Remote Leadership: How to Manage and Lead a Global Team Remotely with Charlie Perrins

Welcome, Charlie, to the Mastering Tech Growth. It's been quite, quite some time we didn't see each other, but good to have you here. Welcome.

Hi, Mike. Good to see you again.

So I want to give the listeners a little bit of context. So we met, uh, was it like 2, maybe, maybe maybe 3 years ago in one of the CTO roundtables, isn't it?

That's right. Back in London, probably about 2 years ago, I think.

Here you go. And we took a trip back to King's Cross Station because you have a train which, you know, took you home. I have not the same train, but from the same station. And we chatted and I remember being fascinated about your position and how the remote/hybrid, you know, work is getting done and, you know, all the clients you have across the globe. So I was like, that would be such an interesting conversation to have. So thanks for doing this.

You're welcome. Glad to be here.

Let us know who Charlie is.

So my name is Charlie. I work in technology like you do, Mike. My whole career I've worked within the agency professional services side of technology. So I've always, I've always worked with clients. So you said you mentioned clients there. It's always been an element of how I work within tech teams, how I worked, you know, originally as an engineer. As I got a bit older, I started to become an engineer slash manager. And then as time went on, it became clear that the thing that people were wanting me to do more and more was to manage a team rather than write code. And so over time, that became a bigger and bigger percentage. And as I kind of moved through different jobs, different agencies, always staying within the same kind of world of advertising and marketing services. But, and you say now, I work for an agency within the Publicis Group, which is one of the large advertising holding corporations. And I work with a team at the moment that is distributed across the globe. So we've got people predominantly in North America, Latin America, and India. Those are the big three centers of our technologists, you know, our tech capability. But as you say, you know, we met in London. I personally currently live in the UK. So I was, um, before that I was living in the United States. So my wife and I moved out to the US in 2018 for work, but post-pandemic, which, you know, for us was also post having had children, um, we were in a position where we wanted to be closer to family and so took the decision to move back to the UK, which I think that we always eventually were planning to do. We're planning to come back and be close to family once again. But because we were coming at that time out of the pandemic, the whole world, well, our world of technology and professional services and kind of knowledge workers had spent a whole load of time working remotely. And so I had some conversations with my team, with my employers, and everybody agreed to give it a try and say, well, continue doing the job, um, continuing your kind of focus on what you're doing, but do it now remotely, do it from your home in the UK, um, and we'll work out all the rest of the details once you get there. So we got on a plane with our very young children, came back to the UK, and then started to work out the details. And it was probably only 6 months or so after that that I think you and I met.

Okay, so are you this outlier then within the organization who actually is alone in UK and then majority of the business operations is, you know, like you mentioned, North America, Latin America, and India?

Definitely not within the organization. It's a huge organization and I'm certainly by no means the only employee working remotely. And of course, there's thousands and thousands of employees in the UK. But within my individual team, the team that I work on a day-to-day basis, I'm the only one based in the UK. So yeah, I'm an outlier within my individual team.

And you're in your own bubble.

In no way in the company.

Okay. So did the remote— I mean, pandemic gave it to us like you want it or not, here's the remote, deal with that. Right. But from your perspective, from your personal perspective, were you potentially planning to go full remote and, you know, be in a position where you you have the time flexibility and all the benefits remote gives, or was it just more like situational how you ended up actually sitting in?

I think it was, I think it was 100% as a result of the pandemic. So prior to that, my whole kind of like mental model of work was based around going into an office. Um, there were definitely days when I'd work from home, um, you know, you might work from home on a Wednesday or on a Friday or something like that. If you had a doctor's appointment, something like that, like you might work from home. So it was like not like there was no ability to, you know, boot your laptop up, connect to the VPN and work from home. But it was something that was done on occasion. And as you said, like, no, not something that I was kind of harboring an ambition to do. And perhaps some people were more forward thinking than me, but I just was kind of putting one foot in front of the other and working, you know, on the teams and the projects in front of me. I didn't have any thoughts about, you know, making a radical shift in the way that I approached work and geography. But then COVID-19 happened. We were all sent home, you know, at various different times through 2020, depending on where in the world we were. Figured out how to work outside of an office environment and how to work kind of isolated from other people, which meant that as, you know, as restrictions were eased in the following years, we all had this toolkit of, you know, literally a toolkit of digital tools, but also a kind of mental and practical toolkit of ways to do work in, you know, in a manner that was very different from how I guess I would have imagined it at the outset of my career.

That's quite cool. So you had this mental model of office worker, and then pandemic happened, and in that span of 2 years, you almost were upskilled to actually, you know, be able to run remote teams. So before we pick on that, Charlie, can we take a step back? And you mentioned that, you know, your bubble is that you are sitting in London, and then you have your squads or your teams effectively, you know, people who report to you in North America, Latin America, and India. Can you give us a little bit like how that looks like? Is it— are we talking developers, you know, with a product owner, you know, with the PMs, with the QAs? Is like how that geographical setup looks like?

So I'm a little ways north of London, hence our trip across town to King's Cross Station. Um, but How we split up. I think it's probably— it's worth coming back to the idea that we work for professional services team, right? I've always, my whole career, served clients, as I said. So the first thing to think about is where is our client? And it differs for different teams, different clients, different points in time. Right now, the— right now, the work that I do is focused on North America, and that gives everything else an anchor. You know, if you have to pick a time zone around which to anchor, pick Eastern Time because that's the one that makes sense for the, the team that we're working for. You asked about product owners. I think we could do a whole hour on the idea of technology within professional services, within agencies— let's call it, call them agencies— technology within agencies and where does the product owner sit. Or do you have to have two? Do you have a product owner within your client organization and a proxy one within the agency, or what? And I think that's probably, that's definitely something that's taken an interesting trajectory over my career. But the constant has always been you do good work when someone from the client's team is acting in some capacity as a product owner. When you're in a fortunate position on both sides of the, equation to be able to do that, then I think the best work will come out of it. So think about your client's time zone, think about your product owner's time zone, and for me at least, be comfortable with that being an anchor for the rest of the team. So I'd say that when it comes to like managing where people are and what time zones they're following, it's not a kind of free-for-all or a democracy, or everybody works whenever they want as long as they get their work done. We have an anchor, which is where, where all of our attention lies. And then the rest of us who are not, say, on that time zone, but actually, to be fair, even the people in that time zone, everybody uses that as their basis, as their focus for work.

