Navigating Communication Challenges with a Newly Remote Team

Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash

As a product manager, a large part of the time is spent on communication. Communicating with other PMs, designers, developers, business stakeholders, and client engagement team is important in ensuring that quality product is shipped and that the different stakeholders are all on the same page.

Effective communication in and of itself is not easy to achieve by any means and this is even more difficult under the new normal caused by COVID-19. At StashAway, since April 2020, (almost) the entire company started working from home following government measures to contain the pandemic.

Difficulties we faced at the start

1. Decreased velocity: Instead of walking over to a designer’s desk to discuss and review design, or to a developer’s desk to answer clarifications with regards to product logic, such spontaneous communication was replaced with Slack messages, which are prone to miscommunications. As such, more time was spent on clarifying any miscommunication and rectifying the mistakes rather than doing productive work. Collaboration was painful and inefficient.
2. Awkward and unproductive meetings: In contrast to everyone being in the meeting room where the PM can generally manage the meeting flow better, make eye contacts, as well as observe body language and facial expressions, virtual meetings restrict some of those abilities. And safe to say that I was no stranger to the long awkward silence when I asked a question during a virtual meeting.
3. Information disconnect: With remote working, there is a higher chance for people to miss the information being circulated. During virtual meetings (especially a huge one involving many participants), people tend to multi-task and possibly miss out on important information being shared during the meeting. To make matter worse, lack of physical lunches and coffee chats meant that the additional channels where information is shared have also disappeared altogether.

Photo by Jukan Tateisi on Unsplash

What we did to improve remote communication

1. Annotate and document more religiously: We started annotating and documenting more than before, especially when it comes to product design. We annotated changes specifically and spelled out more clearly the business logic and expected behavior to reduce assumptions made where possible. We also created and populated an internal product knowledge base that dives deeper into different topics, such as portfolio types, account types, deposit and withdrawal, and many others.
2. Encourage quick voice/video calls: Truth be told, a lot of the miscommunications (and the pain that comes with them) could have been easily avoided if both parties are willing to “jump on a quick call”, which effectively replaces the action of walking over to someone’s desk when we are in office. When compared to sending the other party a multi-paragraph text message via Slack, this is almost always a more efficient way of getting on the same page or have a quick discussion or clarification without actually scheduling an official virtual meeting.
3. Improve meeting etiquette: Other than switching the camera on during meetings, sending over an agenda before the meeting as well as a summary or minutes after also help with overall alignment across multiple parties. As a PM, what I find helpful is also to mentally take note of participants who didn’t speak up as much (again, especially so in a larger virtual meeting with more than 6–8 participants) and prompt them specifically for their views or opinions — not to pick on them, but rather actively ensuring each person gets a voice and decisions are being made collectively.
4. Dedicated Slack channels and workflows: We created a few dedicated channels and utilised Slack workflows to better centralise and distribute information. One example is a #product-updates channel where we built a simple and straightforward Slack workflow that publishes changelogs announcing new mobile/webapp build as well as website changes, with the primary purpose of keeping everyone in the loop of the latest product changes. We also created a #product-feedback channel for anyone to submit feedback or idea using a Slack workflow, after which the feedback is automatically zapped into Airtable via Zapier to be discussed and prioritised subsequently.
5. Make virtual collaboration interactive and fun: Perhaps one of the tougher challenges in the new normal is to ensure collaboration continues to happen effectively. We tried out different collaboration tools for this purpose and to our surprise, Figma works pretty decently for general collaboration as well even though we use it as a design tool. The flexibility of the tool also meant that we could better structure the session and engage our participants, setting ourselves up for a more productive session.

Brainstorming over Figma and having fun while voting and discussing various ideas!

Conclusion

To be fair, many of the things we did here probably could have been done even before the pandemic strike us — remote working simply revealed and magnified some of the issues that were already present. Nonetheless, the new normal has pushed us, in a good way, to rethink the way we communicate, collaborate, and work together. Just one month after we became fully remote, we found that in general, velocity picked up, meetings became more fun and productive, miscommunications were reduced, and we were able to continue focusing on shipping great products to our customers.

We are constantly on the lookout for great talents to join our team. Visit our careers page to learn more and feel free to reach out to us!