Hey, South African tech industry?  Meet me behind the rugby field at 15:00.  We need to talk.

I’ve been back in South Africa for 3 months now after 6 years working in Silicon Valley, and I think I finally figured out what’s been bothering me about the tech industry here ever since I got back.  The problem is that we have some serious Goldilocks issues going on right now.

This one is too cold

The first problem we have is a severe inferiority complex.

Remember: just because we’re not in Silicon Valley doesn’t mean we don’t know what we’re doing.  Like Morpheus says in The Matrix: “Some things are true whether you believe in them or not.”  We’re good at what we do.  We’re really good.  Why does it matter if anyone knows it at this point?  They will, soon enough.

I know that many of those dudes in San Francisco treat us like the little brothers of the world — adorable but not to be taken seriously.  But that doesn’t mean we have to grovel.  Who cares what they think?  Haven’t you heard?  Silicon Valley is dead.  You can be brilliant anywhere.  So we might as well be brilliant in the most beautiful place on earth.

This one is too hot

But we also have a second problem.  Some of us tend to overcompensate.  You see, since we have this inferiority complex, there is a danger in wanting to “show them a thing or two.”  So we livetweet from events that we’re not attending.  We write reviews of products we haven’t seen.  We fight about what the definition of a startup is, as if that matters.  We show up at conferences and give talks on who we are instead of what others can learn from our experience.

No, not cool.  There is no need to overcompensate.  We have some very unique skills, and we have the benefit of the element of surprise.  No one thinks the next Facebook is going to come from South Africa.  Let’s keep it that way — don’t let them know we’re here!

This one is just right

But there is an alternative.  We can make great products, build great companies, and take over the world without anyone even knowing where we’re from.  Does it matter where WooThemes are from?  It matters to us.  It doesn’t matter to anyone they sell their products to.

So, please.  Stop being apologetic about our skills.  Stop wishing we were Silicon Valley.  Stop pretending to be in Silicon Valley.

Instead, follow Seth’s advice.  And forgive me for quoting verbatim, but no one says this better than him:

Yes, I know you’re a master of the web, that you’ve visited every website written in English, that you’ve been going to SXSW for ten years, that you were one of the first bloggers, you used Foursquare before it was cool and you can code in HTML in your sleep. Yes, I know that you sit in the back of the room tweeting clever ripostes when speakers are up front failing on a panel and that you had a LOLcat published before they stopped being funny.

But what have you shipped?

What have you done with your connection skills that has been worthy of criticism, that moved the dial and that changed the world?

Go, do that.

Google Buzz is really messing with my brain.  All my other social media activities fit nicely along the private-public continuum we all have to juggle.  But Buzz feels like an invasion of my personal space.  By infiltrating the most private of online communications (email), it’s also daring me to move that privacy line a little bit, and let people in on conversations that they really have no business in being a part of.  One of the few positive reviews I’ve read about Buzz so far is this tweet by my friend G-J:

Good point, but Tweetie for the iPhone already threads Twitter conversations, and I use Twitter lists to keep up with people in my closer network.  So I’m just not sure what to do with it, and that makes my brain hurt.

Privacy and the public persona

This issue, as well as the widely reported privacy gaps in Google Buzz, are just the latest in a growing conversation about privacy on the web.  Facebook’s recent updated privacy settings created quite a stir, and out of all the gazillion blog posts discussing it, none was more insightful than the brilliant Danah Boyd’s article Facebook’s move ain’t about changes in privacy norms.  It is a must-read for anyone interested in this topic.  In the article she says the following (my emphasis added):

There isn’t some radical shift in norms taking place. What’s changing is the opportunity to be public and the potential gain from doing so. Reality TV anyone? People are willing to put themselves out there when they can gain from it. But this doesn’t mean that everyone suddenly wants to be always in public. And it doesn’t mean that folks who live their lives in public don’t value privacy. The best way to maintain privacy as a public figure is to give folks the impression that everything about you is in public.

That last sentence really stuck with me.  It is so true.  Just because people divulge intimate details of their lives online, doesn’t mean everything they do is public.  Joshua Porter recently tweeted the following:

Ain’t that the truth…

But what if I want to maintain my privacy in public?

