Remote working Product Teams
I’m sitting in an airport departure lounge to head home — SaaStr 2020 was cancelled on strong recommendation of Santa Clara county. Others in SF have also been cancelled. There is a guy a few rows behind me coughing and sneezing — not into his sleeve, not covering his mouth.
Apparently oblivious to Covid-19 and oblivious that others are doing their best to minimize risk to themselves and other. He likely to be on my flight — oh….the…joy.
Meanwhile “Zoom” Video Communications Inc (“ZM”) is up 33.44% last 30 days and Slack Technologies Inc (“WORK”) is up 22.68%.
Clearly investors comprehend that technologies that help reduce travel, reduce the potential for infection are a great bet on the future.
It’s now the norm that Product teams to be more distributed instead of centralized. Some companies like Gitlab are born remote.
With COVID-19, many companies are implementing work-from-home as a preventative measure and also self-quarantine.
“GitLab is the world’s largest all-remote company with team members located in more than 65 countries around the world.”
Even large product companies like Atlassian have embraced remote work as a priority. “We think that by doing remote we can tap into a whole new workforce that our competitors aren’t tapping into,” Atlassian Co-CEO Scott Farquhar.
Great remote tools are emerging such as whiteboard tools Miro and teams going beyond Slack to use the voice “hoot-and-holler” of Twitch.
But the big deal is changing the culture. Engineers are notoriously introverted and I’ve spent 15+ years trying to get engineers to talk to each other even when they sit a few feet apart!
I asked Bonjoro’s CEO Matt Barnett about his team structure and how they handle the remote culture.
The no-surprise summary: “Communication is everything”. But here are a few specific tips.
Key Point 1: Drop a 2 minute zoom call to somebody to resolve an issue that might otherwise take hours or days. Why?
- Timezones mean that chat/text messages and emails are unresolved for hours or days.
- People misinterpret the tone of chat or emails.
- If you must use text, then don’t use capitals (SHOUTing) and choose the best emoji for the purpose.
Key Point 2: Bring the team together once a year. The team has to “break-bread” and spend time together in the same physical space.
This was first published (along with lots of other Product Management goodies) on the Contextual Onboarding blog.
