The Agile Within
Providing agile insights into human values and behaviors through genuine connections.
The Agile Within
The Balancing Act: Remote Work and Personal Values with Sardor Akhmedov
Ever wonder how to navigate the complexities of entrepreneurship, or how to manage a distributed team across different time zones? Join us for an insightful chat with Sardor Akhmedov, who wears multiple hats as a tech entrepreneur, CRO, managing partner at Jafton.com, and an angel investor at Fathom AI. Sardor's journey from a student to co-owner of a tech business is nothing short of inspiring. He sheds light on his introduction to agile and scrum methodologies, the transition from business development to business operation, and the nitty-gritty of scaling a company. If you're striving for self-awareness and keen understanding of your entrepreneurial strengths and weaknesses, Sardor's experiences are a must-listen.
We then pivot our conversation towards the challenges and potential solutions of remote work, a hot topic in today's globalized business environment. Sardor shares his wisdom gained from managing a geographically diverse team, and how he implemented core hours and adopted Time Doctor to track productivity. He underscores the need for transparency between employers and employees, and reveals how relocating his sales team to the US boosted efficiency.
As we wrap up, Sardor unveils his strategies for streamlining processes, consolidating software, and motivating his team. He talks about the importance of productizing his business and balancing remote work with personal values. His valuable insights on the importance of building relationships with potential investors and leveraging technology to streamline operations are golden nuggets for anyone running or planning to start their own business. This episode is a deep dive into the challenges of running a business with a significant time zone difference and its impact on operations. Buckle up for an enriching journey with Sardor Akhmedov!
www.jafton.com
Sardor@jafton.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sardor-akhmedov/
Don't miss Scrum Day, scheduled for Sep 14, 2023, in Madison, WI, at the Alliant Energy Center. Morning keynote using Liberating Structures by Keith McCandless followed by break-out rooms including speakers from Stanford University and the authors of "Fixing your Scrum". Afternoon keynote by Dave West, CEO of Scrum.org. Scrum is a team sport, so bring your team and get your tickets at www.ScrumDay.org. Hosted by Rebel Scrum. Find the training you've been looking for at www.RebelScrum.site.
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Welcome to the podcast that challenges you from the inside. Come be more and discover the Agile Within. And now here's your host, Greg Miller.
Speaker 2:We're thrilled to announce that the Agile Within podcast is a gold sponsor of Scrum Day. Join us on September 14, 2023 at Align Energy in Madison, wisconsin, for this one day conference. Prepare to be inspired by remarkable speakers, including the author of A Pocket Guide for Scrum, as well as the authors of Fixing Your Scrum. Get insights from afternoon keynote Dave West, the CEO of Scrumorg, including invaluable strategies from industry leaders on implementing Scrum in human resources, technology teams and beyond. Don't forget to visit us at our booth at Scrum Day. Mark and I will be there and get your tickets at wwwscrumdayorg for this incredible event. Look forward to seeing you. Stop by the booth, mark, and I will say hi and we'll see you then. All right, welcome back to another episode of the Agile Within. It's Greg and Mark, and today we have our guest. He is a tech entrepreneur. He's a CRO and managing partner at Jaftincom And also an angel investor at Fathom AI. I want to welcome Sardor Okmanov.
Speaker 3:Hey, thanks for having me, Andre.
Speaker 2:You also go by Sam right. Is that true? to call you Sam?
Speaker 3:I prefer not to anymore. No, okay.
Speaker 2:Just telling you Moving away from that Got it Moving away from that.
Speaker 2:So it's Sardor. Yes, well, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us today. Glad they're coming on. Yeah, so now you're talking to me earlier You're located in Miami, right? So we're in Cincinnati here, so you're down in Miami. So for our listeners who may not be familiar with you, maybe give us a little bit of a background. You have a pretty interesting background, i thought So maybe just give us a little bit of taste about what's going on right now, maybe a little bit about your history.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so currently I manage a tech business with a team of over 100 people. But you know, i originally came to this country with pretty much nothing. I came here as a student nine years ago. It's going to be nine years in August 25th this year. I came here for high school after receiving a pretty good scholarship to attend a high school in the state of Massachusetts. It was a private boarding school, very good school. So my parents sent me there kind of like last minute when I was actually supposed to go to the UK to study, because that was like the dream since I visited the UK. But this kind of happened by the leap of faith And just yeah, i came over here.