Another interesting story in this same vein — and a great example of the uncharted waters of online privacy — is that of designer Dustin Curtis.  I’ve been following his blog every since he blogged about the fascinating chain of events following his redesign of the American Airlines website.  That made him a bit of a celebrity in the world of web design, but it turned out to be nothing compared to what happened next.  On the day of the Apple iPad launch, he posted some very real-looking (but very fake) photos of the iPad.  It quickly sent the Internet into a frenzy and got him coverage on Mashable, TechCrunch and The Washington Post, among other places.

The next day he tweeted, simply:

Dustin Curtis: 1, Internet: 0.

Well played, sir.  Well played.  What’s interesting is what happened next, though.  He got a lot of attention from this stunt, and his Twitter follower count exploded.  He created an air of mystery leading a lot of people to wonder who he is.  It even led to a question on Quora with some amusing Chuck Norris-type answers: “Who is Dustin Curtis?”  The post on Quora prompted this tweet from him:

The answer is, of course, pretty straight-forward.  If you create a public and controversial persona, and in doing so amass over 13,000 followers on Twitter, people are going to want to find out more about you.  And, as a recent Times article pointed out:

When you make your private life public, when you seek attention in that broad a manner, you’re inviting not just the cool and the loving, but the angry and aggrieved.

And that is where online privacy get tricky.  We already talked about how public people value there privacy very much.  But at some point, people are going to assume that because you live a lot of your life in public, you have no need to be private, and won’t mind people digging around in your personal life (since there is no personal life any more).  But that’s clearly not the case, as Dustin points out in his tweet.

Facebook as theater

In a similar vein, I have to say that I have become increasingly uncomfortable with public conversations on Facebook.  And by that I mean girls who write “I miss you” on their boyfriends’ walls, people making coffee arrangements on each other’s walls, etc.  Once conversations that should be private are undertaken in a public forum, they become theater — meant for the onlookers more than the participants.  And that’s troubling.

Yes, there are legitimate cases (mostly for the sake humor) to have public conversations on Facebook.  But if you decide to write on someone’s wall and not send an email or a text, you are doing it so that other people can see it.  And that hurts the authenticity of the interaction.

So it’s not just that the lines between what is public and what is private are getting blurred.  It’s also that what is acceptable in the public realm is changing, as proven by those “I have to go to the bathroom” status updates I’m sure we all see occasionally in our news feeds.

Where do we go from here?

There are no universally agreed upon guidelines for what should be public and what should remain private online.  I’m pretty sure there will never be.  But I do believe that where that line is drawn should be a conscious decision by every person who goes online.  You can’t share every detail of your life online and then expect people to leave you alone.  You can’t go on Facebook, not change your privacy settings, and then complain if some of your photos leak out.  On the flipside, you can’t build a blog audience by writing articles that don’t expose your opinions in some way.

But wherever that line is drawn, it is extremely important that there is a point where your life stops being public.  The article Danger online: Perils of revealing every intimate moment puts it this way:

Concerns, though, are growing about the decline of the private self. Many people are questioning the wisdom particularly of blogs in which ordinary people write regular updates about their children and spouses, and they are asking whether we are surrendering our privacy too easily.

Or to put it another way, from another great article on the topic, Party On, but No Tweets:

We are fighting against this whole idea that everything people do has to be constantly chronicled. People think that every thought they have, every experience ”” if it is not captured it is lost.

When you let go of the pressure to chronicle, you are free to enjoy the moment for what it is, without the pressure of getting that picture up on Twitpic.

Don’t get me wrong — I think it is possible to build fantastic communities online by living public lives — both for business and personal purposes.  And I am definitely not going to stop blogging or shut down my Twitter account.  However, more and more I am finding myself agreeing with another sentence buried in that last article: There is something magical about a life less posted.

I recently realized that you don’t hear the word “globalization” all that often any more.  And I think it’s because globalization has moved from being a buzz word to a reality that is just part of the way we do business now, making it unnecessary to give it a fancy name.  As we become more comfortable with managing companies and projects across multiple locations, it’s easy to assume that geography does not matter any more.  And certainly the technology is there to support the around-the-clock collaboration that is so valuable when you work across time zones.  With cloud computing now a reality, and plenty of collaboration applications to choose from, working together has never been more efficient.

But I believe geography does still matter, and can result in decreased efficiency if not managed correctly.  The difficulty with working across multiple locations is not technology limitations, it’s human nature.  We tend to not trust what we can’t see, and that’s a problem if developers, product managers, and marketing folks sit in different offices and different time zones.  Once different work philosophies come out and you’re not able to talk about it, things can escalate out of control and make for really bad relationships if conversations happen intra-office but not inter-office.

