Organizational changes and transition to a fully remote PM amidst the pandemic

As I am writing this, we have entered the 45th day of lockdown in India and still a few more days left before the lockdown ends, but will our offices be functional as normal as it used to be Pre-Covid-19? The answer is definitely ‘No’ and we all are aware of this situation. The majority of all IT companies across the globe will not be opening their office doors soon enough to their employees and the remote culture is here to stay until the world re-opens in its full ON mode. In this story, I will be writing down how I transitioned to this remote phase and learned to manage more effectively as a Product Manager.

THAT’S NOT ME. It is a photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

Situation

To give you a brief, I look after product @ Frendy and around 25 people work in our tech team alone. We are a startup in social e-commerce space dealing with daily essentials and so the work for the entire team drastically increased since the lockdown occurred owing to the increased demand. Other departments into the company include Marketing, Operations, Catalogue, Category, Finance, and Customer Support comprising of around 80 employees in total and apart from the operations team who handles delivery, procurement and logistics, the entire team was made ready for remote work.

Problem

None of us had ever expected this situation and frankly, we didn’t know how will we deal with this and daily work. It was a totally new kind of situation for all of us and the main issue that we knew would pop up was COMMUNICATION GAP

Everyone knows their work, they have the tasks defined on a Scrum board and they seem to be productive. If everything seems to look normal, what was missing? In the first few days, we started to notice that the timelines for tasks were going on for a toss and the only one thing that we didn’t have right was human interaction that unknowingly solved lots of problems when everyone was working together at the office. At the same time, we also needed to be sure that the right environment was set in place to keep the morales of the team high in these trying times.

As a PM, I began to feel the repetition of communicating tasks with various departments and specifically working with the UI/UX team to make them understand my viewpoint for the designs. The requirements coming in from various departments were becoming ad hoc and it was even difficult to prioritize the backlog or even plan a sprint properly. It was something new for everyone and we had to deal with it anyhow.

Solution

Along with the help and guidance from our CTO, Gowrav Vishwakarma, we decided to set some rules internally.

1. The entire company communication was moved to Slack and channels were created accordingly. We purposely ditched the WhatsApp groups and made it mandatory for everyone to be there on the same platform. This helped us solve the problem of communication in real-time and it was as good as going to meet the person in the office.
2. We tightly integrated Zoom with Slacks and also ran a company-wide tutorial to schedule or start meetings in Zoom directly from Slack. This was an echo of our intercom telephone lines in the office to talk with someone or call them to the conference room for a meeting.
3. To ensure the transition is smooth and people get the same feeling working from home, we schedule our daily scrum meetings sharply at 9:30 AM via Zoom and make sure it operates in the same fashion as it used to be.
4. I began to focus more on detailed user stories and tasks ensuring that the same has been understood perfectly by the tech leads or developers.
5. For the UI/UX team, I made sure that the low-fidelity drawings I gave them were fully comprehended by them, and just to top, I used to give them a simple call to reassure the same.
6. We formed a channel to communicate any bugs or queries being reported to us from the customers directly or through the customer support team and added them to the defect backlog.
7. To mitigate communication errors, we also formed small groups with their respective technologies in the tech team and even though the tasks were there on the Scrum board, we asked for its updates in those channels similar to how we would go and approach them in the office.
8. All the new requirements and enhancement requests in the form of email or through Slack were communicated and verified well enough before taking them into the main backlog.

All-in-all, we have tried to replicate the same working environment and processes that we used to have at our offices. This led to an immediate adoption by the team and in no time we were all on the right track.

For me, working as a fully remote product manager, I realized the need to be more meticulous, more organized and more transparent on the communication aspect with all the stakeholders involved and Yes, I have been working hard myself to get close to those standards and will continue to evolve and learn. Going fully remote has not been an easy task for people and organizations around the world both physically and mentally, but I am sure that we will definitely overcome it with flying colours soon.

Check out valuable insights, tips, strategies and fundamentals on Product Management on my YouTube channel — Parth Amin’s YouTube Channel

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