Remote product management & design

Welcome again to the Product Bakery. I'm Christian and since a long time here with my co-host Alex in person in Berlin, here for you. Hi Alex. Hi Christian, nice to finally see you again in person. Oh yeah, sitting next to each other and recording feels like almost nostalgic. Yes, indeed. And I have to say that I'm, that I feel that like slowly Berlin is like more returning to normal with a lot of people being vaccinated, restaurants being open, green passes whatsoever, allowing us like to meet again. It's pretty nice, I have to say. Yeah. And when I look back over the last couple of almost two years, we needed to find many solutions when you and I weren't able to meet or didn't also have the time to see each other in person via Zoom, via certain tools that we tried out. I think we also discussed some of them already. And I was just wondering, how do you want to proceed? What do you think? So I think that it's definitely that there was a lot of good progress, like also in terms of, as you say, like tooling and so on. I think also most of the companies adjusted to this new ways of working and even non-very digital native companies are very fluid now with like tools like Zoom or having a workshop in Miro. But I have to say that just this week with my company, we had an in-person offsite. So sounds really rare. Yeah, it felt pretty weird to, first of all, see everyone. I joined the company in March. So really full-on lockdown when I joined. Most of the people, I've never met them in person, or I've only had personal interactions with a few people who came to the office, because I think the normal now is that people work from home. So you don't see them, you don't meet anyone. We had a lot of new joiners in a period because obviously the company is growing. We have people in different offices, Hong Kong, London, and they all came to Berlin and we all met in person. So obviously we all have our vaccines. We all got tested the day before just to make sure, because obviously the vaccine is also not like fully covering you. But then we could spend the day together without masks, without having to worry. And I have to say that what I got out of those meetings was just so good. And I think it was so more productive than comparing it to the time when you don't meet physically. I think it's a good question of where do we go from now? I think most companies don't want to go back to the normal in-office policies, but at the same time, I personally am someone who really thinks that it's important for the companies or for the employees to move back, to get this productivity, to be close, to be able to sit on a table and just ask someone something whenever the question comes up. I think it's also much more time efficient than having to schedule calls or having to write via Slack. I think the in-person communication is just amazing. I'm not sure how you perceive this over the last couple of months. I've been back to some offices over the last couple of months as well. And the emotional part when you do coaching is definitely something which is more in the front, something that you can take care of when you see someone and when you talk to someone. However, I'm just asking myself if it's really needed because for sure, having this on-site workshops and having the chitchat in between and the small talk is actually what helps you bonding. Fully agree with that. However, I hear from many people and also companies, I think it's also public, that in some industries, the whole topic of performance and outputs and outcomes has increased over Corona. So there were companies who managed to accelerate and take an advantage out of the remote work. So I believe it will be more hybrid in the future, but I wouldn't see being on-site anymore mandatory. I might be biased a bit because what I'm doing is much more of like a creative job as well. And I feel like creativity is bigger when you have the possibility to just talk about things, to brainstorm, to raise ideas. And this is also how I work. I cannot sit down and just be creative. For me, it's always something that is part of the, like we're talking as part of the process. I talk to someone and as I talk, I come to new conclusions, I get new ideas. And usually just a short conversation brings you much further than me just sitting down and doing something. Obviously, it's very different for different people, for different mindsets on what makes them the most productive. But for me, at least when it comes to creativity, when it comes to working out new ideas, I can't do that fully remote because I also miss a lot of this time. And if I have an idea, I either communicate it via message where you cannot communicate it to the full extent, and this could also be a language barrier. And if I then have to set up a meeting, it's also like you need to prepare it. It's never as natural as if I'm sitting on the same table. And I have to say like last week because of the event, for example, our head of marketing flew in from New York and he was in the office. And for the first time, we were really spending days together and we were sitting in the same room. And man, you don't want, it's unbelievable how much more productive it actually was to quickly like as a response to an email, for example, be like, hey, I just got this email about this recent campaign. How should we tackle this? Let's quickly discuss this. I couldn't have done that remotely. I think there was recently just a post on LinkedIn that Google started making sure that employees coming back to the office and they're really strict about it because they also believe that on-site communication and in-person communication is the best to be productive. But I would also like to distinguish between different working modes. For example, if I have one-on-one conversations with