Okay.

So then in terms of how we're split up, if you take me out of the equation as the— in this particular team, as an outlier being in the UK, it's about 33% in those, those regions. So about one-third of us in the US, one-third in Latin America, and one-third in India. There's a really good spread of roles. So we've got, you know, the types of capabilities or the types of skill sets within the team would be managers like myself, technical managers, architects, digital product managers. So, you know, what would historically maybe have been considered business analysts in a consultancy in the consultancy world, but digital product managers for us is the term that we use, and it gives us a better freedom to expand that remit to think both kind of up funnel and down funnel with the types of things we're focusing on. So our DPMs, architects, software engineers, QA capabilities, both manual and automated QA, individual specialists, and then content publishing. So not like full-on MOPS, I don't run a CRM team, but content activities that are in that kind of marketing operations kind of vein. We've got all those different capabilities, but they're spread out pretty much everywhere. So there's no one geo, there's no one geography that furnishes us with all of the particular capabilities. We've got a decent spread across each of the regions, which I think It helps in terms of resiliency and redundancy if you need to lean on someone because somebody else is out for a period of time. But I think also, I think probably what we'll talk about today is the idea of, I suppose equality is the word I'm using. I'm trying to search for a slightly different word, but all teams being able to provide all skill sets. Takes geography out of the equation. And I think, you know, you can't ignore time zones, and it's sometimes it's impolite or inconsiderate to ignore things like time zone or geography. I think you need to respect where people are, you know, in their lives and in their working day. But you can also reduce its kind of prominence or its primacy. And having all of our different skill types across all of our different office areas just allows us to treat everybody as team members first and worry perhaps only as a secondary consideration which particular area they're working in.

I had a couple of questions to dig into that, but I feel like you answered. So you mentioned you have a good spread, which is almost like one-third in each region. So that's some to extend like a business continuity. And in all those regions you have again a spread of all the necessary capabilities. So that means that if one of the regions, say for sake of argument North America, is somehow in a bad time zone or very not comfortable time zone or something happens, there's another region which effectively can step in, right?

That's certainly true. I spend more of my time at this stage in my career looking at business continuity than I did when I was coming up as a younger developer, I wouldn't necessarily have guessed that that was a type of document I'd become familiar with. While I think it's true what you say, I also think that majority of the scenarios that you consider when you're doing that kind of planning are more localized. You know, they might be focused on a particular city or a particular state. Losing connectivity or losing the ability to work in an uninterrupted fashion, but not for an entire time zone or not for an entire kind of geography. And I suppose I should have said, you know, I talk about having teams in— the team I work with is located in North America, Latin America, and India. It's not one office in each of those countries, so there's multiple offices spread out all across India, multiple countries within Latin America, and then multiple sort of major kind of cities within the US. So even within our individual countries, we have fairly good spread of where people are, which means that on the whole, the kinds of scenarios that we consider when we're, when we're doing business continuity planning would be unlikely to affect even like one-third of the team at any given time. It would be, it would be a smaller percentage of the team that would most likely have to flip into a kind of alternate working pattern or a recovery mode.

Okay, so, so the anchoring is the client's time zone and everybody comes to that sun, right? It's just like a gravitational pull. Like, here's a, here's a new star in our solar system, so we're all just going to gravitate around that. That makes perfect sense. When it comes to individuals in the localized zones, again, for the sake of argument, let's say in North America, Do they actually work like fully remote, or do they have some type of like a hybrid setup where they come in offices? So, so effectively there's a, you know, there's this bubble which is local, which is a different operational module, say hybrid, and then, you know, you as a sort of like a management is actually remote to them.

Yeah, so the answer is most people work in a hybrid fashion. So, um, globally we have a sets of policies around time in office and time working from home. Those are outside my remits. But the short answer is most, most team members, most of us are spending some time in the office and some time at home.

I do see remote taking a much stronger grip in tech industry. Like, you know, we started with this fully remote because of COVID Then there was this pull in the offices and it seems that we settled down now into type of hybrid working, and it's just, at least in London, it's becoming the most popular way of doing work. So yeah, it seems like you guys doing the same, which is, you know, which is great. Personally, I, I think hybrid is, uh, it serves both ends quite well, as in it gives enough flexibility to people and it gives what businesses want, where, you know, fully remote or fully in office just You know, it's one another in a way. So, um, you mentioned ways of working when you came out of the pandemic. Uh, so what was that, some type of like internal coaching? Was that like a document of how we're gonna look at the next chapters of your business?

