The ‘Connectedness’ Piece - Todd Kaufman - Episode #39

Todd Kaufman is the President and CEO of Test Double. Todd has worn a number of hats including - Software Developer, Project Manager, Agile Coach, Salesperson, and Entrepreneur. Test Double is a software development consulting agency experienced in: Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, React, Elixir, Erlang, iOS, Android, React Native...and a lot more!

Discussion Points:

What myth or bogus strategy do you want to bust?  2:20
How did you guys get into working remotely? 3:15
How was the response and experience 10 Years ago when you started the remote culture in your office? 6:00
What process and key tools did you set up to stay successful in remote culture? 7:00
We would like to hear a little bit about the client engagement from a thought process standpoint. 17:40
What do you do to keep your employees inspired and motivated? 24:10
What does the future look like to your employees who are also part owners? 33:10
How does offshore integration process work for you? 41:00
What is the biggest mistake you made as an agency owner? 43:40
Tell us a little bit about you. How many marathons have you run? 47:50
What does the future look like to you and your agency? 49:50

Show Notes

Software developers prefer the flexibility, the autonomy, and really the level of focus that they get working remotely. 3:01
Remote work isn't 100% Great and 0%, like bad. There are trade offs, as with everything. But with us, we want people to work where they best operate, where they're most focused, most energized, et cetera. So we give them the choice of working wherever they like. 5:09
You have to build in the connectedness piece. Otherwise, I think it just tends to feel like a cooperative of independent consultants. 9:48
We've lost out on bigger opportunities that just didn't feel like they wanted a partner coming in, who would be remote. 10:45
In some sense, a lot of companies want you to be inside their office spaces, and then you go in there, and everyone has headphones on, no one's communicating via any other means than slack. And it feels just like, you know, working from home. 10:54
What we do is we do open ended contracts. So our clients, any one of our clients can fire us with a seven day notice, that keeps a healthy pressure on us to continue adding value. 14:08
I think what we've seen work is honestly trying to be respectful and operate in our clients best interests. So that includes the budget. So it's not that we want to ignore their budget, by any means. We want to understand what their budget is, we want to be good stewards of their funds. 15:13
We want to do some planning. We just don't want to be beholden to it when, you know, we're at the most uncertain point of a project. We want to iterate, get feedback and keep adjusting. So I think that that model works well for almost all software projects 16:18
We've partnered with some companies that are really, really good at UIUX. And as a set of specialists, we provide a pretty comprehensive, valuable solution there. 19:22
For software talent, we recognize that if we don't find projects that people want to work on, they're going to find them themselves, whether it's at Tesla or elsewhere. 23:18
We didn't become remote because we wanted to be remote. We were remote, because we wanted people to be autonomous. 25:40

Links:

Company LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/company/testdouble/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/testdouble
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/testdoubletodd/
Company website: https://testdouble.com/

 

Myth: You have to be in an office space to be productive in the software industry.