How Uber Bengaluru became a successful distributed office
7 keys to distributed office success
Ethan & Jason here—welcome to a paid member-only edition of Level Up: Your source for executive insights, high performance habits, and specific career growth actions.
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We are thrilled to bring you a guest post by Jaikumar Ganesh, an experienced engineering executive with over 20 years of work experience, that breaks down the 7 keys to opening and leading a distributed office.
Jaikumar has worked in startups and high-growth companies across multiple technical domains. Notably, he was one of the early engineers on the Android team at Google, and also founded the Uber Bengaluru Engineering site in 2016.
Jaikumar is currently the Head of Engineering at Anyscale - creators of Ray - the popular platform for scaling machine learning workloads that is used by companies like Amazon, OpenAI, LinkedIn, Netflix, Instacart, Uber, and many others.
Anyscale is actively hiring. Connect with Jaikumar on Linkedin.
Apply to be featured as a guest post: If you are an expert and want to share actionable career advice with our readers, get in touch.
“Oh boy, it is really hard to hire in this location, we have too much competition. We need to hire faster…”
“Getting a visa is a pain…”
“People don’t want to move countries, they want to be with their families…”
These are some statements you often hear in the tech community.
Then, they are usually followed by:
“Let’s open a remote office and hire faster by hiring remotely…”
This will either be the best thing the company has ever done or open a pandora’s box of problems—It all depends on how they approach it.
Having opened a distributed office, worked in one, and helped make it a success, I have distilled the key learnings into 7 tips and tricks to get it right:
Understand the purpose and secure buy-in from key executives.
Establish an independent charter and ownership for the new site.
Finding Ambassadors, Seeding the Office, and Setting the Culture.
Hiring the Site Lead and Key Technical or Business Leaders.
Unconscious bias exists – Call it "distributed," not "remote."
Site and HQ Visits, and Operating Review Cadence.
Be Forward-Thinking and be ready to adapt.
Tip 1: Understand the purpose and secure buy-in from key executives
When opening a new office, make sure you understand the "why" from the CEO or another executive. Determine if the goal is to hire in a new location or to meet a business need in a specific country, or both.
Then, make sure you have a genuine answer for why the work can't be done at headquarters (HQ) or another existing location. Though you will have CEO support, make sure you grasp the additional internal dynamics: Who sponsors the project, who supports it, who opposes it, and who is neutral. Listen to the detractors and try to convince them, if possible. An understanding of these dynamics before opening the office will help you navigate challenges and ensure success.
At Uber, the CEO made the decision to open the India Engineering Office. While there were no major objections from others, the Head of Operations and the Technology team disagreed on the location. The Operations HQ was in Delhi, and the Head of Operations wanted the tech team there too, despite most tech talent being in Bengaluru. We resolved this by putting the Bengaluru operations team and the tech team in the same building. Additionally, the product and engineering teams traveled to Delhi for quarterly planning with the Operations team. It was important to understand the dynamics between the Head of Operations and the technology team in order to form a plan that would get the most executive buy-in for the new office.
Tip 2: Establish an independent charter and ownership for the new site
This is crucial for the site's success.
Either move an existing team's charter from HQ to the new site (this requires strong support from the top) or create a new charter. For instance, Uber Engineering opened a site in Bengaluru to work with the operations team and develop products specifically for the Indian market. We actively relocated teams and projects, having clarity on what we wanted to do from the start. Projects that don’t have this clarity from the start often fail.
This is because starting new offices simply for easier or cheaper hiring without separate charters will split teams between HQ and the new site. While this can work with the right people and seniority, it rarely works well in the long term. HQ employees tend to feel superior, causing frustration and dissatisfaction in the distributed office. Similarly, the frustration can also be on the HQ side because what used to be a simple local execution dependency now becomes complicated, possibly across time zones and language barriers.
