252: The New World of Managing Global Hybrid Teams - with Projjal Ghatak

People want to feel seen, and managers need to see work getting done. And I think overall, people are just less seen and that often makes people feel less successful. And we've we've seen this burnout epidemic that's that's happened as a result of the pandemic and and Saudis. Yes, people are working harder. They don't have a bit of a line between work and play. But I actually think a lot of this because people need to feel successful to not burn out.

Welcome to Scale Your SaaS, the podcast that gives you proven techniques and formulas for boosting your revenue and achieving your dream exit brought to you by a guy who's done just that multiple times. Here's your host, Matt Wolach.

Hello, welcome to the show. Super excited to have you here. Thank you very much for coming. My name is Matt Wolach. And our goal here is to help you Scale Your SaaS so you can achieve the dream exit that you're looking for. And I'm elated to be talking to Projjal Ghatak, Projjal, how you doing?

Good. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. I'm

super excited for you to be here. Let me tell everybody who you are project. So personal is the CEO and founder at OnLoop. He founded on loop in 2020, to create a category called collaborative team development to fundamentally reinvent how hybrid teams are assessed and developed on loop helps teams drive an impactful loop of regular reflection, feedback and learning that manages that managers and their teams co create to provide powerful insights into individual and team development. They're doing some really, really cool stuff. And I can't wait to dive in. So once again, puzzle, thanks for coming on the show, though. Thank you, have you been a bit good been super busy? How about you? Same.

So it's, it's 10pm in Singapore. So you know, I try and operate a global business out of Asia. So that means you do a day shift, and then you do a midnight shift after so so this is smack in the middle of the night shift.

I love it. Well, I run a business with people in many different countries about three different countries right now is where our team is, yeah, we service people in about 30 plus different countries. So I understand having different hours. In fact, for you, it's 10pm. For me at 7am here in Arizona, that's kind of the way it is today, a global world, isn't it?

I know and you know, this, this global hybrid future is is very exciting. And the pandemic sort of accelerated. And that will mean that we'll have to reinvent a bunch of stuff to do make it work. But it levels the playing field in terms of talent around the world and opportunities to have, we were just chatting about books in the Philippines and just how amazing talent is. And, you know, I had the privilege of working there for a while and my wife grew up there. And so so we, we try to hire folks from there as much as we can. And it's amazing to see people who just have so much potential, now find opportunity and not having to sort of travel around the world and relocate to find the best jobs, they can just find that where they are. And we we have COVID-19 to tang to accelerate that in many ways. And that's the while the permanent Silver Linings coming out of this pandemic.

Yeah, it's kind of funny how something really, really bad can create some some good things. And I agree there's a lot of stuff that has come out of that. That's been good. And that's one of it. And I can tell you, my team, they're all over the world, like I mentioned, and yeah, they are awesome. They are they're like family to me. And we're very close. And I felt like they do some amazing stuff. It's it's pretty cool. What can happen.

Now for sure. And, you know, we started in April 2020 When the walls shut down. So so we've been we've been global and distributed. Right from Day Zero. I don't I don't think a lot of actually VC back tech companies that that have been that way right from infancy. And so at some point someone might want to study that and, and understand good, bad and ugly of teams starting out that way. But we had a very different experience of never having been a pre pandemic company. And so we we only know, remote and hybrid as

well the same. So my coaching company started in March of 2020. So write that as well. So it's been no different. So it's kind of fun how it happens. But I want to hear what gave you this idea to start on loop. How'd that come about? Yeah, no

loop was born from personal pain, to be honest. And right before starting the company. I spent three and a half years at Uber in a variety of roles prior to that in finance and management consulting and, and throughout my career, the importance of managing teams teams was just front and center all the time. And, and people development is such a huge piece of what we do as leaders. But I was very, very underwhelmed by the quality of tooling by the quality of processes that me and my team were subjected to, both from a recruiting perspective, from a learning perspective from a performance management perspective. And frankly, I just had a lot of anger and disdain for how things are run. And and I didn't necessarily know, when you started out what the answer would look like. But the problems were very clear. And the first problem we decided to tackle was the performance review and performance management process that that I was subjected to, for many years. As a leader, we just, we just felt like a backwards process that took a ton of time and yielded minimal to no benefit. The people going through it. And, and when a billion knowledge workers go through something day in day out and hate it, there's an opportunity there to go to go build something that's fundamentally better. And so, yeah, that's, that's, that's really how we started. And it's been, it's been an amazing journey since.