I think that we did offer, and I was offered, some kind of coaching, some sorts of meetings like that, but those aren't the things that stick in my mind. You know, the things that stick in my mind are, um, are just figuring it out and realizing that it was possible fairly quickly, you know, within, within weeks really realizing it was possible and then just kind of getting on, getting on with the work that needed to be done. Within agency world, being part of tech has been It's been an amazing kind of capability to be attached to within my career. I've always really enjoyed the identity of both being a technologist in, in the wider sense, but also being a technologist within an agency. But it's important to remember that agencies are full of other capabilities as well, right? You know, you've got various types of creative, various types of project management, project delivery experts. You've got people whose focus is on commercials and focus on strategy, that kind of thing. So agencies are full of different skill sets, and successful projects and engagements often bring those different capabilities together to collaborate, whether that's, you know, going after new business or working on projects that the team's engaged to work on. I'd say all of that because one of the, like, mostly unique, I should say, parts of the technology world. And this extends obviously far beyond agencies. It's just true of tech is that way before the pandemic, we had embraced global working as a big feature. So I remember that being, you know, in the tone of the conversations when everybody was working from home was, well, we've been doing this for years anyway. Because we've got teams all over the world. So although, you know, our colleagues within North America might be kind of getting used to this unusual situation where every single one of us was working from home, as well as kind of all of the non-work-related things that everybody was kind of going through and having to deal with at the time, it was, you know, it was unusual in many ways. But one of the things that was not unusual for tech at least was having team members, you know, on the phone, on Zoom, collaborating on documents, using all of those things, because we've been doing it for many, many years, you know, having teams in different geographies. So in that respect, there wasn't a huge change. There hasn't been a huge change. Like, a tech meeting, you know, might always have been remote first, if you like, in the way that it was approached. But in my world, at least, it became the case that every other type of interaction or gathering or collaboration also became remote. But as I say, you know, we're now a number of years post that model and now we're, we're in a position where everyone's able to work. Majority of people are able to work hybrid and, you know, if they need to be in person, they're in person. And if they, they need to be remote, they can be.

Okay. So it's a very pragmatic way of getting things done. So effectively it's not about, hey, here's a remote module, we're going to do this as a company, or here's a hybrid. It's more of a question, what works best in our current climate to get things done? And this is how we just sort of approach it, right? Because you mentioned a couple of weeks, you worked out how things should go, and you just off you went, right? Without any policies or frameworks or whatnot.

Yeah, I mean, I think that that does a disservice to the people whose job it is to consider those policies and frameworks and those things. Those things came, you know, in time, some of them quickly, some of them more slowly, but all of those things were put in place and were thought about, you know, with a great deal of thought. It wasn't my job to do it, so I did what I said at the beginning, which is I kind of put one foot in front of the other and made sure that my teams were communicating with each other, knew what they needed to deliver, and were in a position to deliver it, you know, well and successfully. Those new policies and kind of formalized arrangements grew up around us. But that was the nature of the situation where we shifted from not being 100% remote to being remote.

Okay.

And how's— Yeah, we now live in a world where those policies and frameworks continue to now and sort of exist, but the kind of the pressure to be fully in one mode or fully in another mode has shifted.

Okay. How sustainable? Let's postulate, because, you know, your setup is, is not like fully remote, right? We established that there's all different flavors because of the size of organization as well. You know, you being an agency, you know, having different disciplines and it's just a huge operation. So there's some localized, you know, frameworks which are in play. But from your perspective of doing remote for quite some time now and, you know, the knowledge you picked up and coming from actually this office mindset to this remote mindset. What do you think long-term-wise is the solution for businesses? Do you think we're going to settle on hybrid? Do you think the businesses will actually pull people back in a full office type of work, or do you think remote, as in fully remote, will actually take its foot and will expand its influence in the tech industry?

I'm glad that it's not my job to make those decisions. I think I would, I would guess it would be somewhere in the middle, right? I think that it will be a version of hybrid. There's no doubt in my mind that there are certain things that can only be done face-to-face, and I'd also probably agree that there are certain things that are done better face-to-face. There are also certain types of tasks that you can do more easily if you have a quiet, uninterrupted space, and some people who work from home are lucky enough for that to be quiet and uninterrupted. But of course, working from home means lots of different things to different people. So not everybody is necessarily working in a kind of quiet zen garden where, where they can focus on high-intensity cerebral tasks. But I do think that most people's jobs involve a mixture of those different things. So I would guess that, I would guess that the future is going to be close to where we are right now, which is acknowledging the benefits of both models and finding the right balance depending on the needs of, you know, individual companies, whether they're big companies or small ones.

It's always a trade-off, isn't it? There's no real silver bullet in any situation. It's always like you're going to lose something to gain something. It's always finding that, that balance.

Yeah, but I think that the— that's, that's certainly true. I completely agree about it being a trade-off. What I'd say is it's also not be-all and end-all, you know. It's not why, you know, my job, my industry doesn't exist to kind of litigate the question of where people should work. We provide services to client organizations and solve problems for them. That's the job. The other things are, you know, ways of getting the job done. But the focus is on the work, right? Whatever that work might be, whatever kind of company you work for, whatever kind of problems you're trying to solve. Most of the time you're trying to solve sets of problems in our, you know, in yours and my industry, we're trying to solve those problems through the application of technology. We're not trying to decide where to work, we're just trying to solve those problems. And where you work is a factor and it can control, you know, the team members you've got and all the rest of it. But it's certainly not the first thing I think about when I wake up or the last thing I think about when I go to sleep.

Okay, I love that. It's a good, good conclusion. So let me dig into the trade-offs. So what happens often, and I see conversations online, especially, you know, on LinkedIn, where you have, you know, people from one end, you know, being full remotes, you know, being quite aggressive about how they defend that operational module, and then, you know, people who love offices do the same. So there's a lot of misconceptions when you have, you know, when you go very far deep into one, one of the opinions. So in your experience, you know, like, what's the biggest misconception you dealt with when it comes to remote work?

Yeah, I think that I can only really speak for myself rather than—

of course, that's from your experience—

anyone else's, anyone else's misconceptions. But, um, When I went from being in the same country as most of my team and the same time zone as most of my team to, you know, being in a separate time zone, that was the time when I think I felt, you know, quote unquote, the most remote. And I think that my biggest misconception was that it wouldn't work. Like, I worried that it would be difficult. I worried that I would be less useful to the rest of my team if I was not, you know, not there all the times they were, or not able to step into a room or hop on a train and be, you know, be in the same place as those. So I think that my, probably like my biggest conception 3 years ago was that it would be difficult and that I would be unable to, you know, carry out the duties that I needed to carry out. And I think 3 years into this way of working, I think that, that misconception is gone. I feel more, I guess I feel more confident now that I am able to do a good job, you know, working in the way that I do. And I have some unusual approaches in that I work to my target time zone. So I don't start work at kind of the, um, 9 AM, 8 AM UK time. I start later in the day and then finish later in the day in order that I can have a greater crossover with, um, with the team that I'm working with in the US. I think that's probably the thing that's, um, of all of the like shifts, adjustments, or whatever that I've made to, to work, I think that doing the time-shifted work is what's allowed me to really kind of minimize a sense of dislocation, um, and therefore, you know, carrying on being able to do hopefully a good job for, for my team and for the people that I'm working for.

