When the pandemic first sent office employees home last year, knowledge workers and managers didn’t know what types of interactions they needed to succeed. I am reproducing this fascinating article from Kristen Senz at Harvard Business School because it really resonated with me and the experience I have had working with my teams remotely for more than a year. A lot of non verbal cues are not only missed but most importantly many times misunderstood, which in a corporate setting can lead to disaster. The Harvard research points to “bounce time” for example, which doesn’t exist really in a virtual setting. Executives are starting to envision post-COVID collaboration in organizational cultures reshaped by remote work. Research by Leslie Perlow, the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership at HBS, and colleagues sheds light on the interactions that were lost during the pandemic’s early weeks, and how teams adapted or faltered. The findings also hold practical implications for managers struggling with low engagement and inefficiency amid a lack of face time and continued pandemic stress. “One of the big insights from our work has been that, just because you went to the meeting doesn’t mean you know what happened,” explains Perlow. “The more senior people assume that the more junior people understood the meeting because they were there.” In reality, while technology makes it possible to invite more and different people to virtual meetings, the lack of spontaneous “huddle time”—quick post-meeting conversations to process what just happened—can leave some attendees in the dark about nuances and next steps. The researchers also found that switching from on-site to remote work reduced “bounce time,” a term they use to describe impromptu brainstorming sessions. The disappearance of bounce time stunted innovation and caused content discussions to intrude on meetings scheduled for other purposes. “Grabbing a marker and sketching ideas together on a whiteboard—that's much more difficult in the virtual environment,” says Ashley Whillans, assistant professor at HBS and co-author of the study Experimenting During the Shift to Virtual Team Work: Learnings from How Teams Adapted Their Activities During the COVID-19 Pandemic, which will appear in the journal Information and Organization. Perlow, Whillans, and HBS doctoral student Aurora Turek interviewed 51 knowledge workers at a professional services firm from April to June 2020 to chart teams’ interactions as they transitioned to remote work. The name of the firm and its industry are confidential, but its teams routinely traveled together to visit clients prior to the pandemic. Drawing on past research about collaboration, the study identifies three categories of interpersonal interactions essential to knowledge workers and looks at how teams tried to facilitate them. They include: At the office, the teams studied would often sit together and discuss content or projects, providing feedback about ideas and early iterations. Like with bounce time interactions, these “content interactions” were usually spontaneous, so the shift to remote work made it difficult to give and receive early input. In response to these challenges, the teams found that using asynchronous communication tools—specifically, Slack or similar messaging apps—helped compensate for the lack of spontaneity. Moreover, the researchers suggest that this change could permanently improve team collaboration, even when teams reunite in person, by giving individual members more time to think through their responses. To compensate for lost bounce interactions, the teams used synchronous communication tools, such as WebEx or Zoom, to simulate in-person work conditions and brainstorming. Even with these tools, it took time for teams to adapt, the study says. The researchers quoted one of their study subjects in the paper as follows: “In the first project, we didn’t have a virtual team room, and didn’t have a rhythm for working together and organizing our work,” the interviewee said. “In the second project, we had a smoother teaming process because we tried to relax the norms around communication, do more virtual brainstorming, and allow for more personal autonomy over the work.” Process interactions: Prioritizing quality over quantity In terms of agenda-setting, Perlow, Whillans, and Turek found that balancing the quantity and quality of process interactions was critical for teams as they adjusted to remote work. In an office, it’s easy to ask a manager or colleague, “When is this due?” or “Who’s working on that?” Without those informal interactions, teams often went too far, scheduling too many meetings to touch base. “They would have check-ins and check-outs, and then that process time would start to get usurped and there would be other kinds of interactions happening within it,” Whillans says. “Process time started to become content conversations because teams were not getting as much feedback during the day.” With so many check-ins, burnout became a real concern. Over time, teams discovered that using Slack or minimally disruptive technologies for process questions helped them achieve balance. Relationship interactions: Connecting through huddles, not yoga The importance of nurturing social relationships has come sharply into focus during the pandemic, as often isolated coworkers communicate exclusively online. Spontaneous socializing in the office helps build bonds, and “huddle time” offers opportunities to learn from one another. When these interactions could no longer happen organically, teams started scheduling them. Virtual drinks, team dinners, and yoga sessions became opportunities to learn more about colleagues than was possible in the office, as videoconferencing offered glimpses into people’s home lives. But as they