday afternoon. Questions, blockers, sharing knowledge, banter, getting to know each other.
I also set up a dedicated group chat for everything in between. And an open invitation to push back on low-quality requests and requirements.
That last one took longest. The Shanghai team didn't want to offend, so nobody questioned things too loudly. Everyone did what seemed best. So I stopped waiting for their questions and went poking for them.
San Francisco needed some educating too. Clearer tickets. Requirements spelled out, not implied.
And a bit more politeness. The Shanghai folks weren't just a third party. They were our partners and work colleagues.
Nobody had ever told Shanghai how an American dev team works. Slang, euphemisms, shortcuts, acronyms. Stuff we all knew and assumed Shanghai did too.
A couple of the Shanghai developers even flew over to visit us in San Francisco.
By the end the Shanghai team was a finely tuned machine. Popsugar's development ran almost round the clock. Shanghai covered support for time zones well beyond the US west coast.
Two months after the Shanghai trip I was an Engineering Manager. Turns out the job is mostly asking questions. Getting to know folk. Understanding how people work. Not being a dick.