How I Design Team Standups, Calendars, and Schedules as a Product Manager.
DESIGNING MY TEAM STANDUPS, CALENDARS, AND SCHEDULES AS A PRODUCT MANAGER.
Leading a team as a product manager can be a handful, and therefore, organizational skills are one of the most important skills in a product manager’s arsenal. Organizational skills are considered essential to building a proper structure which is necessary for seamless coordination of your teams towards achieving set goals for a product and turning in necessary deliverables at the right time.
I have found it easy to get my teammates to deliver on their tasks promptly solely because I have designed the right structure for this. Seeing the seamlessness of results I have been able to achieve so far, I have thought to share some of the tools that have been at the crux of my work, hopefully, you would find them useful as well.
I use the following tools to keep my house in order, designing and managing my team standups, calendars, and schedules.
• Google Calendar and Google Meet:
At the moment, these are my favorite tools from the Google suite. Google Calendar has been a lifesaver for me and it has been saving lives for ages! I particularly love and continually give thumbs up to everyone on the Google Calendar team.
I use Google Calendar to schedule meetings and calls for my teammates. Scheduled standups for the entire year on Google Calendar and it has automatically synced to my teammates’ calendars, providing them with times for meetings as well as meeting links. It has a notification functionality that can be set as required, sending reminders or emails at different times before the meeting times as required. This helps you to repeatedly remind your different team members about upcoming calls and thins out the chances of them missing meetings.
Google Calendar is also automatically synced to other apps in the Google suite — Google meet in this case, and your team members can join meetings directly from the reminders and notifications they receive.
To learn more about how to use these super tools, check out this video. They have done wonders for me and they can do so for you too!
• Trello App:
Trello is a productivity tool, developed by Atlassian. Particularly, it is useful in doing sprint planning, sprint review, and product and feature backlog. Though there are other tools such as Jira, used by product managers for these functions, Trello takes away a lot of complexity and provides multiple templates for you to work with. Within the Trello interface, I make use of the Kanban board template, particularly for sprint planning. My team members can document their upcoming tasks, current tasks or what they are working on, future tasks or what they plan to work on, backlogs, and many other activities related to the product being built.
The Trello board also provides a due date functionality for each task, with which team members can track the deadlines for their current tasks, receive reminders, properly manage available time, or communicate any escalations. This fosters great accountability cultures within teams and it is one of the reasons I love Trello the most.
These are the apps that have worked the most for me in terms of excellent team organization as a product manager. I would love to hear what is working for you and how you are using them as well. You can share yours with me in the comment section.
