Making this distributed model work requires a process and a culture that has completely transparent communications. Consequently, Macadamian has adopted many of the tenets of the open-source software community: it uses mailing lists and wikis, and every small iteration on a project is reviewed by the rest of the team members, who then post comments. A project maintainer gets the final say. Boulanger calls this model global agile development, but the result is that bugs and conflicting pieces of code are caught sooner, clients get more flexibility and projects ramp up faster. “There are no fiefdoms, there are no empires being built,” he says. “Everybody has to be able to share whatever they’re working on, and on a daily basis. This way, we believe we’re breaking the distance barriers.”

Boulanger is positioning Macadamian as a high-value, innovative outsourcing partner, expert at short-term, quick-turnaround jobs that “require a lot of reading between the lines,” he says, and it’s their knowledge of end-users that lets them go from a napkin sketch to a market-ready product with less supervision. “That’s where our value is, and that’s where the value of Canada is, in my mind,” says Boulanger. But he still needs a global workforce to keep prices down.

What prevents emerging-market competitors from stealing his clients? The same thing that makes it difficult for western companies to enter places such as China, India or Russia: it’s hard to intuit what customers in foreign markets want, and it’s hard to build solid working relationships with local partners. Technology makes the world seem small, but deep local knowledge is still a big competitive differentiator.

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