Ownership of the distributed office is also critical. An independent charter is ineffective if key decisions are made unilaterally at HQ, because this leads to a lack of ownership at the new site, resulting in disenfranchisement and dissatisfaction. Ensuring the new site has the right seniority levels to avoid daily dependence on HQ is crucial. The new site needs the expertise to design and take responsibility for their systems. For example, an engineering site should be able to do its own in-code reviews.
While this sort of independence takes time and multiple iterations, setting this goal from Day 1 and working towards it will pay off in the long run. Starting small and showing impact earns trust will earn HQ’s trust and also help win over some of the detractors mentioned in Tip 1.
For instance, at Uber, we initially started with products only targeting the Indian market, like improving the driver referral and signup funnel. Over time, we began to move projects that had global impact. One of the challenges we faced was that Uber was in the rapid growth phase, and our code base wasn’t modularized. So, the ownership was hard to establish, and resolving disagreements during day-to-day work like code reviews required active management and relationship building by the Site Lead.
Also, we had to proactively communicate and secure new projects and charters for the teams at HQ who were working on problems that would be moved to the new site. If not managed well, this can lead to resentment and fear of job loss. Fortunately, this wasn’t an issue at Uber, given its high growth phase.
Tip 3: Ambassadors, Seeding the Office, and Setting the Culture
When setting up a new office, enlist tenured employees who understand the company culture and have the respect of their peers at HQ as “ambassadors.” Implement a program where these ambassadors spend 6 months to a year at the new office, assisting in hiring local talent, establishing the company culture, and managing dynamics with HQ teams. For the Uber Bengaluru engineering office, we had around 10 ambassadors travel to India to recruit local talent and 4 ambassadors relocate to help set up the office. Additionally, in order to develop the culture, new hires were flown to HQ for orientation. In order to seed the office, we visited all the top engineering institutes, conducted batch interviews, and made same-day offers as the competition for talent was immense.
One reason to take so much care in developing your distributed office is that it is crucial to prevent the perception that the new office staff lack knowledge of the company’s history and culture or that they make misguided decisions. Such perceptions can quickly take hold and create lasting negative impressions of the office. Ambassadors who are trusted and respected by their peers can effectively counteract these issues and set the new office up for success.
In the case of Uber, a couple of the Ambassadors even stayed on in Bengaluru. This was a great outcome, but the challenge was that we had to creatively work through the legal and tax implications of their Uber equity.
One question that often arises in discussions about culture is how to determine if the culture is taking hold or working. This is often subjective, and is a crucial focus for the Site Lead. Techniques we used to ensure the culture was setting in included active polling of executives at HQ, training sessions for new hires, and engagement surveys. We also made the culture taking hold one of the goals for the ambassadors, and they were held accountable for it in their performance evaluations.
Tip 4: Hiring the Site Lead and Key Technical or Business Leaders
To ensure a site's success, you need a local site lead who can drive growth and is accountable for the location's success. Ideally, this lead should be a tenured, respected leader who can relocate to the new site. However, you may not be lucky enough to have a person like this. Companies often face the challenge of deciding whether to hire the site lead first, or build the site while searching for one. There is no one-size-fits-all answer, and the approach will depend on the specific situation and the urgency. Typically, companies begin with an "interim site lead" not based at the location to get things started before they find someone to fully take on the role.
When planning to hire site leads for engineering offices, you'll need two types of leaders: a site lead and 2-3 technical individual contributors who will be responsible for key architectural decisions related to the tech stack.
For the Uber Bengaluru office, we opted for an interim site lead while we began interviewing for a permanent one from day one. It took about 9 months to hire the site lead. In the meantime, a few of our ambassadors acted as technical leads, guiding the team and fostering strong relationships with the operations teams in India and at HQ.
Tip 5: Unconscious bias exists – Call it "distributed," not "remote"
When starting a new office in a different location, you want to go the extra mile to ensure it is not treated as a second-class entity. This is important to ensure that the people from the new office are not treated as secondary compared to those who work at headquarters.
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