Managing distributed development teams, especially those across software vendors, requires strong project management skills. Too often Project Managers are tasked with strictly administrative busywork that keeps track of assigned and completed tickets while coordinating with stakeholders to keep things moving smoothly. What is often missed is the responsibility that choices being made bring value to the user and the organization and not simply the busy tasks of building features. As a result, despite how strong and proactive the engineers of your nearshore partners may be, you may not be set up to recognize their full potential. Successful investments require active and results-focused management.
Ensure that the work the team is focused on is solving a problem, not simply building out a new widget. If this is not immediately clear, work backward to identify the problem that the proposed solution is addressing. One of our clients has two different teams: one focused on making changes to the shopping cart checkout to properly capture sales tax globally, and the other for updating some user flows and adding features that were tangential to the core functionality. While both teams achieved their sprint targets, maintained consistent velocity, and produced quality work, only one team added measurable value: the money team. While it is easier to quantify hundreds of thousands in recovered revenue from the checkout team, the user behavior stats from the feature team showed disappointing results on their own. In this case, the investment made in the feature team had a very low return on investment; good work but little value.
In a great team, the Project Manager would be empowered to bring solutions to the table. She/he should feel comfortable managing up, and using their expertise in the product data to highlight engagement statistics, application performance, and other aspects of user behavior. If the Project Manager truly understands the customer, their profiles, their needs, and their pain points, they can push back on feature overload, or help executive stakeholders identify priorities that serve both the user and the bottom line. Project Managers need the strategic context as to what other teams are doing and understand the overall product strategy. Project Managers will then ensure that the team also feels empowered. Like the PM, engineers should have the agency and feel comfortable raising risks, asking the why behind decisions, sharing alternative approaches, and suggesting technical and product implementation solutions. If the means of having a strong Project Manager on your team is not feasible, some nearshore partners may be able to provide those resources as well.
When spending money on development resources, invest it in higher-skilled engineers and provide them the means to understand the product, the user, and the business objectives. This will dramatically improve the value they add to the team and the bottom line. Better decisions made before fingers hit the keyboard to write code will save money and hours in the future on maintenance, reusability, and refactoring. If the team is focused on adding value rather than completing assigned tasks we see marked results. Many of our most successful clients have moved from a feature mindset to a product mindset, and those who have effective and empowered Project Managers, whether their employees or ours, are seeing outstanding results.
Learn more about First Factory’s Project Management Capabilities.
