Building Better Developers - Interviews 2.0 - Sebastian Schicke

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer Nord podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season, which is interviews again, calling this Interviews 2.0, where each episode is usually one of a three or four parts, at least series of or pieces of interviews with various people. We're starting a new one this time. We're going to talk with Sebastian Schicke, and he will say his name better than I do because I just don't do that German accent very well, but he does. And he will talk to us about a lot of interesting things, mostly dealing in the realm of remote teams and making them into teams, not just remote workers and remote resources, but actually having a team that is built out of remote people, out of people that are not just all in a different office or somewhere else, but they are individually in different places, which is very key to the way a lot of teams work these days. You have people that are working sometimes around, you know, from sunrise to sunset all the way around the world. And there are, there's cultures, there's languages, there's all kinds of different things that can make it challenging to put together a team and really make it effective. But one of the things Sebastian has done and one of his focuses is on doing that, on building those teams, on making it better, on making it something that people want to stick around and be a part of. And that being said, I think it's time to actually start our conversation with him and get it straight from the horse's mouth. Here we are starting off part one, our interview with Sebastian Schicke. Well welcome back. Today we're going to talk with Sebastian Schicke, and he will pronounce his name properly for me shortly here. He is an entrepreneur. The main reason we're going to talk about him, because he's done a lot, as he will probably share with us, but it's about dealing with remote teams and assessing them and how to help them work better. Teams in general, but particularly because remote teams are such a challenge, we're going to talk with him and see where they have found some ways to really take what you may have normally gotten in a in-person team and realize how you can do some of those same things in a remote team. And so I guess to start us off, I'm going to allow you to give us a little bit of your background and how you got here and just sort of introduce yourself a little bit here. Yeah, thanks Rob for having me on the show. My name is Sebastian Schicke and it's a German name and we pronounce the I like an E and it's often passively English speaking people. I've never been in London many years ago and they say Mr. Schicke, you know, is it now Schicke is I don't want to say what it means in German, but it's not really my name. So it's a Schicke. Yes. And yeah, I'm an entrepreneur for over 25 years now. I actually have never been employed. I never had a full time employment. I started off, I was financing my studies. I studied electro engineering actually. I was financing my studying with some IT jobs. I was, I mean, it was, I had a, I also, I'm an also podcast host and I had a conversation with a guy the other day and he also started in the before the Y2K changed. And this was a time, it was a crazy time. Anyone who could spell IT could get a job, you know, so there was so much work around. It was crazy. And yeah, so I started off as an IT freelancer working for various banks and corporates here in the German market while I was still a student. So I remember I was, yeah, I had to wear suits by then and I was probably the best dressed student in the subway once, you know, because I was standing there with my suit and was going to my project. And it was a really nice time. I learned a lot. And I think about 2000 I founded my first company, first in the area of IT. And I also wanted to staff IT projects. But I realized quite soon that this is not my topic, you know, just shuffling CVs back and forth. So I by accident, as it often happened, I got into a niche market where, I mean, nowadays they would probably call it FinTech. Back then I was implementing treasury management systems for corporates and banks and we developed lots of interfaces and add-ons for this product. And this was a very successful business. I run it now 22 years. Sort of retired from this business this year and it was a great story and a good niche market. And yeah, back then I primarily had my local team here. So it was, I always say, before 2019. So I had my local team here in the office and client sides and run the business as everyone did by then, yeah, with local attendees. Yeah, what I also built up in parallel was my sort of career as a business angel. So I started investing in startups. I started supporting startups primarily in the software as a service space. And there I sort of felt that, hey, there's this shortage on experts, on developers, on really good people. So we started looking for solutions and then everything happened at the same time. You know, you had the pandemic, you had people in the home office and everyone sort of learned that, hey, home office is actually working, you know. So you can work with someone who's not sitting next to you. You can work with someone who's sitting at home. But what it also means is that it doesn't matter if this person is in the same city or in a different country, maybe. As long as you're connected over the Internet, it's fantastic. So companies started to realize that, at least here in Germany and also in our startup scene, that, hey, you can actually utilize this huge resource pool which is available and these amazing experts which are sitting anywhere in the world. You can work with them, you know. And this was a big game changer. I mean, I was working with freelancers over platforms like Upwork and so forth over a decade now. I remember exactly when I started, it was, I don't know, 2011. I read an article in The Economist about ODesk, how it was called back then. And I said, hey, you know, I was in a situation where I was looking for a SharePoint expert to help me setting something up for my company. And I couldn't find anyone here in Germany. They're all busy or really expensive. So I said, hey, let's give this a try. So I put my first job on this ODesk platform, which is now Upwork. And there I found my first expert. He was from India, helped me setting up this environment. And he even flew into Frankfurt and we rolled it out together. It was a success story. So this is how I started working with people from all over the world. But with the startup, we