GROWING OUR PRODUCT CAPABILITIES — HELLO POLAND 🇵🇱
We started Legion with a thesis and a playbook. We believed and continue to believe that there is a better way to build and buy small software ventures and then scale them using a combination of sales and marketing and great product development. Part of our playbook is to innovate the product within each of our software products but do that in a cost effective manner. Given our experience and the fact that we have been cautious about how much money we have raised, we aren’t looking to scale up our development teams in Silicon Valley but rather look to other areas of the U.S. and the world to grow our teams.
Many years ago, I learned a simple equation. I actually learned this the hard way, like so many companies and business executives. I was helping to run an agency and we couldn’t afford to hire a developer in San Diego, San Francisco or New York. So, we went on Upwork and we hired a very low price developer. He had five stars on tons of projects. It looked like he had great experience for the work we wanted him to do. And, he was nice in the initial interview. Within 6 months, not only had he not contributed to the software we were building but he actually had done poorly enough to slow down the development for others on the team. Slowly, I started to get better at hiring and slowly I started to learn that, even when you are looking to save some money, this can’t be where you start. You have to work really hard to find the best talent that also happens to be affordable. This led me to a simple equation that is true in software development as well as in so many other things in life:
VALUE = BENEFIT / COST
Let’s break that down a little for what it means for software development. In software development, what we are looking to do is build the most easy to use software that our customers can use to solve a problem. This means the tech has to be: 1) Easy to use; 2) Effective; 3) Scalable so that many people can use it without it crashing. Seems simple, right? Well, unfortunately it’s very hard.
Easy to use: To make it easy to use, you have to have software development teams and product people that know how to design intuitive and beautiful products that people want to use and they can learn quickly. This is hard and it takes product understanding beyond just being good engineers or designers.
Effective: To make it effective, you have to be excellent at using code and libraries that exist while also developing your own code and libraries to make your software solve a problem. And, it has to solve that problem in a simple way that makes it effective (so many software products are products looking for solutions rather than products built as a solution).
Scalable: To make a business out of an effective and easy to use product, the software has to be scaleable so a lot of people can use it. This takes an understanding of development operations — where to store data, how to call that data efficiently, etc…
Again, value = benefit / cost. Therefore, for us to get the best value as we build our development teams for our software products, we must have teams that do all three of the above things well AND at a reasonable cost.
For us, as a team, we have experience in growing development teams with this equation in mind. And, one way we have been able to be successful against this equation is to build up teams in Poland. Why?
Effective: Poland has some of the most educated and experienced software developers in the world. The country is very committed to STEM throughout its educational system and its universities are some of the best tech universities in the world. Companies like Google and Uber have learned this and have opened offices in the country to tap into such great talent.
Easy To Use: While there are a lot of countries that have a large amount of strong software developers, very few of those countries have shown that they can build beautiful and easy to use software products. Making intuitive products is really hard and requires strong product understanding and great design thinking. We have found that Polish software developers, designers and product teams understand how to make intuitive products as well as any that we have worked with in the U.S. or other parts of the world.
Scaleable: Making products so they can scale to lots of customers isn’t easy. It requires a deep understanding of infrastructure and architecture. Again, Polish development teams have proven to be very good at DevOps.
So, first and foremost, Poland is a place we love because we are able to work with product teams that build effective products that are easy to use and scale so we can get lots of customers on those products. But, Poland is also great because:
English is widely spoken: English is taught in the schools at a very young age in Poland so most people we talk to in the Poland tech sector speak english very well. This makes it easy to communicate with our Polish team members.
Relatively easy to get to: It’s relatively easy to get to from where we live as Legion team members. There are lots of flights to Europe with easy layovers and there are even direct flights to Poland from many parts of the U.S. where we live.
Affordable: It’s affordable to hire in Poland and it’s also affordable to travel there for work so we can be close to our team/s there when needed.
So, there you have it…We ❤️ Poland. Oh, and did we mention the Pierogi:)