So that's the trade-off you needed to do?

Yeah, I mean, it is a trade-off, but it's, it's, it has positives and negatives. You know, I've got, um, young children. I know you have I have kids too, Mike. I've got very young children. They're not in full-time education yet. They don't go to school yet. My eldest will start school in September. And so, you know, being able to spend a bit of time with them in the mornings on weekdays is great. And then I start work a little bit later in the day. It means that I'm not always available to do tea time, bath time, bedtime on weekdays, but because of that I made an adjustment to work, essentially work UK hours on a Friday. So what I discovered is that in, you know, in my world at least, most of the time it's less impactful to be working UK hours on a Friday because of the way that meetings get structured and, you know, all that kind of thing. So I'm able to work UK hours on a Friday, which frees me up to be a dad and help my wife, be present and work with my wife to get things done around the house on Fridays in the evening in a way that I'm unable to Monday through Thursday. But also just as important, I'm able to be present with the family in the mornings. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, I've got time in the mornings that I wouldn't otherwise have. If I was not working those time-shifted hours. So yeah, it's a trade-off in some ways, but it's allowed me to remain very close to my colleagues in America at the same time as giving me some kind of unusual, unexpected shapes to my week to spend time with the family.

I love that. And I think it's people who do this, you know, have that real appreciation of what that setup actually brings. You know, I'm sure everybody has a certain appreciation. That's why people actually love remote or hybrid. But for me, it's the same. It's just, it's just that casual events where you go, go to the load on T and you can say, you know, hi to your wife or kids if they're at home, and then just, you know, have a 5-minute conversation. It's just such a, such a small thing when you think about it, but this actually has a really huge compounding effect if you do this you know, couple of days a week, you're just a lot more present, you know, which is— you don't have that if you need to go out at 9 and come back at 6. So yeah, I love that. Um, let me ask this: you're alone in London, right? And you're doing remote, and you know, you mentioned there's more people, so you probably go and meet, but I would imagine that happens quite rarely, which leads to a question of isolation and disconnect. Do you have a feeling that you're actually not you know, like you alone in a way, or do you think the connection is actually quite strong with your team and the broader business?

Yeah, I would say on the whole, no, that's not something that I struggle with. I'm aware that other people do, so, you know, again, it's not to kind of speak for anyone other than myself, but no, it's not really something I worry about too much. I do travel as required by the job. So that means that I'm, you know, face to face with other professionals, other people who are kind of in the industry as I kind of travel around. I go to the London office when necessary. As I said, there's hundreds of other people within my capability and thousands of other people, you know, within my company in various locations around London. So if I need to be in London for any reason, I won't be kind of traveling on my own. It won't be just me and a kind of backpack and a laptop. I'll be going to one of the, the office locations where there's tons and tons of people. And, um, I've worked for this particular— I've worked for this particular group for over— I think it's coming up to maybe coming up to 8 years now. Um, so I know a bunch of people, right? Like in different offices, different, um, agencies, different brands, you know. I know lots of people there. So when I do travel down to London, I get to see lots of familiar faces, and, um, and that lessens the sense of isolation. So yeah, for me personally, you know, I've got a busy house. Um, my wife and I have 3 children and a dog, so there's always people to see around the house. It's not isolating working from home. And then, you know, I'm fortunate enough to be required to travel around a bit to fulfill the role, which means I get to spend some time with colleagues and with clients. So yeah, it's certainly not kind of almost in my mind.

So you got 3 children and a dog, Charlie?

That's right.

So you have 3 and a half child then?

Yeah, sometimes it feels that way.

Yeah. All right. So let me flip this question then, because I was looking effectively for something which is something you would like to change? So, you know, isolation and disconnect is actually very, very high as a, as a negative, you know, trade-off of the remote setup. So if that's not it, is there something you would, you would like to change?

I was thinking about this, um, I was thinking about this, you know, knowing that I'd be speaking to you today and kind of, um, trying to think what it would be. And it really isn't, it really isn't too much, you know. I would, I would, I would choose for the UK train service to be a bit more reliable, for there to be fewer cancelled trains. If I could wave a magic wand and have my train ride to London be closer to 1 hour instead of 2 hours, I would do that. Um, but No, honestly, I, you know, I like the way that my, I like the way that my kind of geography and my role intersect at the moment. I like, I like the work that I do. I like the people that I work with. So no, there really isn't like one overriding thing that I feel like I'd want to change. I think I'm, I'm lucky to, to have a good job that I enjoy, um, in a working setup that works for me and works for my family. So Um, yeah, there's no one thing that stands out.

That's great to hear. And you're so right about the trains. Oh my God, so expensive and so not reliable. It's just, just, you know, often when I get these train cancellations, I'm like, I don't get it. It's like, you know, we are, what is it, like fourth strongest economy on the planet. You know, we have these trains for like couple of hundreds years now. It's like, can you just sort this thing out? And I always think about Japan. And it's like they, they just work like a clock. But anyways, our, our issues, right? Our country's issues. Okay, so let's maybe move and talk a little bit about talent retention. So you have all of these people, you know, North America, Latin America, and India. Do you actually, in your setup, do you actually responsible for people in the sense, you know, do you deal like with one-to-ones and career progressions, or are you more more like, um, you know, have this distance and they have the local, uh, team leads or DMs or whatnot, and, you know, you oversee leaders of leaders?