Yeah, it's so true. I want to talk about that. It's this shift that has happened, we talked about it earlier. What does that meant? Like? What how has that changed business? How's that changed work and work habits? What have you seen from your perspective?

Yeah, I mean, you know, I think there's a lot there right to do to uncover, but one of the things that we end up talking a lot about, and, and see a lot with our customers, is just this visibility and clarity gap that's got created because people have gone hybrid. And so, you know, we had built an entire tech stack to largely enable and support in person work. And when we build products, so we build products for people to communicate and collaborate remotely, we built products to project manage at a task level, like notion or Asana. But managers kind of kept tabs on hay with teams on track on an everyday basis, kind of by physical osmosis. And so you could get by, with point in time updates on what was going on. And feedback people got from a tooling perspective, because a lot of that happened informally did that that loop has completely gone away. And and as a result, there is a massive anxiety both on the leader side as well as the employee side. And you obviously have seen as we've gone into more recessionary environment where leaders have been asking people to come back to the office. And a lot of that is driven by just paranoia and anxiety about productivity. And actually Microsoft ran this study, but a couple of months ago, and they call it the productivity paranoia, which is a great phrase where 87% of employees think they're being productive. But 12% of leaders think that teams are productive. And there's a massive gap there and and the way leaders are trying to fill that gap is by saying, come back to the office. And I don't think that solves the problem. I think it's it's a temporary bandage is not as good for the world and which is why we need to build technology that that sort of provides that that clarity and and I don't think we're ever going back to a five day in person workweek, I'll be very, very surprised if that becomes the outcome. But people want to feel seen, and managers need to see work getting done. And I think overall, people are just less seen. And that often makes people feel less successful. And we've we've seen this burnout epidemic, that's that's happened as a result of the pandemic. And sound is yes, people are working harder. They don't have, they don't have a line between work and play. But I actually think a lot of this because people need to feel successful to not burn out. And there are times when I've worked 16 hours a day, but I felt successful. I haven't burned out and the times where I work lesser and I made it seem that I did it on my burnout. So I think the diagnosis needs to be very clear around these things to treat them right.

Yeah, I completely agree. Well, sad. So what's the fix? How should businesses approach team development and managing their teams so that they can create excellence?

It's really about building high fidelity feedback loops. And at a basal level, it's understanding how people are feeling. At a secondary level, it's, it's knowing that people have clarity on what they're working towards. So so you know what the goals are, at a tertiary level, receiving enough feedback to have a very clear sense of, of where your superpowers are or where your blind spots are, so that you can, you can hone one and mitigate to the other, and finally take action to get better. And that can be through coaching that can be through consuming content. And, and really all the things that a great manager does in on a consistent basis. And, you know, in our case, we try and sort of augment teams with a platform that allows that to happen on a much more consistent basis. So that managers have a good sense of where to intervene. And people are very quick to blame one side versus the other Oh, employees are lazy or, or managers don't care, or leaders are terrible people. Like I don't think any of them is true, right? Like I think, I think everybody, everybody's fundamentally operating from what they know and what they feel better off. And if we increase the amount of information that flows through them, without adding a ton of burden, we're going to build more line organizations and organizations just calmer and can and can deal with sort of varying work styles and wearing work arrangements.

I think that's well, Sadie. And you mentioned earlier, annual reviews, should annual reviews. I mean, it feels like we're always taught growing up as leaders like as we're coming up the chain, make sure you do an annual reviews with your team interview. Is that should that still be a thing? Or should we ditch it and do feedback other way? What what should happen? Before I

answer that? Have you spend much time with Chad GPT?

Not yet. I've seen all that. I'm on Twitter, it's so everybody's tweeting about it this and that I haven't popped into it myself yet.