interviewed employees at the firm they studied, the researchers found that scheduled social time tended to feel forced, and not everyone was interested or able to attend. Still, those who participated found the experiences worthwhile, even if they fell short of past in-person gatherings. Not all social time is the same, however. “Huddle time” helps workers understand the team’s work and context. For teams that valued these “hallway conversations,” especially after meetings, and made an effort to replicate them online, “the results were striking,” the researchers write. “The challenge of replicating ‘hallway’ conversations via digital communication led interviewees to realize that these conversations were more than ‘downtime’—it became apparent that these conversations helped the team qualify their thinking,” they write. Short, scheduled debriefs after client meetings helped team members process what transpired and the work that needed to follow. Moving forward in a virtual world By labeling the types of interactions a team needs and tracking the quality of scheduled time, managers can systematically improve collaboration, the researchers write. “There’s huge inefficiency in so many meetings, and it became even worse in the virtual world,” says Perlow. “So, how can we think about, what are good meetings, and what are less-effective meetings?” Inevitably, various types of team interactions co-occur or overlap. Perlow says she and her fellow researchers are continuing to examine those intersections and ways that different technologies can improve team collaboration long term. “When we go back to the new normal,” says Perlow, “now that we better understand that you need these different types of interactions to work well together as a team, can we figure out how to do them more effectively?” Let me know what you think!
DM me @philippemora on IG and Twitter My name's phil mora and I blog about the things I love: fitness, hacking work, tech and anything holistic. Head of Digital Product thinker, doer, designer, coder, leader
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As the longest and largest unplanned work-from-home experiment continues almost a year after the first lockdowns, there are a lot of questions that are emerging, for example: when the dust settles, hopefully in the second half of 2021 when a majority of the population has been vaccinated, will remote work become the rule or the exception? Is a permanently remote workforce sustainable? How will productivity and employee well-being be affected? Will innovation suffer in the absence of face-to- face peer connections? What will be the role of the physical office? Probably companies will be able to overcome the issues and ambiguities related to the digital workplace, and embrace its positive aspects in particular harvesting and making sense of the data generated by worker’s tools and platforms in order to effectively optimize team performance and customize the employee experience through personalized recommendations. And as onsite workspaces and headquarters evolve, organizations can use this data to create thriving, productive, and cost-effective offices that are seamlessly interwoven with the remote experience. The study here from Deloitte is fascinating (page 116) and I thought I would share – personally after a l year of working virtually, a few themes and lessons emerge and this study is spot on in a lot of very interesting ways. It’s a good read! Let me know what you think!
DM me @philippemora on IG and Twitter My name's phil mora and I blog about the things I love: fitness, hacking work, tech and anything holistic. Head of Digital Product thinker, doer, designer, coder, leader I have always seen lots of debating about the roles of product manager and product owner. In most agile frameworks in high-tech software product, and for both larger companies as well as startups, the product manager communicates the voice of the customer by achieving both customer and market success. In contrast, the product owner creates, maintains and prioritizes the product backlog, creates actionable user stories for the development team, participates in scrum meetings (if the team is sprinting), answers developer’s questions as the customer / user representative, works and signs off on completed user stories acceptance criteria and lastly participates in iteration retrospectives. That said, not all software companies work this way – in some orgs you only have product managers, in others just the product owner. So: where’s the right mix? For larger engineering teams, some organizations decide to split the product role in two - and in that scenario, the product manager is responsible for conducting market research, validating customers, managing and foreseeing the company’s long-term vision, communicating with external stakeholders, etc. Some will describe the product manager as the CEO of the product mainly due to the front-line character of the role:
The product manager is also responsible for driving the product strategy and monitoring the whole product lifecycle starting from market research, customer adoption and enablement, all the way to product marketing, business development and sales. The product manager is also expected to know the product as well as the target market inside out. In contrast, many organizations will have Product Owners take the role of defining user stories, managing the backlog, talking with the team about the requirements, constructing the product processes, attending all the agile meetings, communicating the validated roadmap to the PM and helping them build the roadmap/vision using internal and external feedback. In other words, the PO does all the product homework that needs to be done. As a result, they are considered as the Chief Operating Officer of the Product.
