Building Hub-Based Global Teams
I discuss how our business has grown around hub-based teams in London, Thailand, Belfast and the United States. The focus is on balancing office culture with flexible working, whilst keeping multidisciplinary teams closely connected across product, engineering and go-to-market functions.
Key Takeaways
- Hub-based working supports collaboration whilst still allowing flexibility for home working.
- Multidisciplinary teams benefit from regular in-person time, especially when building complex product stacks.
- A global team structure can align engineering strength, customer proximity and go-to-market focus across regions.
Topics
- Company Culture
- Hybrid Work
- Team Management
- Engineering
Transcript
So me and Luke have known each other a long time, and he's British, but he actually moved to Thailand in 2004. So we've always had a London and a Thai team in the culture of our business, which is obviously we've been working together for over 20 years in that respect. So we were always, I suppose, we're a bit ahead of our time there, having kind of not like remote, because we've always been hub-based. We're not remote. So we do believe in office culture. We believe in being together, especially when you've got multidisciplinary teams. And in screens, there's a lot of moving parts just to the product, let alone servicing the customer. So you really feel that people do need to get together because one part of it just doesn't solve it well enough. It needs to be a complete stack, otherwise it just doesn't really work. So that's why we believe in hubs, and we obviously let people work from home, you know, half the week or more than that. But we also really get people together. We have another engineering team in Belfast in Northern Ireland, which is a really, really strong technical culture, a bit closer to the West from an engineering point of view, so they can interface with our customers who are mostly in America with 70% US revenue. And then obviously London is HQ, and then we have LA and we have Charlotte as our kind of go-to-market teams in America.