WFH @ Bumble 🐝

A Product Manager’s experience of working remotely during lockdown

The expected email came on a Monday afternoon, the one that said we would be WFH (Work From Home) indefinitely due to the current circumstances.

Personally, as a Product Manager, I’ve always wondered what the “digital nomad” life was like, so I was interested to see how the company would transition to a 100% remote-work model — overnight.

A picture of what I’m so not doing, but what I imagine I’m doing sometimes

I knew our team thrived with in-person interactions to deliver projects, but three weeks later, with established processes and good vibes, we have created an effective working environment. In many ways, I wouldn’t mind making the remoteness permanent!

Here are some examples of what WFH at Bumble (and parent company MagicLab) is like, and how you might be able to make the most of your own work from home situation during these times. Of course, these tips don’t apply to every scenario and industry — and I fully appreciate how fortunate we are at Bumble to continue being employed and doing work we love.

For us tech workers, as we shift toward an indefinite stay-at-home period where the only things keeping us sane are the memes that find the humor in our apocalyptic predicament, we might as well embrace the benefits of WFH.

WFH — The Austin Bumble team repping

Here are 5 things about remote life you can use to your advantage.

1. No location restrictions

Let’s start with the obvious benefits. Being remote means you can work anywhere that you have wifi. While my job at Bumble for the past year has been based in London, I’ve come back to California for the quarantine, and remoteness means being able to work effectively even from here. Of course, the time difference of eight hours takes self-discipline to manage sleep and be online at the same hours as my colleagues in London, but the family time and Californian views make the scheduling worthwhile. If travel were to be open, there are significant benefits in being 100% remote, as you can realistically balance both an intense career and traveling for leisure.

I’ve seen the pros of remoteness truly scale past the individual level though. When everyone is remote, then everyone is at their laptop (pretty much) all the time. You don’t need to wonder what meeting someone is in and jot down a note to talk to them face to face later when you see them at their desk — you have no choice; you message them about the issue or message them to schedule a call straight away. You can use the fact that you don’t have a choice of meeting in-person to your advantage to not procrastinate.

One of my favorite recent memes — how do you end your work phone calls now?

Of course, you do need to establish a work-life balance for yourself, as the line between work and home is likely the distance from your desk to your bed.

Using classical conditioning can be a way to combat mental stress, i.e. wearing different pairs of sweats (but still sweats) when you’re working vs. sleeping, sitting in different areas of the room when you’re working vs. relaxing, etc. Such distinctions help the brain associate certain stimuli with work and others with relaxing, keeping the two separate in the mind.

Additionally, taking “screen-breaks” really helps the eyes. Whereas before, even though I was on my screen quite a bit, there were many “screen-breaks” with in-person meetings, lunches, and walks in the office. Now, even meetings happen via a screen, lunches happen at my desk, and walks don’t happen during the workday. So intentionally taking breaks and carving out time for my eyes to not be looking at pixels is critical to long-term remote success (and to me not throwing my laptop across the room).

2. No setup requirements

I don’t know about your company, but at Bumble, there have been many times where a room of 10 people couldn’t get Apple TV to work for a screen share presentation. The setup often wasted 5–10 minutes of a 30 minutes meeting, 16%-33% of the meeting time!

I was a bit hesitant to do our usual Bumble weekly sync of 30+ people in a video call, but the results were smooth! We started the meeting, for a change, exactly on time via Google Hangouts.

The chat room right after our 30+ person Hangout video conference, for our Bumble weekly sync

Reducing setup costs and the fluff around meetings is a huge advantage of working remotely — embrace the efficiency!

3. No nonverbal communication

It’s common to hear self-help gurus and business experts comment that “80% of communication is nonverbal.” But in remote work, there is much less of that. Unless you’re over video/voice call, you can’t hear someone’s inflections and you can’t use a kind tone to ask why something hasn’t been delivered on time — and even on video calls, nonverbal cues are limited to above the shoulders.

That moment when your humor just doesn’t translate in slack channels and so you decide to explain your sarcasm

Not having nonverbal cues can be a significant disadvantage unless flipped on its head and embraced for its benefits. Without the ability to communicate nonverbally, feelings that are usually left tacit must be communicated over real words at the surface level. You can use over-communication to your advantage.