Yeah, so we actually partnered with open AI in 2021, and incorporated, sort of GPD three into our product. And what our product helps do is it takes sort of the frequent captures that people make over the course of time, and then convert that into a cohesive narrative, using opening eyes technology. And so if you think about an annual review, right, and if you think about where the time goes into it, the bulk of the time goes into writing these reviews from scratch. So it tries to convert everyone in organization into a storyteller. And, and often who gets promoted, or who looks better is based on someone's storytelling capability. And what I what I call eloquence bias, be it in writing or in verbal, versus the actual work that. And so yes, I think, you know, companies need annual reports, they need quarterly reports, they need some Yeah, so there are points in time that you should always check in and reflect back on, on what happened. But the data points that support that conversation or support, that discussion, should be very much accrued over time. And so and so what we try and do with our approach, and we, and we call it collaborative team development, as you mentioned, is to be much more forward looking whereby we try and give teams a product that can help them collect snapshots of how things are going on a much more regular basis, and then use AI to help summarize them. And, and that's summarization should be a byproduct. And not the main product of how teams have left versus today, that reviews sort of becomes the forcing function. And as a result, people hate feedback, they hate goals, they hate all these things that should actually be good for you. But the way they've been implemented, has made run away from it. And, and, and that's terrible, right. And in the same way that fitness tech made, losing weight cool, like new made, working out and losing weight, cool. And that's good for the world. And we're trying to sort of make goals and feedback and development and well being cool so that people don't hate it. Like they've hated it for the last 40 years because they were given performance management tools to spend time in.

So is that a big undertaking? I mean, I agree with what you're saying. But from your perspective, you kind of need to re educate the market and the world about the right way to do things instead of what has just been drilled into us over the years. Yeah.

And you know, I'm an old school founder and old school entrepreneur and believe that something being solved and why solve it. And so I don't want to be the 10th person that builds another binary, an inner product or a your product sell to the world, if you're not actually driving meaningful change, then why do you not occur? And so I absolutely believe it's a huge undertaking. But it's also one that's, that's meaningful. And that makes the long nights we're doing right. So I agree, and which is why, you know, for us, it's very much about encasing all of the chains, we're driving into a cohesive framework. And that's why we talk about CTD, or, or collaborative development in the same way, people have talked about OKRs, or they've talked about ELS, which is entrepreneur operating system, because you want to drive change, you need to make sure people understand it and package it. And we spend time thinking about how we sort of drive a methodology. That just makes sense. And people do it like people, people move to channel based messaging with Slack, right? And, and learn how to speak in channels, which must have felt weird at the beginning, or people picked up notion and although that product seems foreign for people for a while, but having a air table or notion that has a database built into a spreadsheet, just makes sense for a while. And so, you know, we're applying a lot of what people have done for other use cases, and applying it to making teams fundamentally better.

A lot of it. And speaking of your own company, you've been able to start on loop, like you mentioned, at the beginning of pandemic, you've earned some success you've been able to grow, what were some of the best moves you guys made along the way that helped you get where you are now?

Great question. I think I think one of the things that I decided pretty early on was that I wasn't trying to bootstrap the company, or, or sort of do it on my own. And the biggest reason for that is, when you build software early on, you can often make more money by providing services. And it's almost easier to sell services in the early start early stages of building a software company. And if you're bootstrapping revenue matters a lot, right from day zero. And so you can, you can sort of get distracted and move away towards services. And so ensuring that your product focused right from the get go, and that we did raise capital quite early on. I think that was a that was a fairly important design choice. I think the second was when it comes to fundraising. And then obviously, people have horror stories about fundraising. And, you know, I will have to probably fundraise again for this company and won't be intimate when it right when he wants. So we'll see. We'll see how that goes. And, and people claim to easiest years to fundraise. And there's only two years I fundraise ever, so so maybe getting back in a couple of years and see if I were fundraising. But one of the things that we did was, was be quite public on LinkedIn on on what we were building and why. And that just meant that we got a lot of interest from from investors, right from the get go. And that changes the conversational dynamic. In fact, the same thing happened with customers, a lot of our early customers came through inbound. And attracting inbound is so much more powerful than then sort of driving outbound. And it just changes the dynamic of conversation. So I tell her about nurse to think about sort of, you know, talking about yourself enough that, that people are intrigued, and they come to you versus you having to go to people because it changes the dynamic of the conversation. And then the third was, you know, we took this better on on GPT three and angina AI to write performance reviews quite early versus other use cases. And and we were sort of a bit of a rush to announce to the world and might be the first one answered. And so I think that really paid off. And we're now in a place where everyone's talking about general AI, we, we sort of successfully survived the boom and bust of all things having to be crypto and NFT. To be to be valuable. And I'm glad we didn't get sucked into that sort of wave. And sort of staying focused on solving a problem and and sort of pick your first principles on how can we use the very best of technology we have to solve the problem at hand, I think has led us to a place where we feel well positioned to capture the opportunity. So those are the few things that come to mind.