Speaker 3:I first it was really hard to get accustomed to it, but when you know you have no other choice when you're in the corner, you kind of survive and you adopt. So I adopted, became comfortable, i found friends here. I graduated from high school, went to the university. I went to New York Institute of Technology in New York, tended that for a year, originally thinking I need to study computer science and electrical engineering. I quickly realized it's all about self-awareness and knowing what your strengths and weaknesses are. So my, you know the programming wasn't my strength, so to say.
Speaker 3:So I moved away from that and went into business administration, thinking, okay, at least I can study business, because I always knew I wanted to be a tech entrepreneur. But I also realized that in college they don't really teach you entrepreneurship. They teach you business operations, how to be working in the business, which is great for most of people. But if you know that you 100% you want to own the business and you want to run a business, then there's not too much value, especially for the type of tuition you pay there. So I, long story short, i dropped out of college and I started taking, you know, before making my last decision. Actually, i went into a specialized course at General Assembly which teaches different tech courses, and I took product management. That's actually where I got interested to agile and different methodologies and scrum, so, but it was more about, like, product ownership and higher level than you know, in the weeds.
Speaker 3:But I got introduced to that and in parallel I was also doing product management at my mentors company, who is currently actually my business partner. So I started kind of interning there and the year after that I joined the company in a business development role and worked my way up to covening the company. So, no, i had two routes to go into business. I could either start my own business from scratch, take yours to scale it up, or Join a business that's already up and running, that's doing, you know, something in revenue and has profit, and scale that business. So I chose the ladder And since then we've scaled the company. I joined Jaffton four years ago and we were about 15 people and since then we almost 10 extra revenue or on track to to head that this year, and the team has grown almost 10x as well since then.
Speaker 3:So Been a wild journey and in the process I've learned a lot. You know, even though I didn't start the company from scratch, it was pretty much in a very much an infancy stage, right where we were wearing a lot of hats. Right now it's much more structured, much more, you know, departmentalized, but back then it was. I had to do the operations myself as well. I had to project manage somewhere And do the sales and do a lot of different things. So I was introduced to project managing through that as well. But right now I don't do that hands on. I do have a few of my pet projects that I run, that I product manage for, but they'll sort of like Very much a you know, not a full time thing or big team size management. So yeah, it's a little bit about myself. You know that's where I'm at right now.
Speaker 2:Life okay, yeah, well, thank you, yeah, i can. I can kind of relate it. I don't know if it's the same, but I worked at a startup. I don't know if you would consider What you just start.
Speaker 2:I guess it kind of could be right yeah, yeah so I worked at a startup back in the early 2000s And so, yeah, i know what you're talking about. You're talking about the not as much structure. Yeah then not as not official departments, right, just people doing like you said, whatever it needs to be done, right, and I can, i can definitely rate to that, and we eventually moved to agile, to that company. But, yeah, so maybe just a little bit. Also, you know you're you're at Jaftin, what is that? what does Jaftin do? help help our listeners understand what you guys do there.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we are an outsourced software development agency Anybody who wants to build software. Mainly we specialize in mobile development, but we do any kind of software Generally. So companies come to us and I'll give you an avatar of one of our clients. It's a web based CRM That has been successful in the market for over 10 years and they've been only web based. Now they want a mobile application. Their internal team has no capacity to build that mobile app. They don't want to hire a full time mobile developer yet. So they come to us and they say, hey, we already have the web based CRM built. Can you guys build us a mobile app and how much it will cost? So we do the discovery phase and then we start out the development and, as a matter of fact, we launched that mobile CRM three months ago And currently have a full time team supporting that as well. That's one of our projects and that's the type of business we do for our clients.
Speaker 2:Right, that's that. Yeah, i worked. I worked with a lot of CRM. That sounds like a lot of things I did to mobile. Yeah, that's that's the big thing. Right, all everything's mobile right now. So, yeah, you mentioned earlier you You got exposure in college to agile and I assume I Think we were talking earlier you run. Some of your teams run agile currently. Now, right.
Speaker 3:Yes, correct. So we, we work in two different, two different Systems. One is when we, when we take the ownership of the product, we take it from the idea to launch. Another one is more of a staff augmentation, where we just provide developers and the client clients project management team Manages them directly. So in those cases it varies, right, whatever the client prefers. But when it comes to us, yes, we do apply agile and You use, you know, we have scrum musters and yeah, great, yeah, uh-huh, awesome.
