50 Coffees: Bryce Maddock And Jaspar Weir of Taskus

Taskus.com co-founders Bryce Maddock and Jaspar Weir dropped into San Francisco from their hometown of Los Angeles to meet some of their outsourcing clients here, and as part of that trip, they popped by to visit with us.  Taskus.com is a competitor of our other company, OutsourcingThingsDone.com, but is also one of the first alpha clients of PayrollHero.com.  They use PayrollHero to manage their over 225 employees in Manila, PH.

Jaspar and Bryce stopped by the PayrollHero house and then we went out to dinner to catch up.  It was great to chat and learn about their growing business as well as their first hand experiences with PayrollHero.

(L – R) Stephen Jagger, Bryce Maddock, Jaspar Weir and Michael Stephenson

(50 Coffees)

How Do We Manage Working In 2 Cities?

PayrollHero has 1 team in 2 locations.  Four of us are currently in San Francisco USA, the rest of the team is in Manila PH.  How do we deal with the team across different time zones, in different offices, within different countries? (Tip: A Window)

We use a few different tools to keep the team “close”. Some of those tools include; Yammer.com which is a fantastic tool for online chat within the team.  It allows team members to have group chats about tickets they are working on, bugs, new features, etc.  It is a great way to communicate, while not disturbing team members when they are focusing on something else.  Google Chat works well for one on one conversations and Google Video if you need to see and speak with a specific person.

For our standup morning meetings, the development team has 2 flat screen TVs (1 in each location) each connected to an Apple Mini with iChat.  This allows the team in both locations to stand up and meet just as if they were all in the same location. (kind of like looking through a “window” into the other office)

(L – R) Michael Stephenson and Piotr Banasik (foreground) chatting with 5 members of the PayrollHero team in Manila on the screen

(L – R) Adam Baechler and Stephen Jagger (foreground) with the developer daily standup meeting happening in the background