9 Essentials for effective Product Management while WFH

Last week , I published an article about how Product Managers can step up their game in COVID 19 times. There is another critical aspect that needs to be kept in mind. All that I wrote about has to be done while Working from Home.

In this article I want to discuss about these 9 points I have implemented in my daily routine to ensure effectiveness in what I do and delivering value to the customer while not burning out. More importantly, as I said in my previous article as well, one should consider thinking as human-first while building products that will lead to decisions that will ultimately benefit everyone involved.

WFH is a balancing act. All of us are learning to live the new normal!

WFH is a balancing act. All of us are learning to live the new normal! Working for the organization is not the only task at hand. Balancing work and life outside work has never been more important.

1. Know your Collaboration tools. We use a variety of collaboration tools across my organization. We have Zoom, Slack, Confluence, Microsoft teams (and many more that I probably don’t know about) that are used across business areas. While its good to have options, you tend to spend a lot of time in figuring out how some of these work. Make time to learn about these tools, talk to your counterparts if they know about the interesting features that seem valuable to you and similarly learn what they use more often. There is a lot of content available online and while researching I found articles varying from “31 best online collaboration tools, 61 best online collaboration tools, 25 best” and so on..There is content to read and figure out what you need and find the tool that works best for you and your team.

2. Doing the basics right- get your user journeys, process flows, matrices and diagrams in order. One of the biggest disadvantages of WFH is not being able to understand if you’ve explained the problem statement effectively to the developers. While in-person meetings allow you to read the non verbal cues as well, remote discussions can be deceptive and might take you more time to explain and others to understand the issue. A Product Manager cannot leave it to chance and ambiguity and make sure the development team is understanding the what needs to be delivered. One key point I have focused on is detailed documentation. Documenting and utilizing User Journeys and process flows is playing an important role in being able to put across my points more effectively. These are also adding up as the visualization that the developers need that we would have achieved through simple whiteboarding while in office.

3. Identify the teams who need more attention and setup time in advance. As a PM, i work with multiple scrum teams namely QA, Data, UX , Middleware, Upstream/Downstream systems in addition to develop teams. I try to anticipate based on my experience which teams will need more time and constant followups and block their calendars in advance. This also sends across a message to those teams to make them understand that they are the key focus areas at the moment. Also, one has to ensure there is enough time for teams to work on the deliverables before we ask for a status update.

4. Use email effectively to reduce the avoidable meetings. A million dollar question, to meet or email. Forbes has a wonderful article that talks about the same. I try to solve issues through emails but maintain a 3 email principle i.e. if an issue goes beyond 3 emails, it is better to pick up the phone and talk!

5. Keep the scrum ceremonies from going out of control. Don’t let the scrum ceremonies stretch out and go on for ever. Solving problems and raising issues as they occur is extremely important. If the team has to wait for the next ceremony to happen before they can bring up a problem, chances are they might forget it or not have a productive conversation given that the issue happened in the past.

6. Fix your working hours. Working from home doesn’t mean working 24*7. Identify your most product hours.Keep your teams informed on when you are available for meetings and times when you might not take calls to engage in something called Life outside work! I work with teams spread across 4 different time zones, and spread my 10 hours through the day. My team drops me a slack/zoom/whatsapp message if they need to connect and we decide on a time that works best for everyone. Also, not all questions have to be answered ‘NOW’. Everyone should get in a habit of planning work, asking questions during scrum ceremonies and respecting each others time.

7. Spend time with the family and help them with the chores. I have the daily responsibility of mopping the floor . In addition, i act as sous chef for my wife for atleast 2 meals. With a 6 month old son and elderly parents, i can’t leave everything to them. While work is important, helping out the family is equally important and one key responsibility. I try to do this while attending some of the daily scrum calls and multitask. This also allows me to have the sense of accomplishment of completing a task and keeps my morale high!

8. Keep yourself entertained and do things outside work. As a PM, i need to keep the ideas and creative juices flowing.You never know where your best idea might come from. One of the key things that I do is to keep some entertainment as part of my daily routine. Watching a series on OTT platform, playing online games or browsing through a few books has been a part of my daily routine. I have read a lot of articles on Medium and Linkedin and that has been a key to keeping the learning going. As a new habit, I am publishing new articles (Medium/ Linkedin) every week on these platforms as well.

9. Sleep well. This point is valid not only for PMs but everyone WFH in general. Make sure you are sleeping well! While a lot of professionals suffer from a lack of sleep due to stress at work, sleep is all the more important when you are WFH. The routine to stay at a single place might get further stressful and physical activity has also reduced and sleep patterns also change. Importance of sleeping well is nicely documented in this article on Forbes.

We must realize that remote work is not synonymous with working 24*7. Sometimes, the lines tend to get blurred. This period of working from home will teach a lot of us about the importance of managing by objectives, of setting clear goals and expectations for ourselves and teams that we work with.