It's more the latter. Yeah, it's more the latter. Um, the individual regions, individual countries have, um, yeah, have management and autonomy about that kind of thing when it comes to hiring and talent retention and career progression, all those things. So yeah, my role is to play a kind of leader consultant role to those individual regions. You know, they'll ask my opinion when they want it and I'll share it with them, but ultimately they own their own responsibilities in those different areas. I'd say that's been That's true of my experience today, but it's also been largely the model that I've seen working for other agencies and, you know, other parts of the industry over the course of my career.

Okay, so let's postulate then. So if it's not directly in your domain, do you think there's intrinsic challenges which exist with remote or hybrid, or do you think it's still fairly the same when it comes to strategies of how you retain people, which we utilized when we had full office or in-office cultures.

Yeah, I think it's not something I feel, not something I feel like I know enough about to really sort of helpfully comment on.

Okay, let's jump over this then. From my perspective, I got disconnected as well. You know, it's like in the current role, I'm in a very similar situation like yours as well, where it's, it's actually the localized management looks after the career progression and people retention. So we— I want to define that we're sitting in this driver's seat and we just sort of, you know, taking the car where it needs to go. But what happens within the car, there's another person, you know, entertaining people and making sure people don't leave the car. Type of situation. So it's more like, uh, you know, less of that, um, what are these roles, like team lead type of roles, uh, local DMs, you know, who have one-to-ones and make sure people are happy. But before that though, I had the role where it was remote as well, and I was directly responsible for the people. So I felt like there were some challenges, like the same strategies just didn't apply as easily as it did when we had, you know, full in-office. So I want to just sort of see if I can pick your opinions about that. But let's jump over this. So same question but different angle. Do you feel like people leaving is a higher percentage in remote and hybrid setups compared to in-office? So meaning that people join and they go like, I don't like that. And they leave in higher numbers than in-office numbers.

I mean, I don't see widely enough across the industry. I don't see numbers widely enough across the industry to be really confident about that. Anecdotally, I think that, um, turnover and people leaving has lessened in the last few years, you know, I've been— I'm aware that there are lots of, you know, large tech organizations that have undergone, you know, real disruption over the last 3 or 4 years. There's been lots and lots in the news about large rounds of layoffs and redundancies and those sorts of things. There's a bit of a difference, I think, between significant Those sort of significant shifts that those kind of big companies made. And then maybe the idea of kind of retention, like how long people stay in a job, how quickly people move on to new roles. And I'd say anecdotally, as I say, it feels like people are more inclined to stay put for longer than they were a few years ago. But that could be bias from my point of view because, you know, as I've grown older, I've grown more senior, and I think that people in senior roles tend to stick around longer, whereas, you know, junior engineers at the start of our careers, we're more likely to kind of bounce around, you know, either at the end of every project or, you know, in kind of smaller yearly increments. I'm just seeing fewer people move around, but Across the whole team, it feels like there's, there's a bit less of a propensity to, to move around quickly. Honestly, Mike, I don't think that's got as much to do with this whole question of being geographically distributed or whether you work in an office or not in an office. It's probably got more to do with kind of bigger, like, macroeconomic factors, um, that, that are at play, um, rather than, you know, really being a symptom of people who work from home are more or less likely to want to shift jobs, you know, after, after 18 months, that kind of thing.

Yeah, that's the danger with statistics, isn't it? It's like, it's very easy to pick a number and go like, hey, you know, in 2024 and 2023, we're seeing people leaving remote setups where, as you rightly pointed out, you know, the, the environment economically is just not the same. But anecdotally, I definitely agree. I feel like the retention actually grew with the remote coming out of the pandemic. At least that's what the numbers which companies are sharing is telling us. And there's a, there's a book called The Future of Work. I can't remember who actually wrote this, but it goes into all the statistical benefits we're seeing with remote taking hold in the market, tech market, because, you know, it's not applicable to all the markets. So do we have any differences in working with people from cultural perspective in Latin America, North America, and India? It feels like that these, at least India and America, feels like, you know, ways apart. And, you know, to some extent I would say, you know, they, you know, different cultures. Do you tend to see that, you know, there's different ways of how you need to work with them, how you effectively maybe hand on the task, how you communicate, how they receive information, and these soft skills, let's say?

No, I think that, um, that's, I think that That feels like a misconception.

Good. Misconception.

Slightly, slightly, you know, slightly outdated view of how geographically distributed teams work. So I'd say no, an individual level, like the team is the team, the specialists have jobs. I definitely think there's a difference between how you hand a task to a business analyst or an architect and how you hand it to a content manager or QA. And it's not just that they'll be doing different tasks, it's that I think people who become good at those different jobs end up kind of being specialized in certain ways. So I would definitely sit down and like work through things in a different way with a, with an architect or a DPM than I would with a QA manager, for example, because of the nature of those roles. But whether that QA manager is sitting in, in the US or in Latin America or India should make not too much difference. What I do think matters is, like we talked about it a little bit before, acknowledging that people are in different countries and are on different time zones and just being kind of respectful and polite about it. So knowing when your team's, um, knowing when your team's national holidays are, like, makes difference. Um, and I don't mean like committing the whole calendar to memory, But I mean like checking the calendar and seeing whose office is open, whose office is closed next week, next month, so that you don't kind of mistakenly or just thoughtlessly plan something important for a day when one half or one third of your team is going to be busy or out or on vacation or traveling or whatever it might be. And paying attention to things like people's time zones in meetings. So this certainly wasn't something that I came up with. One of my team members started doing this and I kind of loved it and therefore tried to like copy that behavior. But she would open the meeting saying good morning, good evening, good afternoon, depending on, on what the time zone was of the people who were on the meeting. And it was just this like half-second little bit of like being thoughtful and respectful about where everybody was, um, that felt like a really appropriate way to acknowledge the fact that everybody's distributed geographically, while also skipping over it and getting to the heart of the matter, you know, as in a kind of, you know, in a split second. So I love that, and I try and kind of not just take that action at the start of meetings, but kind of take the spirit of it into the way I work with the team. While, as I say, really not kind of not considering how it might then impact the actual work, the actual tasks that we're all doing.