Speaker 2:How big are your, how big are your teams? Typically, do you know your agile teams, your scrum teams?
Speaker 3:varies project by project. Probably our largest was I mean, the entire team was about, at the peak 60 people From our team. They hired about 20 people but they were doing stuff augmentation, so we were not Yeah, but but other projects anywhere from. To take a specific Project persona, that would be five people. Right, yeah, okay, yeah, this is like a average size, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, i got it. And now you, you have locations, various cities around the world, correct, that's right, yeah, and you work Probably different time zones. And and one thing I wanted to want to dive into is about managing those distributed teams. I know that Every company has challenges with that, and especially with COVID, and now that Some folks are, some companies are fully remote, some are hybrid, some have to be in the office What is what is that Jafton there? How do you guys handle distributed teams and what is like your? I Don't know. Maybe you can give me your opinion, or what is Jafton's policy on Distributed teams and working with people that are offshore and coming into the office, things like that? Yep, totally.
Speaker 3:So, prior to pandemic, almost everybody was mandated to work from office, and you know, we had one tech lead, a CTO, who was managing the whole team. And even then, though, we used to Use, like time tracking, time management Software to I'm going to dive into in a second But after COVID, you know, during code, we were fully remote. After COVID we reopened our office. It's made a larger because the team grew, and now it's kind of hype hybrid. There's no requirement to come to office, but a lot of people still do, and Our main development office is actually in Uzbekistan, in in Tashkent, where I'm from Large campus. But we do have people in a lot of neighboring countries, like Kazakhstan, azerbaijan, even some in Russia, but although a lot of Russians are now moving out of Russia and coming to Uzbekistan, we're accommodating them as well. It's a different story, but, yeah, right, yeah, but we have people in Israel as well, in Ukraine still, even during this time.
Speaker 3:So A lot of these teams I mean in that zone They have very close Time zone, so for them It's not a problem, although the problem appears when the project managers, most of our project managers are also offshore, right, a lot of companies like, as they hire inshore project managers to be in the same time zone as the client. But what we did is that is we We have hours that are Usually up to 2 pm Easter, 9 am to 2 pm Eastern, that our project managers work at And are available for our clients right for for zoom meetings, for slack chats, for reports, things like that like core hours kind of right, like like 92 is your core hours, i guess Exactly, and during the rest of the hours they, during the day, they work with the team to distribute the task, work with developers, because developers do work on their own time zone, which is about 9 to 10 hours depending on the time of the year, different than yeah so it's a pretty large difference, right.
Speaker 3:Mm-hmm but but with the way we tackle that was through having project managers on More or less Easter time zone. At one point, by the way, we tried to Shift everybody to Eastern times and I told everybody hey, oh guys, you guys have to work on Eastern times, everybody, including developers, and it was a huge, huge.
Speaker 2:It was not received well you're right So so let me stop you there. So if I'm living in I mean another country, different time soon. So what you just said is you're you asked those folks to switch their hours to match Eastern times, okay.
Speaker 3:Yes, which still, you know, my part of my sales team is still there also and they work Eastern time zone and I realize that's not efficient even for salespeople. There are much more highly motivated times to you know, work because they're commission based. But even for them it's difficult. I tried myself, you know, when I was back home. We're working Eastern time zone. It's extremely exhausting. So I'm actually moving the sales team completely to to the US as well. Okay, getting them visas, because I realize the efficiency is worth it. So Yeah, but the way we also Kind of create efficiency is when folks are not in the office.
Speaker 3:A lot of people are afraid of like Hey, how am I gonna control what they're doing? right? and A lot of people kind of just rely on likes. You know, as long as the sprints are getting completed, tax are being completed, we don't care what hours you work. And I kind of agree with that, but not fully, because what we realized, at least in our region, is it became a Sort of a norm to take at least two jobs, if not three.
Speaker 3:People just kind of take multiple jobs remotely and then just kind of, you know, work half-ass there, half-ass here. So what we, what we require from our Developers and everybody the company is they use the software called time doctor, which, i'm not gonna lie, it's pretty intrusive. It not only tracks your time during work, but also if you Go on any website that's not work related, it will like that. And also it randomly takes screenshots of that Yeah, people's screens, and some call it, you know, extreme. A lot of agencies don't use that, a lot of companies don't use that. For us It's gives efficiency. We've, we've multiple times, we've, you know, flagged and caught people just kind of Not working and working not for us.