Over the last two weeks, colleagues have typed phrases like “Not trying to challenge your decision, I’m curious where you’re coming from,” or “I feel like I’m bombarding you with questions, but I am very curious about this matter,” phrases they might not have verbalized before, but rather would have conveyed through nonverbal signals which can be misinterpreted. The over-communication is a clear way of addressing previously implied issues.

Additionally, people explain concepts like bugs a lot more clearly over step-wise bullet points, because there is no ability to explain to the person ad hoc at their desk. Use this written documentation to your advantage because it is scalable and can bring more relevant people into context faster by being added to channels, rather than having to explain 1:1 at opportune times.

An example of a bug reported by a fellow colleague and Bumbler for our voice call feature, increasingly being adopted by users during quarantine times

And remember — emojis go a long way in establishing a kind tone 😊. If you feel you’re coming across the wrong way, remember there’s a human behind the avatar you’re chatting with, and embrace the opportunity of being able to type what you think and feel without nonverbal cues.

And if things escalate — realize the limits of remoteness and jump on a call; people are still human at the end of the day — and it’s easier to have empathy when you can see a human on the other end of the line.

Taking that realization one step further, I do recommend making a regular video sync with key people you work with. Our Product Lead created a mandatory video-standup for our squad every day, and while some still mildly protest that their looks are too disheveled for a video call, this simple 10-minute sync with actual face time makes people remember that we are not all in isolation, but working as a unit. (Plus, seeing people in their natural habitats is its own type of team bonding!)

4. No more commutes

If you had a one hour commute before, your commute time is now one minute, or as fast as it takes for you to open your laptop. That is a 98% reduction!!

You have so much more time in the day.

Before it gets filled up with useless noisy things that people are so good at doing, use the time to develop a new habit — you can finally read those product books or fiction novels that have been on your shelf for a while, or take up a new hobby, or work out (i.e. “work in,” safely inside your home). Or maybe it means appreciating the (albeit now required) time with family more.

Being inside all day can seem like a prison sometimes, and, of course, mental health comes first. Just don’t forget that in a lot of cases, you have more of that one precious thing that we always wanted more of before — time.

What skillset can you pick up that you’ve always wanted to have (especially if it’s something that can be learned from an online course), or what indoor hobby have you always wanted to try? After this WFH period is over, you’ll feel so proud of yourself for using that newfound time that everyone is generally “too busy” to find.

Personally, I’m using the extra time to blog more.

5. No more non-intentional hangouts

Thought WFH stands for Work-From-Home? Well on Friday evenings, it actually means Wine-From-Home for the product team.

Wine-from-Home Fridays are a new tradition for the Bumble product team now

Hanging out with people has never been so intentional. Instead of a party where you just stop by and chat around with people, you need to make intentional efforts to talk.

While in the product team we’re still figuring out how to all hang-out on a 15 person call together since you can’t break off into natural chat-sustainable groups like at a bar, we’ve discovered a fun Google hangouts feature that allows you to mute other people and we have randomly adapted this into a game. Also a “virtual talking stick” has come up as a suggestion. We likely won’t find a way to have sustainable small-group conversations over one big video call, but syncing altogether is another form of connecting, and we’re embracing the advantages of talking one at a time. When all you have is the ability to talk, people start listening more. Also popular during these wine nights: adopting snap filters and playing games, like “Contact.” (Highly recommend!)

An artsy friend’s photo of Wine-From-Home that my photos just don’t compete with

That moment when the product team discovers Snap filters and turns into potatoes for video calls

Parting Thoughts

Indefinite WFH isn’t something anyone at Bumble expected to be doing, but now that we’re in this giant social experiment, there are several learnings we can take to improve our lives — both now, and when life is back to “normal.” Embracing the benefits of remoteness is highly likely to make communication and self-awareness more effective in the long-run. Let’s use the remoteness to our advantage.

Niki is Product Manager at Bumble, a social networking app based in London. Want to chat? You can slide into her DMs on insta @goodbad_ux.