I love that. Small things, they compound, isn't it? So, okay, so it's misconception. In your experience, culturally speaking, no difference, it's just, you know, professionals doing their work. What about language barrier? Again, maybe in your experience, you know, any cons and not like cons and pros, it's more like, did you feel that there's a challenge in, you know, in having non-English speaking members part of your team? And if they, you know, they may be still coming up with their language?

I mean, I don't have anyone who's a non-English speaker on my team. Like, I'm fortunate that the lingua franca of technology and of professional services in many ways is English. And it means that all of the team are versing in English the majority of the time when we're talking about work. So everybody speaks English. The difference is that for 66% of my team, it might be their second language, or it might not be their first language that they learned as kids. But everybody's an English speaker. It's just that some of them speak 2, 3, 4 languages, which I certainly don't. Language barrier, yeah, I really— again, by the time sort of people come into the company and come to the kind of level that they're at in the careers, everybody's able to speak English, and so it really isn't a huge problem. I think that somebody who's not confident speaking English might choose to do certain tasks differently. I think that it's probably important to have a little bit of a finger on your pulse, finger on the pulse of that and the sense of confidence. But it comes down more to the not just language, but all ways in which, you know, members of the team might feel confident or not confident and able to contribute fully or not. What we do have, in my experience, in the kind of the teams that I've worked with most recently is this applies to myself as well, there are people who have the opportunity to work in more than one company, and therefore you might have somebody who is based in the US right now who began their career in Latin America. And so not just— they don't just speak fluent Spanish, but they might also have like experience of what it's like living in, you know, in different countries. Other than their own, and I think that really helps. It helps kind of gel the team together, is that you've got— what you don't have is just 3 sort of buckets of people who live in one country and don't understand the cultures of the other countries. Actually, we've got a good amount of kind of cross-pollination, cross-migration, you know, team members from India who've moved to the States, myself who's moved from the UK to the US, back to the UK again, So yeah, I think we're fortunate to have a depth of experience and appreciation for the places where our teams work, which allows us to try as much as possible to appreciate where everybody's coming from. And the last thing I think I'd say on that is that in terms of the language barrier, as a British English speaker and writer, the thing that it puts me in mind of most is that I still, you know, 6, 7 years after first having started working directly with, you know, with majority of clients in North America, I still have to think about American versus British spelling. And my boss, you know, used to pull me up for putting British English words into emails, you know, saying, hey, why is your email full of spelling mistakes? I was like, well, is it a spelling mistake or is it a difference? Yeah, that was that's something that I've obviously focused on and managed to, managed to make that shift.

Okay. I get that. And so let's talk about maybe more tactical things. So, so you are in London and you need to pass on the tasks. You need to collaborate about the task. How does that software development cycle look like? Is it like, you know, the standups you mentioned, you have a different time zone. So everything comes together. What are the tools of collaboration? Is it like Jira for techies? Do you guys use Slack? Is there another way you can reach out to people? How does the work move on? And just like, if you give us a flavor of that setup.

I mean, I guess what I'd say is it's just not— there's certainly nothing surprising, but there's also nothing really different now. I mean, some of the tools have changed and some of the level of sophistication and the you know, the adoption of like cloud services to spin up ephemeral dev environments so that you're not constantly battling with 100 different local dev environments that are, you know, configured differently, opting infrastructure as code, um, you know, formalizing the, the tools that you use for code reviews and for merge requests and all that kind of stuff. Like, those things are not the same as they were 5, 10 years ago. They've got better, and, you know, in many ways we've got more detail But broadly speaking, the SDLC that I, you know, see my teams executing today is using those same sorts of rituals and tools and kind of big milestones in the project that it was 5 years ago, 10 years ago. You know, we have source code, we tend to organize ourselves in broadly agile fashion, You know, for me, going back to around about 2012, 2014 was about when agencies I was working in started to really import agile thinking into an agency landscape, because prior to that, I think there was— obviously agile's been around for a lot longer than that, but I think there was a point at which it was being adopted within kind of startups and pure-play tech companies, but not being adopted in wider organisations, but you know, going back a full 10 years plus, you know, it's been part of the agency technology landscape as well. And so, you know, organising in scrums, using, you know, I mean, I'm familiar with most of the Atlassian suite, so I would think of task management as being a Jira thing, to the point where I'd refer to task management as using Jira rather than, you know, calling it task management. But you know, that's probably more, it says more about the tools that I've used over the last 15 years rather than anything about Atlassian's position in the marketplace. You mentioned Slack. I've, you know, I've been in agencies where Slack's been the tool of choice. I've been in agencies where it was Teams. There was a hot minute where it was HipChat. And that was one of the products that I think Atlassian did, did let kind of go by the wayside. There's more, probably more of a fact, probably the change, I suppose, you know, look over the last 10 years, the percentage of your day you spend on a Slack or a Teams or a kind of one of those all-in-one integrated messaging and collaboration tools, you know, has obviously changed rather than it being a mixture of emails and IM and file sharing. It's great to have all of that in one place. I love organizing my own files. I love like starting a project and having an empty folder and deciding what files are going to go where and how I'm going to organize and name things. So to some extent, you lose some of that when you're just doing file collaboration directly in a piece of software like Slack or Teams or whatever it might be. It obfuscates where the files are and just kind of puts them in a Teams channel for you to work on, which is great in the moment, but can sometimes make deliberative decisions about where to store stuff a bit harder. So there's a, you know, there's a consideration there on how to make use of those tools. But on the whole, everyone spends a great deal of time in that kind of messaging hub, but then they're doing the same things that we've always done in terms of committing code, deploying through environments, you know, accessing and testing environments, and then ultimately kind of using tools to manage and execute on software releasing. So yeah, it comes back to the, you know, it feels more the same than different in terms of the shape of the SDLC. It's just that some of the tools have got better. The access to cloud services has increased and it lets us maybe do certain things faster than we used to do.