This is not an insurmountable problem though.  Here are some things I believe can help distributed teams run smoothly.  Please also add your tips and ideas in the comments section!

1. Meet in person. Now.

People get along so much better once they’ve shared a meal together.  This is just a fact of human nature — we thrive on in-person social interaction (yes, even us introverts).  If you have distributed teams, it is imperative that they meet each other in person as soon as they start working together.

If a trip can be planned during a major software release — even better.  Nothing binds people together like the stress and exhilaration of getting a new product out in the wild.  Work hard, but also make time to go have dinner together.  You’ll find that after the initial trip, you’re able to understand each other a lot better over IM/phone calls.  I do think it’s worth getting teams together at least once a year, but even if it’s just once at the beginning of the relationship, it will go a long way to improve working relationships.  So go ahead, spend the money on that trip.  It’s worth it.

2. Be respectful of time zones.

10am in San Francisco is 8pm in Cape Town.  Not a great time to have a meeting… Now, it won’t always be possible to line up time zones, but at the very least it’s important to trade off meeting times.  Don’t make the guy in the smaller office always dial in at 9pm.  Alternate between meeting times to give everyone a chance to have a life outside of work.  Try to have all night-time calls on one or two nights, not spread out across the week.  It’s the little things that count.

3. Use the right technology.

When it comes to collaboration across teams, there is no excuse for inefficiency.  We use the following applications, and I can highly recommend all of them:

• Google Docs and Dropbox for document collaboration
• Jira and Confluence (enterprise wiki) for bug tracking, product specs, and related discussions.
• Conceptshare for sharing and commenting on visual designs.
• Campfire for group chats during projects, and especially during product releases.  The Propane desktop app and the Ember iPhone app are great add-ons to Campfire.

4. Keep it human

One of the most important aspects of team dynamics — and especially distributed team dynamics — is not losing your sense of humor.  Even when things get really stressful, keeping funny alive is essential because it reminds you that there are real people on the other side of the phone line/email address.  And, of course, it relieves stress.

I’ll give an example from a project I recently worked on with a developer team in our Cape Town office.  They built an environment for us to test the new product flows, and the screens can live either in a website or a pop-up window.  The normal (boring) thing to do would be to put a link there that says “Open in pop-up” when you want to test the pop-up dialog version of the flow.  Instead, the developers called the link “Pop that collar,” and the following image appeared when you hovered over the link:

Now, I don’t know if they did this to amuse me or themselves, or a little but of both.  But for some reason the joke doesn’t get tired for me, and it made working on the project so much more enjoyable.  Always bring the funny on your projects.

5. Trust each other

A recent article called Forced compliance is an obstruction to discipline really got me thinking about trust within teams — especially distributed teams.  I agree with the author on how damaging it can be if team members don’t trust each other:

A forced compliance style of governance is a lot about trying to compensate for lack of trust and admitting that we are more likely to fail than succeed. On the other hand, discipline is not pain, suffering and anguish. It’s only sadistic if you implement discipline for nothing.

We need to trust our team members — they are (usually) smart people who do the things they do for a reason.  It doesn’t mean you don’t have tough conversations when someone makes a mistake.  But making a mistake doesn’t make you untrustworthy — who among us would be able to meet that bar of excellence anyway?  Ask questions before you judge…

6. Don’t stop talking, especially when you disagree

The book Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High is a must-read book about having those tough conversations when things do go wrong, or when disagreements arise.  At the heart of the book are tools to ensure that everyone on the team gets listened to, and that no discussions happen behind peoples’ backs.  I much rather prefer an open dialogue about a product disagreement, than having to find out 3 months after launch that someone on the team didn’t like the way we did things.  As Product Managers, our role is to gather information from a variety of sources and channel that into the best possible ideas and products.  How can we do that if we don’t listen to everyone?

I often remind myself that as Product Managers, we are not judged by the number of times we ask for input, or how often we change direction based on new and relevant information.  We are judged by the success of the live Product.  So why would we not want to hear everyone’s ideas upfront so that we can launch the best possible experience?

So these are a few principles I try my best to apply when working with teams on different continents.  But I have hardly figured it out, and we’re basically making this up as we go along.  I’d love to know your thoughts and ideas: how can distributed teams work better together?