Author Archives: Hugo Messer

Does the situation in Ukraine affect nearshoring?Heeft de situatie in Oekraïne invloed op nearshoring?

The past weeks I often get questions about Ukraine from people. They wonder whether we notice anything of the unrest in Ukraine and whether it affects the work our nearshore teams do.

From my perspective, it’s simple: as long as nobody barricades our office or cuts the internet or power lines, business can go on. Our developers love their work and as long as they can do their work, they will. On the longer term, a change in government might affect laws, which may have an impact on the way nearshoring is organized. But the past years, Ukrainian government has discussed changing tax laws and only a very small new tax was added last year. So I am not worried about our office in Kiev and Odessa.

How to prepare for managing a remote team?

We recently launched our new ebook about offshoring and nearshoring: ‘How to prepare for managing a remote team?’ We found that many people skip some very important steps when they move work offshore. Most companies spend a lot of time on country and supplier selection and once that’s fixed, they get going. Many problems in communication and collaboration can be prevented, by focussing on some essential steps before ‘doing it’.

Where do you start when you plan to move work halfway across the globe, to a country and culture you don’t know, several time zones away? What can you do to prepare your company and your people to make offshoring a success? What have other people done in order to prepare for their offshore journey? Typical questions that come up while preparing, are:

How to hire a nerd?How to hire a nerd?Hire a Nerd?

Last week, I wrote an article about lean distributed startups. The past months, one of the startups within our company that has taken most of my attention is ‘hire a nerd’. The main goal of this project is making a product out of our current core service (building offshore and nearshore dedicated teams for software firms and departments). Yes the name is provoking, we’re also contemplating launching a second version under our Bridge brand. We try to achieve two things for our customers:

Lean distributed startups: How to launch your product with an offshore team?

The past months, I have been experimenting with the lean startup method in a distributed setting. Let me explain this, because if you are not an offshoring insider, this could sound like gobbledygook.

The lean startup method you probably have heard about. The essence of the method is: if you have a (software/internet/app) product idea, develop a minimum viable product as fast as possible. This could be an ‘alpha’ version of your software, but even better is a ‘simulation of your idea’.