someone, I can do it also on the call. If I want to, for example, work in workshops or if I want to have this creative process with fast communication instead of going always across Slack and email, it definitely makes sense to be on-site. And I hear also for many people who are back in their offices saying they are back to the office destruction and being interrupted all the time by people asking questions that are not necessarily mandatory because if someone is there and you can ask them, you sometimes rather ask them instead of thinking about the answer, which can be also a little bit distracting. So I think a good healthy mix, especially now working in product in our case, is having times where you meet, not necessarily fixed times, but making sure for certain events, for certain parts of the process, let's say feature planning or design critique or something like that, it is nice to be in the office. While for one-on-one sessions, you can, for example, also say as a manager, I do my, or as a product manager, I do my one-on-ones on one day and we just do it remote. Yeah, of course you can do things like one-on-ones. I would even say workshops. I think what I'm describing as part of like also the creative process is something less organized than a workshop. It's not okay. We need to brainstorm new ideas for X, Y, Z, because honestly, workshops with Miro or Lucid or Figma, Freehand, whatsoever, they work extremely well. I think they sometimes even work better than doing it on the whiteboard simply because of the power of the tool. It's like post-its on steroids. Can do proper voting, I can do everything. So I think for workshopping, it works extremely well. But for me, it always comes down to the small interactions. And yes, you call it distractions, but take, for example, engineering team, a product team, right? A cross-functional team that needs to work out some things. As a designer, if I have a question around technical feasibility, I need to wait either for the next day to discuss it. I need to schedule a meeting. I need to write a message where it's harder to convey the whole context and to get the whole message across instead of just being able to sit in a room with my team, bring up questions when they arise. Yes, they might be distracting whoever is like heads down coding. But I think overall, it helps also not losing time, working maybe in a direction that's not feasible, working maybe with some context that is missing because you're not able to clarify it on the spot. And I think this is a little bit like where I personally always feel it's more productive. And I think it's tricky, right? Because I see also, we made a survey on how people want to work in the future. Do they want to come back to the office? Do they want to work remote? So on. And I think on average, there's like a tendency of people who say, okay, I want to come to the office twice a week and work from home the rest of the time, which I think is good. But then you can also watch or look at different professions. And I think like when you look at the engineers, most of them were like, okay, we want to work remote all the time. And I think, okay, it might work for them, right? It's a job that's like really focused. You can sit down, work off your tasks. You might also be able to, if you analyze different personality types, you might find more introverts maybe on the engineering side than for example, on the sales side. So also this one kind of explains a little bit like the decision, but then how do you balance it as a team? Because for product, for the designers, and so on, it might be beneficial to work together. And for the engineers, they don't want to discuss those things. So it's tricky. And I don't know, I've personally never looked at data in terms of like output. I know there's done this, honestly, and this might be a very unpopular opinion. I think that sometimes it's just like people getting very comfortable now with this new networking mode. And it almost, to me, it sometimes sounds like an excuse of we're more productive because I don't see it on myself. Maybe it's wrong to just reflect it on everything and maybe it does work better for someone. But I personally believe in the power that you get from collaborating, from sitting together. Yeah, I like that you mentioned looking at different professions. So I think there are three dimensions you should take care of if you want to decide if remote is better or onsite. First of all, the industry. I mean, in our case, it's rather the profession. So product versus design versus engineering versus other departments. Then we have complexity and size. Because in bigger organizations where you have a lot of cross-functional dependencies or cross-functional collaboration, it's definitely worth it to be onsite and to make sure that you have this small communication between people rather than waiting for emails and replies. But on the other hand, if you are like a small startup with, let's say, five or ten people, it could actually work very well being remote by knowing, okay, whenever I have a question, I just press the call button and I have the person on the line. So there are also many teams who work like with open Zoom chats where you can every time just unmute Zoom and just drop something, which can work, but I believe to a certain size. So especially like middle companies that say 200, 400, up to a couple of thousand people might be sometimes better organized when they're onsite, while in very big companies where you have this very isolated departments and teams, you can actually go back to the first mode I explained where you have a small number of people you're working with where you could jump quickly on the line. So I think making a call on being remote or onsite depends a lot on those factors. And that's something I would ask myself first if