It’s not quite spooky action at a distance, but if you’re a remote product owner you may find a bit of entanglement helpful to maintain that shared understanding you worked so hard to build with your team.
On May 9th, Luke Hohmann and I will share some ways you can be a more effective product owner at a distance in the latest installment of the Collaboration at Scale Webinar Series. Here’s the info:
6 Tips for Effective Product Ownership at a Distance
Effective product ownership allows you to focus your team on outcome over output, build shared understanding, and make sure decisions get made. These activities are key to building the right thing and not building things that aren’t needed. When your teams are separated from each other, or your Product Owners are separated from your teams, those activities become more difficult, and more important. This webinar will include six tips you can use to practice effective product ownership in a distributed situation.
In this issue of Inside Product Management, I wanted to share some resources that will help to make working remote a little less spooky.
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Resources
What type of remote worker are you?
Are you a connector, a talker, an observer, an explainer, an improver, a driver, a promoter, or do you exhibit some or all these traits at any given time?
Nicole Wosje takes a look at the 7 types of remote workers and explains why you need to embody a bit of each archetype depending on the situation.
How can you be an effective remote product manager?
Ron Yang shares his 5 tips for remote product managers based on his experience working with Aha!, an entirely remote organization.
His suggestions:
- Show the purpose
- Show visual plans
- Respond super fast
- Jump to video
- Celebrate the team
How to deal with time dilation, relatively speaking
In an ideal world your team would all be in the same building sitting in the same areas and able to have spontaneous in depth conversations when you need.
In the real world, you aren’t always able to get people with the skills you need to set up shop in San Francisco, London, Sydney, or even the Silicon Prairie. You may find that getting the skills you need requires you to have a team that spans multiple time zones. Maddy Kirsch shares 6 tips to manage a product team that spans time zones. Follow these tips to reduce the impact of time dilation for your distributed team.
Your Basecamp doesn’t have to be at the office
“As an employer, restricting your hiring to a small geographic region means you’re not getting the best people you can. As an employee, restricting your job search to companies within a reasonable commute means you’re not working for the best company you can. Remote shows both employers and employees how they can work together, remotely, from any desk, in any place, anytime, anywhere.
You can be agile and remote
If you would like to use all or parts of the Scrum framework, but are concerned that you can’t because your team is distributed, you may want to check out the Distributed Scrum Primer.
The primer outlines practices that can help distributed teams excel, and highlights some of the common pitfalls that teams encounter, along with ways to respond to these challenges. The primer outlines:
- practices which can help overcome the challenges that come with a distributed team, first in enabling communication and then in building trust
- useful tips for implementing the Scrum roles, meetings, artifacts, and technical practices
- common pitfalls to avoid