Speaker 2:I mean correct Yeah.
Speaker 3:I think that's an ethical. So at that scale that we're at over 100 people I think This has created more transparency for us as the owners of the company and the managers. So That's what we use for for the, you know control right and the, so I'm.
Speaker 2:I'm I'm sure the employees are aware that this time doctor is on their machines, correct? And what is going on? Yeah, i know for it.
Speaker 3:I mean, we had few exceptions, when we had really good engineers and they wouldn't agree to use it. So we work out a deal where they don't turn on their screenshots. There's only few exceptions for that. But and then we check now if they're getting their complete tasks on time and everything, then then we're fine, right. Right working right. You can tell you over that screenshots. He's like working full-time or not. So yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean I, i can, i know what you're talking about there. I, i mean, i'm, i'm an Agilis scrumaster myself and I had a Member, one of my teams, years ago. The manager came to me and said, hey, hey, exactly what you're talking about. The same he was, he was in the US, i think he was in Indiana maybe, and he was. He had a second job.
Speaker 2:We found out and he I guess the manager had found out he was Suspecting something and he went in and checked, like the logs or something, and that he was logging in from our company laptop Mm-hmm into this work for this other company, which was his First mistake. That was a mistake, right there. Right, you should, if you're gonna do that, maybe use a different computer or something like that. And likely, and they caught him And he did get terminated, unfortunately, because of that. But I mean, yeah, it's a, it's like. I mean you want to trust people, right, it's a slippery slope, i guess, in my opinion. I mean, i, i know, i know where you're coming from. As the owner of the company, you deserve to have them working for you when they say they are right, i mean, if they guys see what they do outside the office you know might be their thing if they want to work in the evening.
Speaker 2:Yeah part-time thing that might be better, right, you probably, you probably be more amenable to that.
Speaker 3:Oh, by the way, i have an interesting Kind of yeah finding on on outside of work hours as well. So one thing that I wish I knew earlier and we Used earlier is this year around Our COO came up with this very smart strategy. So because we know that people take second jobs anyways right outside of work And at times you know, with agency probably know The volume varies, right, sometimes you have a ton of clients and sometimes you have less. People are on bench. So we at first we used to just hire more people whenever we get more volume. But now what we do is, instead of hiring more people, we take same people and we paid them over time because we know That anyway. So they take a second job at Jafton, yeah, and it's very good, because when the volume is up we can incentivize them by paying them extra To take other projects, additional projects. When the volume goes down, we don't have to lay anybody off.
Speaker 3:Right that's what we have to do last year, when we over hire and then the volume went down at one point And we had to fire a lot of people and that was not good right now We're kind of hedging against that by just kind of Paying people extra for working extra, and that's working out really well. That's been really one of the best decisions we've made.
Speaker 2:Yes that's great. I like to hear that because that's Yeah, as you, obviously we've all heard what's been going on lately in the tech industry with I guess it sounds like there was Overhiring and a lot of companies is what I'm hearing. I don't know who knows what. The true story Yeah, and they have to cut thousands, right, yeah, yeah, we have experienced the same on a smaller scale, but same thing happen Yeah yeah, yeah, that's.
Speaker 2:That's a great story, that's a great great. That's good to hear that, that you guys are doing that, that you're thinking about that. Yeah, that's a good strategy, Yeah it gives them incentive, gives them some extra money. They don't need to go somewhere else. That's really good. Exactly.
Speaker 3:For us. It makes it easier to We already know. Also, these engineers are proven, we trust them, they deliver. Why try to hire somebody else and take a gamble, while we can just hire the same person twice or you know, quite a lot of times? Right, It's a really good strategy.
Speaker 2:That is great. Yeah, so as you said, you guys have grown I think you said 10X in the beginning. As you continue to grow, how do you see You're going to add more? I'm sure you're going to obviously add more people eventually, maybe even more locations, i don't know. But how do you see being able to The tool you mentioned and manage from different areas? how do you see that you were scaling that?
Speaker 3:I think probably the same way for the foreseeable future, until we I'm not saying this system is perfect, you know just what's been working for us, but we're always open to new things. Our goal is actually long-term to productize our own business, to not always be tied to a service, because the service business is great, it pays well, but it's very hard to scale. So we're currently working on few products that are going to be complementary to our agency And I believe once we productize and become more of a product-based company where your revenue coming in is not tied to We don't have to hire more people. Basically, if you double your revenue in a product right in a SaaS versus an agency, at that point I believe we could probably loosen up a little bit in terms of the control and maybe try different tactics.
