I´ve been dreaming of working remotely for quite some time and I´m happy that I´ve found a company which fully embraces remote work, Vistaprint.
Apart from being in an awesome company of amazing talents and technology, Vistaprint gives employees the opportunity to be full remote workers. This, among other reasons, was the reason why I joined this great ecommerce technology powerhouse this year.
The current pandemic situation made many companies adopt remote work, but it’s still remote / hybrid and many underestimate the power of remote practices and mindset that can make us more productive.
One of the reasons why I decided to leave a former employer in the past is due to the belief that I should show up more often in the office /in the headquarters in another country/ so that my colleagues can see me. Then you go there and your line manager has a busy agenda and hardly 1 hour to dedicate talking to you in a couple of days. Believe it or not, this mattered more than the work you do and the effort you make. It´s kind of sad in today´s digital environment and plethora of tools that we have at our disposal.
I´ve been working remotely as a consultant for years now and know that this remote work stuff just works. It does, it require discipline, motivation and healthy remote work habits.
However, it’s totally different to be a 100% remote worker from the very beginning. You have never seen your colleagues and may not see / meet them any time soon.
After helping a product redesign of a dashboard for Upshelf, crafting the strategy around the user journey, onboarding of new users and working on some new product features while working remotely for some months between two time zones, Europe and Canada, I´ve joined my current employer as 100% remote worker.
Here is the difference, working remotely is different from being a 100% remote worker. It´s a matter of a company mindset, your own attitude, expectations
This article explains some of my remote environment learnings which can be useful for product owners and scrum masters.
To wrap it up, my full time remote work experience started in March 2020 with the pandemic and in 2 companies, one where I knew some colleagues from before / in-person and the other one I’ve met some of them during my first day. Finally, I landed on the 100% full remote bandwagon this year and I’m quite happy about it.
To start off, remote work and productivity is hard. It´s especially in the product management world as we have so many interactions with other departments, we need to meet our users, talk to them and communicate with the software development team in person. As the Agile manifesto states: the most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
As a product manager, I am sure that you need to juggle between being strategic, operational as a product owner to ensure delivery and also work as a scrum master.
We no longer rely on face-to-face conversations and it’s challenging to identify problems within teams, inspirate team members to be more vocal about their impediments and act proactively to nurture a healthy team environment. The physical clues to identify team members’ reactions, emotional state, ambitions and motivations are more important than what we think.
What can you do is act as a determined product ninja to improve your productivity, your team’s spirit and ensure product value delivery in a remote setup.
Let´s get started with some tips from my experience.
Show up
Remote work creates challenges for all of us, so it’s more important than ever to show up and be an active participant to establish healthy and productive work and personal relationships with your co-workers.
Set up your schedule and share online availability to others
If you will not be available during certain business hours, just be open about it and put a message on your quick chat comm channel, e.g. Slack or block your agenda.
There is nothing wrong with putting a red notification on your account for some time and just focus on deep work with no distractions. Don´t feel ashamed and promote focused work by showing when you will be available.
There are hundreds of books which talk about deep work /my favorite one is Cal Newport´s ´Deep Work´/, it can make it or break it in this ´always be online´ environment.
Don´t miss virtual coffee breaks or start organising some
Bonding with others online is as important online as offline. Make sure that you set time to enjoy some fun time with colleagues and get to know them, what they like, dislike, what worries them etc.
We are all humans in the end and being a remote worker online shouldn´t make us digitalize our emotions and human characteristics 🙂
Show your face, hello Zoom
Video conversations are crucial to connect with colleagues and let you analyze more deeply how team members respond to questions, how they react and communicate their impediments. While we cannot or are not comfortable to connect with a camera in every call, video is 100% recommended in most cases.
Protect your time and your team’s time by declining meetings politely
Have you just received a meeting request? Challenge the purpose of the meeting and check whether the issue can be discussed async. Try to send out an email or any additional information. You can always tentatively accept and show up if you have time and you deem it necessary to participate.
Start async communication
Open relevant async communication channels of your choice /don´t let it all sit in your email/, ask your colleagues which channel works the best for them, experiment, learn and adapt!
Async standups
I´ve recently implemented Geekbot with my team as we work in three different workstreams and two time zones. Therefore, there is not always a value of daily standups which can be exhausting and prolonged if your team is too big or someone is late /if the latter, don´t miss putting on your scrum master´s hat to put things in order/.
Geekbot is an app for Slack and it has various customization options, you can set up daily standups or set your own schedule, you can add questions for self-reflection, mood state and the usual standup suspects. Remember that it´s not about monitoring your team’s work, but rather understanding how they feel, what’s the mood, whether there are impediments, where you can help /if some team members don’t reach out to you and are not vocal about their daily issues/ and foster communication in the team.