Okay. So if I would ask, is there a tool which pops out, a new one, you know, which came to be to support remote or hybrid in some way? Nothing pops out. It's really, when it comes to the critical tools for the software development lifecycle, it's basically the same picture.

I guess pretty much, I suppose. I don't want to do— so Teams rather than Slack is the tool that I'm using day to day at the moment. But they're obviously very similar tools in many, many ways. I don't want to do them a disservice, because I think that the The like ease, the facility with which people jump on video calls has massively changed. And a lot of that has to do with how easy it is within one of those tools. The kind of language and set of behaviors that arises around things like camera on versus camera off and, you know, like how you sort of deal with all those like different things. It's like an etiquette. To digital video calling that's arisen over the last 4 or 5 years, which is interesting. It's definitely kind of big, a big part of, you know, how, how I now kind of manage my professional persona, if you like, working the way that we do. I feel like I'm still waiting for the whiteboarding tool of my dreams. So I, I find that I'm a visual thinker. In some ways. I probably wouldn't have guessed that about myself at the start of my career. Because I came into software development actually from a world of language and of journalism and then kind of by way of paid search and SEO into engineering. So like diagramming and those sorts of things weren't a big part of my life at a very early stage. Obviously, you know, I kind of specialize as a frontend engineer, so I suppose in many ways that's a visual medium because you're crafting code to look a certain way and to behave a certain way. But in any case, I think it's in the last sort of 10 years or so of my job that I found that like the best way I can think things out is to sketch them out and to draw diagrams. And very often now I'm put in a position where I need to communicate something to a group of people, either to explain it or to gain consensus or to learn from them on what the right way might be to tackle a problem. But in all of those cases, I find diagrams to be one of my kind of weapons of choice. And I still, still find myself just popping open PowerPoint and doing a quick scrappy diagram using text boxes in PowerPoint because I haven't yet found like a whiteboarding collaboration tool that allows me and a colleague to, to both be sort of drawing a diagram at the same time. And I've played around with tools like Figma, which I think gets close, but Figma is an amazing tool for, you know, lots of my colleagues in the creative and UX community use it too because it's very, very powerful. I think that I don't know enough about it to be a power user. Um, so yeah, it's not become my, my kind of collaboration whiteboarding tool of choice. So I'm still waiting for someone, whether it's Slack or whether it's Microsoft or somebody else, to drop the, the in-call whiteboarding tool of my dreams that allows me to sketch my ideas out and kind of share them in real time. Um, but we, yeah, we shall see.

I love that sketching part and the diagramming. It's same for me. I It wasn't that I thought I'll be doing this as well, just as you have mentioned, but where I found myself, when you have a lot of details, you know, it's just probably my weak brain, but if I have, you know, 7 or more details, it's just hard to keep track in your mind of what's going on. And just getting, putting everything in diagram just allows to sort of bring the picture together and just look at you know, strategically sort of zoom out, look at the diagram you just made and think about all these possibilities, or, you know, risk assess the, the whole operation. So I tend to do that as well quite often. And my choices of weapon is actually Lucidchart or Miro.

Oh yeah, yeah, I remember Lucidchart. I haven't used it, um, in recent years, but it's, um, it's a tool that I've used in the past.

It's quite good, but it's very enterprise, you know, it's very expensive. So, you know, if you were If you're a startup, you probably want to look at Miro, miro.com. It's, it's very nice as well. It's just, okay, just have a different pricing module and allows a much quicker entry to experience, you know, the product.

Okay, so you find that, um, yep, I find that, uh, if you invest too heavily into a piece of software for diagramming, then, you know, within a matter of months you'll be having a conversation with your teams about how, how come we can't integrate this into are other tools. So whatever tools you're using for writing documentation or writing requirements, whatever it might be, as soon as people go heavy on one diagramming tool, then they want to see that integrated into other tools. And that doesn't necessarily always, always work. I think it's part of this idea of like the tool of my dream still hasn't popped up yet. But yeah, to your point about zooming out, I think that personally I feel like if I can't draw a picture of it, I haven't fully understood it yet. And sometimes the kinds of tasks or kind of problems that are in front of me, it might be about trying to get control of something that's new or that's fast moving or that has like, you know, like you say, strategic implications. And so putting pen to paper and drawing something, it's a way of feeling like I'm wrestling control over a problem area because at least once I've drawn it, then I've kind of got bounds around it and a bounding kind of understanding of it. And then, you know, you can click in and click out to have more or less detail and kind of focus on various areas. But yeah, I think that that's— it's probably driven from this idea of, um, once I can draw it, I can control it. And that's why I like to— I like to put these things down.

Yeah, I'm same, I'm same. Maybe it's just not us, Charlie. Maybe it's just like how everybody does it, because you're absolutely right. Like, you know, there's some a lot moving parts in, in many high-impact initiatives. And if you, if you don't sit down and actually make sense of it, of all these moving parts, it's, it's very hard to make sure you put— pulling all of them towards the same direction. And I feel like the more senior you get, the more likely you're going to end up making charts. And, you know, doing mind maps and flow diagrams and whatnot. But maybe it's just us in tech industry, maybe it's just us. So let me change the gear. In the spirit of the show, we have this one question. In your experience and in your opinion, what is the one most important thing for any tech venture growth?