I love it. That's great stuff. And I hope people can emulate that for their own companies. What about the other way? What were some of the things that didn't go well that you thought oh, this is gonna be great then it didn't work so well. What were some of those mistakes? Yeah,

I think I think building good product is incredibly hard. And I think a lot of for founders underestimate that, and specifically, building amazing UX is incredibly hard. And there's a huge difference between UX design and UI design. And, and typically, if you're a founder, elite UI designer, any focus on how good things look and sort of, you know, do they make you feel a reparable way but, but like the intricacies of flows and how they drive habit is, is huge. And you know, because we got funded quite early, we just kept building the product, without thinking a whole lot on it was literally UX was was was perfect or did the right things. And so if I would all over again, I'd be a lot more focused on on UX from the get go. And the second thing is, you know, how you build systems and actually building building a prototype for something is actually really easy in the world you live in today. But if you build a prototype that works, keeping on adding additional features to it, if you haven't architected right, actually makes it a wall off for a while. And technical debt gets nasty. And so you the hardest thing with early stage companies is that you've got to straddle the short, medium long term game, because at some level, you don't even know the long term game exists. So So you, you can't, you can't make artists need to slow you down too much. But at the same time, you can't be super short term focus, too. And I feel like at times, we've been more short term focused than we should have been, in terms of sort of tech decisions. We've we've made. But I think, you know, I didn't build a product company before this. And, and, you know, Uber was, in many ways, quite operational, and I was more on the app side of things. And so I've just gave her appreciation of what building product looks like and, and how much complexity you need to sort of hide away to build an experience that is truly magical, and delightful. And so I feel like I'm still learning how to build a lifelong product. And it's, it's been fascinating to be down that journey. And I'm lucky to have the opportunity to make mistakes and still learn and keep moving.

I love that project. I love your passion, I can see you care so much about this and you care about helping people and growing the product super awesome to see that I did. That's one of the things I just love about talking with great entrepreneurs is just seeing that that vision and the passion come together. It's really fun. I really appreciate you doing this. What I want to ask lastly is what advice would you have for other early stage software founders who are getting going and looking?

Yeah, you know, one of the things that I talk quite a bit about is mental agility, and sort of conviction and confidence and mental fortitude. I had to definitely take that quite seriously even on this journey and make sure that when times were harder, it wasn't messing with with my conviction or my confidence. And in any startup journey, there's a great book called The founders, which talks about the PayPal Mafia and it's an it's an amazing read for for every entrepreneur because it just talks about how you an Elon Musk has been fired twice from his companies. And so no matter how successful it is, it's not it's never a straight line. And it's, it's never going to be one but what really gets you going is is that belief and that faith. And, and so continuing to work on physical and mental health and just psychological well being, I think is what carries entrepreneurs through. And it's something that a lot of people neglect, or get caught up into hustle culture. And that's begun I think the second is just really understanding your support systems and your risk appetite and knowing what your character do. I have to wait till 33 or 34 to start a company because before that in my life, I couldn't afford to not make a paycheck every month. And and and that was my reality. And I'm extremely privileged to have a wife who works at a big tech company and has amazing benefits for our family that allows me to take risk and you know, you know people talk about go find your passion and that's all that matters. But I think that's that's a place of privilege and we should all sort of factor in what risks we can take and and if you can take it then then do it. And this irrespective how it goes there is very few things in life that are that are more meaningful. I

think that's extremely well said well, pros all this has been great. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Where can people learn more about

we we have outlook.com So that's the easiest place to find to find on loop. There should be only one project hardtack on LinkedIn but and mg fragile on on Twitter. So Oh, you know, please, please reach out and, and sort of share feedback or any thoughts.

Okay, perfect. We'll make sure we put that in the show notes as well. Pros. Well, thank you so much for coming.

It's been great love being here.

Absolutely likewise and everybody else out there. Thank you for being here. Make sure you're subscribed to the show. You don't want to miss out on any other amazing discussions with leaders sharing about their passion, their vision like protocol just did. So hit that subscribe button, and then we will see you next week. Take care.

Thanks for listening to Scale Your SaaS. For more help on finding great leads and closing more deals. Go to Mattwolach.com