10 Tips for Remote Onboarding as a Product Manager

Onboarding can be tricky especially for Product Managers; let alone if you’re coming on remotely. You don’t have the luxury of meeting your colleagues in-person and build up rapport organically; so the big concern is:

“How do you integrate with company culture and set yourself up for success when you’re remote?”

Here are my 10 tips on what I’ve learned and wish would have known before onboarding as a Remote Product Manager.

So I recently started a full-time gig and since we’re in the COVID era, my onboarding was fully remote…

I started Googling to get some tips on the topic… nothing was out there to address my need specifically and hence I decided to write something about it.

Without further due, here’s what I would do in the first 30 days:

1. Explore the Product:

When you get started working at a new company, everything is abstract and overwhelming (let alone fully remote). By playing around with the product early on you will get a much better sense of things.

It will also give you a chance to have an objective and unbiased opinion of the product before meeting with your team.

Pro Tip: Note down all your thoughts as you try out the product and keep them handy as you work on improving the product.

2. Get a Few Customer Support Tickets:

As Product Manager, you are the voice of the customer; what better way to get to know your customers and their pain points than getting a few customer support tickets or even attending some live calls.

This will immensely help you in getting an understanding of what seems to work and what doesn’t. It also helps craft questions that you can ask your colleagues as you e-meet them.

3. Get to Know your Manager

The goal is to make it easy for them to manage you;

• Ask why they hired you? set expectations.
• Discuss performance goals and objectives: use OKRs is increasingly becoming popular for companies given uncertainty during COVID times.
• Get to know their priorities and challenges, communication preferences.
• Ask a lot of good open-ended questions.
• Last, try to get to know them on a personal level.

Pro Tip: Ask for a list of key stakeholders and jot down notes on not only their roles but also personalities. This will help adjust your communication style when you eMeet them.

4. Ask Good Questions

Even more important when you’re remote; it’s more of art to ask powerful questions. You want to zoom in and out to get the full perspective of not only topics related to your area of focus, but also the whole organization.

You can leverage a framework like below if you want to be more methodical about it.

Source: https://hbr.org/2015/03/relearning-the-art-of-asking-questions

5. Get in the Habit or Even Master the Art of Taking Notes:

“The best leaders are note-takers, best askers” — Tom Peters

Humans tend to lose almost 40% of new information within the first 24 hours of reading or hearing it. So, effective note-taking can help you retain and retrieve almost 100% of the information you receive.

Since you are not co-located with your colleagues, you want to make sure to take notes on literally EVERYTHING. I remember once I took notes from a remote work social on different stories colleagues were sharing and followed-up on them; it makes a huge difference when you show that you’re interested in others. They’ll be much more willing to help you and it goes without saying that note-taking actually makes you a better listener.

6. eMeet with Key Stakeholders:

One of the upsides of working remotely is easier access to colleagues and especially key stakeholders who often have back-to-back meetings.

When you meet with key stakeholders:

• Keep your questions high level and try to get an understanding of their priorities and challenges.
• Make sure to ask about the org structure of their area and direct reports.
• Last make sure to humanize the conversation by asking about their hobbies and personality; being remote could make it difficult to connect and build up a rapport with others.

Make sure to go over your notes right after each meeting and re-organize them. As you’re doing this, jot down all questions that come to your mind and follow-up on them.

Pro Tip: Draft a few questions ahead of time and use as a script and keep iterating to make it better and more relevant.

P.s. I am a podcast host and have an episode on Stakeholder Management which you can check here!

7. Proactively eMeet Your Colleagues (especially other PMs)

Ask other PM’s about their area of focus and the processes they go through and the way things are done. It’s best to ask about a recent release or product that they’ve launched to understand the end-to-end process that they went through.

One great way to wrap up the conversation is to ask them who you should talk to next. When you’re remote, the more people you meet, the better it’ll serve you down the road.

Pro Tip: Ask about lessons learned and make a note of them for your reference.

8. Read Documentation (with caution)

After you’ve met with key stakeholders and while you’re meeting with the extended team, start reading through documents related to your area of Product. One thing worthy of note: make sure to ask how accurate and up-to-date are the documents.

I’ve noticed especially at big organizations, documentation isn’t followed much and there is a lot of “tribal knowledge” with teams. If that’s the case, start documenting what you hear and share it with your extended team.

Pro Tip: log your questions as you’re reading documents and proactively ask for answers from your colleagues.

9. Find a Quick Win:

First impressions matter and that applies to your remote onboarding as well. This one isn’t a must but if you can manage to find a quick win for an existing problem, it will go a long way.

One of the advantages of brand new hires is that they have low bias levels and that helps them see the product as-is with no preconception. Use that to your advantage to help position yourself and your value with your boss and extended team.

10. Put Together a Presentation on “Lay of the Land”

Now that you have a solid understanding of the Product and organization, it should be much easier to connect the dots. You can take advantage of all your fresh perspectives and create an artifact, call it “lay of the land” and present to extended team.

Product vision, strategy, OKRs, and how your role fits into them can go into this artifact. You can include details on what’s working and what’s not from your lens and your customers' standpoint.

You’d be surprised how long could this one go. It shows your diligence, proactiveness, and also serves a knowledge base for your extended team.