Speaker 3:But I don't know what those are going to be, yet.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, But you said earlier I guess I don't know if I want to put words into your mouth. I guess if it were up to you, you'd rather not have to do that, right.
Speaker 3:Correct. Yeah, actually you're right, because I personally wouldn't feel good about that, although maybe it would motivate me or at least keep me kind of more focused on work than anything else. But yeah, i prefer not to just because of how it's received, but because this has been the thing that's been working for us. We keep it. It's kind of a legacy system, but I'm open. Yeah, exactly, i'm sure there's better ways to do it, or, if not, there will be better ways to do it, because I'm sure they don't do that at Google. People still do it. But I mean, when you have those enormous profits, also like Google, you probably don't have to do that Exactly. People working half day, and that's fine. We can't.
Speaker 3:We operate on a slim margin and we have to, fortunately, squeeze out the max out of people.
Speaker 2:So to say yeah. So are there any other tools like that that you use, or is that the main tool that you kind of use to help you manage the teams?
Speaker 3:I mean, this one is more of kind of a non-standard, that's why I kind of mentioned that Everything else is kind of standard stuff.
Speaker 3:Everybody uses, like Slack, jira, zoom. Obviously We tried Mondaycom. I realized also one other thing about software is that try not to use too many different things, because every new software you add to your stack requires a learning curve And people are going to. It's going to take time. You're going to have to, like, check and check and check yet again to make sure people are using that. That's what happened with us when we tried to use Mondaycom and we eventually just kind of sunsetted that and not using it anymore. And what we did is we tried to do everything around Jira what people are already using.
Speaker 3:Same thing I'm doing right now with the calls. I'm consolidating what I'm using somewhere else to what I'm using currently. So another example is we use a ring central in our sales department to make calls. It's a voice over IP software. But I just last week I got reached out by Zoom that said, hey, we are offering voice over IP. Their pricing was much better.
Speaker 3:But the main reason I'm switching to Zoom right now is because I want we're already using Zoom. Why use Zoom and ring central? Right, we can use Zoom in one place. As a matter of fact, they apparently had a calendar as well, so I told them let's use this calendar because we were using motion. Yeah, so I think another thing is project managers, company owners, should try to consolidate software in as little places as possible for the efficiency. Even simple thing is switching tabs from one another onto another and learning the new UX of the new software is painful. I'm doing the same with HubSpot CRM as well As many things as possible, i'm trying to consolidate and bring back to HubSpot as an app instead of a standalone software outside of HubSpot, because switching tabs again, you just lose information, you lose time. It's inefficient.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I totally agree with that. Even with this podcast, I was using a couple of different things and I was like realized the one I'm using here. I used a different one to do calls and then this one to add. now, Like you, I was like, oh, I can do it over here. Yeah, it's so much easier to consolidate. I totally agree with you on that. Exactly 100 percent. Yeah, well, sorter, this has been great. I don't know anything else you can offer to the teams. Sorry to our listeners about No.
Speaker 3:I really enjoyed it because I got to actually talk more specifics around work instead of just in a lot of these podcasts I go to. It's fine, but like I talk more business and it's kind of the same. Yeah, i enjoyed talking more specific work related stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:If anybody wants to get an advice on structuring remote teams or help, they need help with anything and their agency. My expertise is mainly still sales rather than project management, but because I've worn many hats, like I said, i do have that experience as well. So, yeah, we'll be happy to assist any of the listeners here. Great, and that you can reach out to me at sardorjafftoncom and we can discuss. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Great, yeah, i'll put that. I'll put all that in the show notes too, so folks can get ahold of Sardar. So I'll put your okay if I put your LinkedIn.
Speaker 3:Yeah, totally Please Okay.
Speaker 2:Put you on the LinkedIn. I connected with you recently. I'll put your LinkedIn. I'll put your Sardar at Jafftoncom. I'll put that in there. So great, thank you. Thank you for joining us. Sardar Really appreciate it today, so I hope everyone enjoyed it. Yep, hope everyone enjoyed it. And this has been Mark and Greg for the Agile Within. We'll talk to you later.