Lessons in remote product management

Caio Ferreira, senior product manager, and Lucie Oudinet, group product manager, sound off on tips and tools for scaling a product while working remotely.

Tell us about your role at Taxfix

Caio — I’m the product manager for the Operations Services Team. Our work enables the Customer Success and Operations Teams inside the company. We make sure that they have the right processes and the right tooling to serve our customers best while growing the business exponentially across multiple markets.

Lucie — I’m the group product manager for our German market. This group is composed of four cross-functional delivery teams — or missions. My goal is to define objectives for the group and align everyone on the product vision. Most importantly, I enable product managers to deliver great work and reach towards our goal of creating the best tax filing experience in Germany. While iterating on this core experience, we also introduce innovative features that bring us closer to our dream product vision.

How do you keep your team aligned while working remotely?

Caio — When I first joined the company last year, I was working remotely from my home country, Brazil. Being the only remote team member was a challenge, especially during meetings where everyone else was physically together. So, in a way, when we all moved to an extended home office setting, everyone was suddenly in my shoes. This shift drastically changed the way we communicate and document information. We had to be even more transparent, engaging and empowering everyone in the team. We treat Slack, for example, like a virtual office space. Instead of having private conversations, we try to write everything in public channels. This helps to avoid silos and spread the information across the team. Also, as it’s an asynchronous communication tool, it reduces the need to be in meetings.

Lucie — All of our mission teams follow Lean Product Development processes, which implies running structured ceremonies like daily standups, grooming sessions, planning sessions, and retrospectives. Having those meetings already in place helped maintain alignment when we shifted to remote working.

What we struggled with in the beginning, however, was how we plan experiments and share resources across our different mission teams. For instance, when running A/B tests on the product experience, we’ve had to create a lot more clarity around which tests are running when. This way if two teams are delivering something on the same part of the experience, there is no cross-contamination between experiments. I think these changes would have happened sooner or later because the company is growing. Working remotely just sped things up.

How do you stay connected with stakeholders?

Lucie — I always try to understand the best way to engage with different people and functions in the organisation. With some stakeholders, you get much more value out of having a chat. With others, you’d rather prepare a well-structured document and go back and forth with written comments. I like to treat my colleagues as ‘users’ and adapt to deliver the best experience possible for them. So if there is a particular method that works better, I want to figure out what this is. You have to be willing to challenge what you’ve done in the past. When I have the feeling that the energy in a meeting drops, or we don’t make the most out of it, I’ll change the format.

Caio — I made a conscious effort to bring stakeholders closer to the team. Through our weekly shadowing initiative with Customer Success — our internal customers — everyone on my team had a chance to talk with them and understand their needs. Speaking directly with stakeholders, especially in a remote setting, has made work more collaborative. It has also increased the level of autonomy in the team. They can take decisions themselves because they have full context on the problem we’re trying to solve.

What new methods and tools have helped you?

Caio — We introduced silent meetings this year, which made some tasks, like setting our quarterly objectives and key results, much smoother. In this format, one person prepares a ‘table read’ beforehand. All meeting attendees then go through the information together and make comments directly within the document — all while remaining silent. This style of meeting has been far more efficient because the context is already there in writing, which allows us to focus on making decisions instead. The entire team has a fair chance to provide their thoughts, and we document everything as we go. We only jump into a vocal discussion when needed — which isn’t too often.

Lucie — On the design side, we’ve shifted to using Figma. This tool enables the team to comment directly on the screens shared by our Design Team; it’s a very straightforward way to collaborate. We also adopted Miro for design sprints with large groups of people. This one is very visual, like a giant digital wall. And since we work a lot with walls and sticky notes in Product, we needed to find a remote-friendly way to recreate this. For retrospectives, we found an excellent tool called Metro Retro. This one lets the team easily cluster sticky notes and open voting sessions to prioritise points.

What’s the biggest challenge of scaling a product while working from home?

Lucie — Making decisions on the Product organisation structure demands better planning when all deciding forces are working remotely. As our product matures in the German market, the biggest challenge is to find the right balance between innovating and investing in our core product, while also scaling the way we operate as a business. We’ve tackled this problem by creating more defined focuses within our different product groups and created whole new product groups to ensure operational efficiency or to look into new service lines. Making changes in the Product organisation requires strategic cooperation with many stakeholders and alignment on the long-term company objectives well in advance. It’s all about anticipating what might take longer or will need more iterations in the remote set up.

Caio — Running discovery in a remote setting is far more complicated. Typically in product discovery, it helps to be in the same room with your users so that you can observe how they interact with the product. In times like now, where we’re all stuck at home, you need to approach this differently. I recommend having everything prepared in advance and splitting what you want to discover into more phases. We did this with our Customer Success team last quarter by conducting smaller experiments and scheduling follow-up sessions to go deeper into our questions.

What’s your biggest learning from this experience?

Caio — Communication and empathy. In my opinion, one of the essential skills for a product manager is communication. And this year it’s been even more important to communicate not only with our team but also with the different area stakeholders. I’ve learned to document excessively and to ensure that everything makes sense in a structured way. So that not only the team, but stakeholders and management can digest the information, and we can make better decisions, together.

As a team, we’ve also learned a lot about each other this year. It’s so important to recognise the headspace of the other person. Even just taking five minutes before the start of a meeting to ask how someone is feeling or what they did over the weekend is a great way to relax and prepare ourselves for the important work that lies ahead. I appreciate these little moments because it helps me connect with the person on the other side of the screen.

Lucie — At the end of the day, it’s about the people and building trust in the way that we work. How do you keep this personal connection between people in a remote setup? I think the most valuable learning from this year is that you can’t give up on the people. Your team is, and remains, your top priority as manager. If you have people with you, anything is possible — even shifting the way we work. Everyone feels differently about working from home — some like it, some struggle a bit more. As a manager, you have to pay attention to the details, take the time to care for each other, and try to read between the lines. This connection will help you continue to achieve great results as a team.

Interested in joining our Product Team? Check out our open roles.