I think it sounds, sounds a little trite or clichéd to say it, but it's probably about leading people. Because, you know, it's really easy to talk about tech growth and think about like, you know, stock market tickers and lines going up in a, you know, in a kind of traders screen and the idea of growth equating to like value or the market cap of the company. Or maybe it's like the idea of growth is like a ticker of number of users going from 1 million to 2 million to a billion users. You know, there's lots of kind of dramatic, almost cinematic, um, ideas around tech growth. Maybe, you know, that's just what I bring to it, but that's so much kind of— there's been so much like fascinating and amazing stuff that's happened in the last 15, 20 years that's kind of grown out of that tech startup culture. Um, that tech growth to me, I think, has a lot of associations with all of those things. But there's no people in any of those cinematic ideas that I just kind of, um, I just kind of mentioned. But nothing gets done without engineers and QAs and product managers talking to each other, to designers, to end users, and kind of taking the decision to sit down at a keyboard and write some code and commit it and review it and publish it. And no matter how big or how small or how lofty or how kind of complicated it is, the thing that you're working on, it's going to boil down to some people at keyboards doing these kinds of tasks. Unless you're a tiny, tiny, tiny startup, it's going to be a bunch of people having to collaborate on doing those tasks together. And as soon as you start doing that, then as I say, you kind of have these universal challenges of how do we get tech teams to work effectively and to translate, you know, what's in one person's mind into another person's mind and make sure that the thing that we get at the end of it is as close as possible to the thing that we had in our minds at the start. It's never going to be exactly what it was. Even at the end of a 3-week sprint, what you thought your requirements were has changed and shifted slightly. So you're constantly having to kind of go backwards and forwards and recalibrate and re-assess and adjust your expectations of where you're going and what you're doing. But if you're not careful, team members can get lost and not everybody can sort of be carried along that journey. And that's, I think, where risks and errors creep in because somebody's doing a task, not deliberately doing it badly or certainly not doing it, you know, maliciously. But they don't quite think they're meant to be doing the same thing that somebody else thinks they're meant to be doing. And so all of tech delivery, or a huge, huge part of it, is about being like comfortable that your team is communicating with one another well as people, and it is getting that kind of like idea, that germ of that idea, passed around amongst different people, and everybody is collectively aware that it's going to change, it's going to be malleable, and they need to kind of keep track of it because whatever the thing is, the delivery item is, it's a bit of a moving target. So that's all about people, and it feels like a fairly universal characteristic of tech teams that I've worked with, um, you know, across projects of wildly different sizes and scopes, you know, in different different engagements over the last 10 or 15 years. If you don't have that, you're doing it badly, then you know, you're never going to get to those interesting cinematic ideas about tech growth, whatever that might mean for your organization.

I love that, Charlie. Leading people, one of the most important, or the most important. I love that. And there were guests as well, you know, going I mean, ultimately it is the people who actually get things done. So you have this universal triangle, right, where you have people, processes, and tools. And, you know, in theory they all should be equal, so they did, they built the pyramid. But it seems the more leaders I talk with, the more, the more it's about people. So thank you for that one. Um, I want to ask a little bit about innovation, because you, you were going with this answer, it just popped in my head. And as well, I remembered that you mentioned about the Zoom calls and the Teams and Slack and just being able to jump on the call. In your experience, comparing to the office culture, do you think this spontaneous, oh, I got an idea, you know, let's, let's have a chat about this and see what happens, do you think this is to some extent decreased in, in a, you know, in a remote setup?

Um, no, I think that you talked about everything being a trade-off. Everything, of course, is a trade-off. I, I've always loved spontaneous, like, conversations with people in the hallway. Um, I liked the shift away from, like, having your own desk which, you know, over the last 10 years or so, to kind of remote desking. That's, again, it's not, not for everybody, and some people kind of find it disruptive, even distressing. But it suited me very well to have a laptop and to be able to walk around and to not sit in the same place in an office, you know, even over the course of a day, you know, to have 3 different places that you might sit over the course of a day, um, overhear different people, sit near different people, and like have conversations arise, um, and ideas arise because of that. So for me, that like aspect of hot desking and open-plan offices and that kind of thing worked very well and suited me. And you get less of that if lots of people are remote, right? Because there are fewer people in the office, fewer opportunities to do that. But on the other hand, everybody is a video call away. And so it's not just the people you happen to sit next to that day. It's anybody who sort of whose particular skills or experience is relevant to what you're thinking about, you can ping them and if they're free, you can have a conversation. And, you know, time zones and respecting people's work-life balances are important, but it doesn't have to be someone who's in your country. So, you know, very often I've got a colleague who is based in North America now. Originally he moved to America around about the same time that I did. He likes to work early in the mornings, and very often he and I will be online and chatting, you know, before the rest of the day has started. And we'll often jump on a call and hash things out together, sometimes a video call, sometimes just an audio call. But we couldn't, you know, we can never do that face to face because we don't share a home office. So it's, you know, there's no chance of me pitching up and working next to him when I'm in the office, but we can chat in the mornings if we want to because we've got these, these remote tools in front of us. So yeah, I do think that there's a lot to be said for the innovation and the kind of the things that arise from overhearing other people's conversations and just being around one another in an office. But I think that, you know, to the extent we lose that on the days where we're not working in the office, We gain it from being able to chat to colleagues, or at least in the kind of company I'm in now, where there's lots of us, we're all over the world, we gain it from the freedom of being able to have a call with anybody, wherever they might be, if a call with that person is what you need to get to a good idea or to get to a breakthrough.

Okay, I love that. And yeah, that's exactly what happens. To wrap things off, Wrap things up, Charlie. Last question: any, any parts of wisdom you want to part us with before you go?

Nothing that's— no, nothing that's, that's at the top of my mind right now. I've really enjoyed the opportunity to, to talk with you about work and to think over the last kind of 10 or 15 years, um, and how things have changed, but also think about the ways in which, you know, many things remain the same or, you know, feel, feel universal within our our tech industry. So, um, no, nothing in addition to what we've covered, but certainly would love the chance to come back and talk to you again and talk to your listeners again and see what other topics we might want to dig into together.

Okay, thanks, Charlie. Thank you for doing this, and hopefully you enjoyed it.

Thank you, Mike.