Our Culture Club: Bridging The Gaps

With offices in both Eindhoven and Kathmandu, Proshore is a company born out of international entrepreneurship. And while we’re helping software companies to sustainably scale using our unique ‘development teams as a service’ model, with over 70 employees and counting, we’re also growing ourselves. 

One thing we often get asked is how we manage to bridge the gap between the Netherlands and Nepal. New customers are also curious to know how our ‘teams as a service’ works in practice. So let’s take a closer look at how we operate and the processes we use to help our customers sustainably grow their software solutions. 

Communication And Culture

There are two important elements to the continued success of Proshore as a company: communication and culture. These two things may be intangible and difficult to measure, but they’re also an important part of our sustainable growth and long-term development as an organization. 

“From the start, it’s been important for us to meet regularly to align our goals and ambitions. I think that’s the key thing” – Haico Duisters, Proshore, Co-Founder 

More Than Just A Resource

But what sets Proshore apart from other software development companies is that we’re not just delivering a resource. A resource can be found anywhere and everywhere. When companies choose to partner with us, they’re not just getting an add-on to their existing teams.  

Instead, we go above and beyond by providing carefully-managed, integrated teams as a service. The beauty of this system is that it can be scaled to fit our customer’s needs. So a partnership might begin with two developers, but it has the potential to grow to include other roles, such as quality analysts. 

Before we begin working with a new customer, we assess their needs through a technical assessment from our CTO. We also evaluate what they’ll need to achieve their goals, so we can provide a team to deliver what’s actually required. 

Once this has been agreed, we deploy a scrum master to set up the process and steer meetings with the product owner on the customer’s side. This helps to ensure our expectations are aligned with a common understanding of how the two teams can integrate by effectively merging into one. 

We’ve found that regular and effective communication between the scrum master and the customer can help to address and alleviate potential areas of conflict. The scrum master also ensures that we maintain an iterative approach to development.  

“You want to have an integrated approach to resolving the customer challenges around the software development.” – Haico Duisters, Proshore, Co-Founder 

Connected And Onboarded

With partnerships predominantly located in Europe, Haico and Jeroen are able to maintain an effective relationship at customer-level, ensuring a smooth integration that’s aligned with both our customer’s expectations and our own quality standards. 

The customer-facing team in Eindhoven and the operations team in Kathmandu are connected by the scrum master based in Nepal. Onboarding also has a significant part to play in keeping up an effective communication between the teams. And for co-founder Roshan, it all comes down to the process:

“I think it’s all about the scrum because in the scrum, you clearly set the expectations and the goal of the sprint. Then you communicate that to the client, so there’s no surprise. It’s expectation mapping. And I think that’s what’s working.”

– Roshan, Proshore, Co-founder

Staying connected is an important part of the Proshore mindset. Unlike traditional models of outsourcing, where a few developers are distributed to meet customer needs, Proshore offers a team solution and a team experience. We feel it’s important to really understand customer needs, their motivations, and their capabilities. And then we try to elevate those things in line with their ambitions. 

Teamwork enables us to be more effective than say a single developer brought in to add a capacity. It also provides our customers with complete transparency. Our Agile approach enables us to develop software iteratively – fast feedback, fast failings, and a constant feedback loop.

Everyone in the team has access to what’s working and what isn’t working,  what the expectations are, and what needs to be done. This level of transparency facilitates constant communication.

Being Part Of The Conversation

Everyone on our development team is encouraged to have a voice, and take a lead in our refinement sessions. We really like everyone on the team to have the chance to speak up and be part of the conversation about the work that we’re doing. And the same goes for our customers. We like to foster a communicative culture where there’s an open and positive dialogue that helps to drive our development forward. 

And the great thing about Proshore is that those conversations happen across continents, between Europe and Asia. It’s really important to us that we create high-tech, high-paying jobs in Nepal, so that we can give back to the country and encourage highly-skilled individuals, to stay in the country rather than move abroad. 

Many global software companies are now coming around to the idea that working across continents can work, with the right people in place. Interested in scaling your software development with the help of Proshore? Book a call with us to find out more.