Craft your standup around mood questions, impediments, achievements
Retrospectives
As a product owner and scrum master, you need to run retrospectives. My favorite remote tools of trade are Miro, it has various templates which allow for fun and a bit of change or Funretro.
Refurbish your old retrospective practices /what went well, didn`t work well/, you need more ´live´communication and diversity when you don´t and may not /or not soon/ meet your co-workers.
One of the most successful and enjoyable retrospective which I have tried in a remote environment is the Sailboat retro.
I´ve experimented with it and used a template in MIRO. I highly recommend it, because it´s fun and helps you have a new perspective if you think about impediments as anchors, land / treasure as your goal, rocks as risks and wind as what helped you move forward in the sprint.
The team shared with me that they really enjoyed it and I also think that we got the most out of it due to fun format 🙂 I liked the icebreaker which I have chosen and it helped us learn more about each other. The island goes hand in hand with the favorite icecream flavor during summer months, so it was a good fit 🙂
You definitely need communication and icebreakers that energize others, especially when you have not met your team in person or you are relatively new.
Some of the icebreaker which may help you get to know each other:
- Your favourite ice cream flavor
- What would you want to take with you on a desert island if you could. Each team member shares what they would take and passes the sentence to the next one who needs to continue the story. It’s quite fun and you have a small story to tell in the end + really realize the values that you have as a team.
Document in the cloud
Let the cloud be your friend and keep sharing documentation with your colleagues.
Dropbox, Office 365, Box, Google Drive, JIRA Confluence /my long time favorite to keep things neatly organized and visible in a specific Confluence space/ are just some of the apps you can use.
Digital whiteboard space
You remember the whiteboard in the office, right? And how you grabbed a cup of coffee and drew that user´s flow diagram or explained the new functionality to the development team to open up a technical feasibility discussion? Guess what, the whiteboard is not gone, just you´d better adjust to a digital one, don´t underestimate the impact of explaining your ideas properly.
Draw on the screen as you talk
Keep notes or show someone your idea by drawing, imagine as if you were in the samep physical office and you wanted to introduce them to a concept or an idea.
Async communication
Don´t feel bad to say ´no´ to a coworker if you see that you are spending hours on talking for days and this is blocking your work. I used to have such a colleague, it was nice talking to her, but just ´jumping on a call for a couple of minutes´ extended to long conversations which were not fruitful. Think about the company and your work health, if you multiply those hours by your hourly wage, this is how much the company is wasting for nothing.
Collect user feedback remotely
This is a tough one. It’s always better to observe your users directly and work with them to elicit requirements, test product ideas and experiment even before you develop.
Here your own methodology and arsenal of tools can help a lot. Just be bold and keep trying new things to see what works the most. For example, you can run a user feedback session on MIRO /MIRO is quite versatile and has a bunch of templates that you can customize for your use case/. Alternatively, you can run a survey for a feature or a future functionality to make sure that users are not biased /usually some participants are biased if others have too strong opinions and they are inclined to ´follow´ instead of contributing with their own feedback/.
Time zones and meetings
It’s normal in an International environment that some team members may never share the same time zone. While we are all flexible and would love to connect, that’s not always possible.
As a scrum master or a product leader, you are the one who schedules meetings and should make sure that nobody feels excluded from the conversation.
My rule of thumb is to schedule the meeting either for time that works for almost everyone OR think who is your most important stakeholder. If he/she needs to participate, then adjust to their time zone. Be transparent and ask beforehand whether a meeting outside of usual business hours is acceptable.
I have done it and woke up at 6am to meet a colleague or a client for consultancy, so I’m sure that you can make it too 🙂
If you schedule a meeting that most people should attend, just record it and send over a short recap + the recording to the stakeholder who couldn´t attend.
Be empathetic as your stakeholder may receive a bunch of recordings and meetings async to watch, so summarize the recording and be concrete in regards to what their action item(s) should be. This allows people prioritize and dont feel burn out. I feel that we are all responsible for minimizing the burnout in this remote working environment and digital lifestyle we have as the new norm.
Document, document and share
Written communication is more important than ever. Documenting everything you do in a succinct, clear way can save you or your team´s hours.
I still remember one /or more than one 😀 )/ when a colleague leaves the company and the team needs to spend countless hours on recovering any knowledge that disappeared. Guess what? Bad documentation and software development knowledge transfer from mouth to mouth are the culprits for this.
Do you have a tip or a comment? Shoot it in the comment below or reach out to me 🙂