Stepping up the game as a Product Manager in COVID-19 times

Product Management is a very people extensive role and that has made Working from Home more complex in these COVID-19 times. While people have written about having great Working Spot , defining boundaries at home where you work , focusing , relaxing and more importantly dedicatedly defining their work hours, I want to write about what is needed by Product Managers to step up their game and solve problems at scale. The path forward for every business will be different, as each of us are faced with unique situations, but one should consider thinking as human-first while building products that will lead to decisions that will ultimately benefit everyone involved. Product managers must evaluate the critical ways in which the pandemic affects their teams so they can mitigate the negative effects and plan for recovery.

• Understand problems with a new lens . It is not every day in your life that you’ll face pandemic like situations. Product Managers have to think about the customer behaviour which would have been totally different in regular times. Airbnb had to do a lot of changes to their product which included rethinking its home screen and app landing pages to reflect a world where short-term stays are out and longer-term stays — including for medical professionals needing to quarantine themselves from their families — are in.

• Be Prepared to analyze more data. Data is a key driver in many product-related decisions. We rely heavily on product usage data and run user experiments before launching products and features. However, the rules have changed temporarily as users are not behaving as they would have behaved a month ago when it was business as usual. Assumptions based on dated market research, user expectations, might not be true to accurately support today’s decision.

• Impact analysis more critical than ever. Be critical in the Impact analysis, The pandemic is resulting in rapidly changing priorities and needs for both customers and prospects. Supply chains and product launch plans are being disrupted, forcing product managers to adjust delivery schedules for both existing and new products. Product management teams are being stressed by reduced team capacity and new requirements for remote collaboration.

• Listen to customer feedback and act now. Amid criticism for lapses, Zoom took the decision to buy security firm Keybase to enhance encryption. Zoom, the biggest gainer from COVID 19 per me, had to take this decision to enhance their security after people hacked into others’ videos in a practice called “Zoombombing”.

• Move quickly. I keep thinking about how quickly Airbnb brought about the changes to their home page. Their team mapped it out in under three weeks. There were a couple hundred employees working on the project at any point in time — people from ops, products, localization, design, policy, engineering. It’s a complex operation ; everything was to be done in 60 languages.

• Strike the right balance. It is hard to make customers, teammates, and stakeholders happy all the time. It’s particularly tricky to balance customer needs (delaying certain things to provide enhanced support) while maintaining work life balance for teammates. In order to service their increasing number of users, Netflix and Disney + reduced video quality for its European subscribers, reducing strain on internet networks.

• Rejig the Product Launch & Roadmap. This is the right time to evaluate the impact on your customers of end-of-life or end-of-service dates during product 2Q20 and 3Q20, and reassess the benefits of maintaining planned dates. Also, think about moving around the features on the roadmap to accommodate the ‘New Critical’ for the customer. The cancellation of MWC Barcelona 2020 in February began a string of tech conferences being canceled, postponed or transitioned to a virtual format. As a result, product launches that were planned to align with these events are being postponed, such as Xiaomi’s delay of the launch 2 of its Mi 10 series.

• Stay connected. As a Product person, you’re not just responsible for making your boss or board happy, you’re responsible for the success of your users and the wellbeing of your teammates. If you want to balance it all, you need to lead with empathy and stay connected.

Before COVID-19, the majority of employees working in computer/information systems spent some of their time working remotely. Because of the pandemic, the number and the percentage of time they spend at home has soared. Many product teams turned fully distributed overnight, without previous experience and time to prepare for such a transition. These organizations will need to adopt new practices and guidelines for remote collaboration. Product management leaders should be giving clear guidance on which team members should come into this office — if at all — and setting reasonable and flexible expectations for availability when working from home. Not everyone will find this transition easy, as some team members may require more interaction with others to alleviate the feeling of isolation.

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