In other words, in certain organizations, the Product Owner is the customer voice of the Scrum team. This helps the developers get the right answers fast, as the PO needs to be next to the development team whenever they need them while the product manager is not necessarily much into the technical stuff since their role is more about the grand vision of the product. What’s the right mix? My suggestion has always been that the PM and PO should be one person, no matter the size of the organization – keeping the correct line of sight from vision to execution to data-driven iteration so that the more strategic activities of the product manager and the tactical work of the product owner are met in one person. It is hard to find resources that have all the talent and experience necessary, but in my opinion it is well worth it. In the end, the tactical decisions should reflect the overall strategy and the overall strategy is generally affected by the circumstances that the development team faces so why split the role? Let me know what you think!
DM me @philippemora on IG and Twitter My name's phil mora and I blog about the things I love: fitness, hacking work, tech and anything holistic. Head of Digital Product thinker, doer, designer, coder, leader As a new decade sets in, I would like to take a close look at three fundamental trends that are shaping product management in 2020:
PMs are now strategic leaders within an organization As I have said in a previous post last year, in the past, product managers were often confused for user experience designers, senior technology leads, or even project managers. At best, teams acknowledged PMs as product owners in the agile sense, and as such their main deliverable was the product backlog. The real impact of product management was often misunderstood, and PMs did not have the software of resources to carry out their best work. In 2020, this is no longer true. PMs play an increasingly significant role that will not only impact a company’s product, but overall strategy and growth. In traditional organizations, PMs are needed to create digital product experiences that seamlessly align with existing products and services — a major challenge brought on by the age of digital transformation. In the B2B world, we are seeing a “consumerization of IT,” meaning that people want the technology they use for work to look like the elegant, well-designed tools they use personally (like the iPhone and other B2C products). Thus, PMs are crucial for creating delightful B2B products that appeal to both buyers and end-users. Finally, the convenience of modern technology has increased customer expectations. Customers want your product to solve their problems now. And if you can’t do it, someone else will. As a result, Product Managers in 2020 largely own the product strategy and vision, and play an active role in the future of organizations. More than ever, PMs use data-driven processes and systems to support their mission-critical work and their decision-making responsibilities also mean that it’s on them to act as leaders within their organizations and rally everyone around their plan. Product-led growth and growth product managers As I have said last year, Product-led growth is a go-to-market strategy that relies on product usage as the primary driver of acquisition, conversion, and expansion. The model is exploding in popularity because when executed well, a product can infiltrate the market and grow on its own — no extra work required. Growth product managers share a lot in common with traditional product managers, but instead of owning the product, the growth PM works to improve a specific set of metrics or goals. Experimentation is core to the growth PM job description, and they often use methods like A/B testing to continuously optimize their metric of focus. Some growth PMs own part of the product like onboarding, the sign-up experience, websites, monetization strategy, and email flows. Teams begin to understand the importance of transparency in product management In high-functioning organizations, everyone is invested in a common product vision and works to support the product in one way or another. To be effective, they need to know what products and features are coming up, what was launched, what is in consideration, and how everything relates to the organization’s overarching goals. It is the responsibility of product organizations to make this information accessible.
Product teams who foster this kind of transparency often use a tool or method specifically designed to openly share the product management process —a “source of truth.” This opens up the business context and user insights behind each product-related decision. When transparency is embraced by product teams, it prevents knowledge silos that can hinder communication with customers, prospects, and other stakeholders. It helps cross-functional departments understand the rationale behind tough trade-offs on what gets built next, even if they don’t personally agree with the decision. In short, transparency unites everyone behind a common goal, which, let’s admit, is simply good for business. Let me know what you think!
DM me @philippemora on IG and Twitter My name's phil mora and I blog about the things I love: fitness, hacking work, tech and anything holistic. Head of Digital Product thinker, doer, designer, coder, leader |
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