saw that this is a big opportunity. So we started finding people in Argentina and the Philippines. I also have a team in the Philippines helping me with my mentoring business. So I'm now actually 100% virtual here and some of my startups as well. And it's going amazingly well. I mean, I don't want to miss this. As bad as the pandemic was for many people, it opened up the store and it changed the perspective in many people that remote work is actually something which works very well. So with that, did you sort of early on then change that focus a little bit to say, hey, we want to be a, I guess you sort of think it was sort of like an outsource first kind of a business where you just go find that it's almost like a best of breed, like you would do maybe people would traditionally talk about in software, you go find the best person in this case to do each of the tasks that you need for your business, as opposed to trying to get some, you know, create like a holistic team of people that you hire, they live, you know, all live in the same place, work in the same place, and then sort of, you know, deal with it that way. We've got a more of, I guess, a longer term kind of team that you're building up. And you say, well, they may not be 100% in each of these areas that we need, but we're going to, we'll train them up versus, you know, maybe that shift is saying, hey, we can go get somebody now, we can, you know, either bring them in, or we can just work with them, you know, for that short project, so they can get what we can get out of them, their specialty, they get to utilize their specialty, and then we get to get the best of sort of the best of both worlds. Yeah. I mean, good question. I think, for me, and also for my startups, the, the situation where we've been in, basically pushed us into this direction to utilize people from, from all over the world, because the startup couldn't find experts in the local town. Just, there was no one available. And so we had to make a decision, okay, either we, we slow down our growth and not do what we could do, or we look for alternatives. And then you, you realize how well it's actually working. And then you, when you make a decision, okay, I go now virtual, and it's either, I mean, you cannot do it halfway, you know, you can either say, okay, we do it 100%, we are all in, or we are not. Or even with, with some, some local employees, you, you cannot treat them in a different way than you treat your, your remote workers, because then your remote workers are not happy, and rightly so. So you have to run your organization as a remote organization. And I don't, I wouldn't say it was a decision right from the beginning, okay, we want to go that way. It just developed out of need. And then, I mean, I, for example, realized, hey, for me, that's working fantastically. I have an amazing team in the Philippines, they're with us for over a year. So they're not, I mean, they, they're really part of, of, of, of us and, and we are very successful. And it's, it's working amazingly well. Of course, there are different ways you have to be in mind how to manage and lead a team. But I mean, this is what I'm also teaching. I'm also working as a mentor and, and, and mentor and coach for tech companies, for CEOs of tech companies. And we help them build high performance teams. Because, I mean, high performance is not only that they deliver a lot, you know, no high performance is also an environment where people thrive, where they enjoy working, because it's just, it's just fun being there and they grow. We have an environment where people really develop and, and, and enjoy that time. And this is, this is important. I agree. I don't want to skip out on the idea of the, you know, just sort of gloss over, because I think it's very important that, and a lot of people, I think, sort of miss this when you have a remote team at all, is treating the entire team as a single team, as opposed to having sort of, you know, first in class citizens of, you know, oh, these people in the office, so we treat them one way. These people are somewhere else. So we treat them differently, which gets really dicey when you have, well, somebody lives in the same town, but they'd actually don't come into the office, which you see now, you know, last few years, that's become almost the norm in a lot of places where you have people that may live right down the street, but they still might as well live across the world because they are, you know, it's all through zoom and email and electronic communication and building a team in that kind of diverse environment can be very difficult to deal with if you're not treating everybody, because people, you know, sense that. And that's what leads into a question for you is when you're building a team like this, how do you essentially ensure that you still have some continuity in your team? Because you can have people, and maybe you've got, you don't look at it this way, but I think some people look at remote work as somebody, somebody can come in, they're a little more transient, they can come in, they'll work for a few months or maybe a year, and they'll move on, and they're not as likely to work for you for multiple years. And so how do you, and especially to talk with CEOs and people where you're presenting that approach, how do you sort of allay those fears or help them address those situations? And that will be a nice little cliffhanger to come back for part two. We're right away, we're going to get right back into Sebastian answering that question, talking about how do you actually make a team feel like a team even when they are geographically and sometimes even temporally, you know, time displacement displaced? You may have some team that, you know, part of them that work the night shift effectively, even though it's day where they're at and then another team is working during the day, but it's night where the other part of the team is at, you know how it goes. And these are some of the things that are going to get us into the meat of what he and his company do, how they find ways to build a team, to assess them, and give them sort of a reason to come to work, give them something that they want so that they are, you know, happy to come to work, that they feel like they are contributing and also to help them grow. So some very important things and that will be covered in the next episode and beyond, but I thought that was a good time for us to hold off and pause. So as always go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Nor podcast. 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