I would be a product lead, product manager, CEO, whatever, leadership team to make a call on how to proceed. But the best way is obviously asking your people. Yeah. I hear you on size and complexity and so on and so forth, but let's try and break it down a little bit. We talked a lot about different operating models that we talked about. So the beautiful Spotify, Squat and Tribe model. Now, if we look at the problem that most of these models try to solve, it's okay. You want to come up, have smaller teams, have them as cross-functional teams so that you have all the different skills that are needed directly there and they can operate autonomously. So in theory, if you would look at it, what you're creating is like this startup-like environment of five, 10 people who can make their decisions and who can run fast. In theory, what you're saying is you could just apply such a remote model to that specific team. At the same time, I feel like it's easy to create a disconnect if everyone works remotely. And there's one thing that I would like to add on this, and this is an argument that I also use a lot. For me, it's like either or. It's like we can decide as a company that we go fully remote and there is a lot of examples where it works, but then everyone is remote. People are in a different city. People have to apply or to come up with the best operating model that is remote, can be the active Zoom call, can be whatever you want. But one thing that I don't see working is some people working remotely, some people going to the office. Because then you're creating two different cultures. You have people who can interact. You have others who don't. You have gossip on one end and gossip on the other side. You have engineers who love to be hats down, working off their things, who try to not communicate too much with everyone. And at the same time, you have maybe the designer and the product manager sit in the office and come up with their own ideas and have this disconnect to the rest of the team. It's like something where I see it more of a we need to decide it as a whole model. At the same time, if you think back when we worked at SumUp, we had multiple different offices. To some extent, it was like working remote. So if you increase the size even more, you will always end up having some people working remote because you cannot have a headquarter with 10,000 people and that's where everything's centralized. No, you will have local offices. But what did we do? We had cross-functional teams that were co-located. So I still have the operating team that needs to work closely in one location so they can work together. So I wouldn't hire a designer to work with engineers who are sitting in South America. And I think that's like, again, the same concept. And maybe you can have one product team or one engineering team that's fully remote. So everyone is remote and everyone is like a digital nomad and they live wherever they want, ideally in the same time zone. And other teams that are co-located. But I am somehow struggling with the idea of, okay, hybrid model, everyone does whatever they want. And oh, I'm just out for another six months because I'm traveling the world. I personally just don't think that's working. I agree here. And I used to work in a cross-functional team, which was spread across locations and it sucked, I have to admit. But I would like to add a third dimension here by saying, okay, we can do remote and onsite work, but it's for everyone fixed. By saying, okay, we have this one, two, three, I don't know how many days you need as a company or as a team where everyone will be in the office. And we have this, I want to call it focus time, but this special days where you're also all going remote to be able to get your shit done. Especially engineers need sometimes just coding time without meetings, which definitely makes sense. And also with that guaranteeing productivity on the other hand. Yeah. Big problem. A lot of companies try to, for example, use this hybrid model also to improve things like office capacity and so on and so forth. If you say everyone has to come to the office the same day and everyone stays at home the same day, you're adding that problem again to the mix. So yeah, it's, it probably comes down to how people manage to work. I would say it should be up to the operating team to define what model they have. And with operating team, I mean the cross-functional team that has to work together. If you have one team that says we can work fully remote, then they should probably do it. If they say we come to the office three days and the other two days we stay at home, then they should do it. If they say we all travel around and do whatever we want and it works, they should also do it. Yeah. But that closes the loop of things we have discussed many times. You need to involve your people. You need to understand the customer's problem or the employee's problem to make sure that you find out the best thing. And the worst thing you can do is just deciding a top down. And still, I think you also need to be honest to yourself of what really works best, because yes, I love being able to sit in Italy in the sun with my laptop and just reply to some emails. But at the same time, I also know I'm never as productive there as if I'm back home. And I think if everyone also takes the decision with the company in mind and not only their personal preference, because of course it's nice to travel all the time, then that's how you should take the decision. And I know why you can't be as productive on the beach than in Berlin. It's because you are on social media all the time. Talking about social media, whoever liked this episode, feel free to follow us and share your thoughts around remote work and what you believe will be the future. Thanks a lot, Christian. Have a nice day. Bye-bye.