Product Ops for Distributed Teams
Key practicalities for Product Operations when your staff are global
Once upon a time, SaaS businesses working remotely (at least for some of their departments) was just a thing. It was practical, efficient. Then the pandemic of 2020/2021 made it first necessary for many more, and then cool. At the time of writing this article, old habits around control and realisation of inadequacies are creeping back in as business leaders strive to get staff back into physical buildings under their watchful eye and able to justify their swanky (yes, there is an s in there!) and expensive office locations.
Regardless of these efforts, the world of work has never been so global, so distributed, so geographically and timezone-disbursed. This presents some logistical challenges that, while present in any business, need some special attention to provide a considered and efficient working setup for your colleagues.
This article outlines some of the challenges we can encounter, and the steps I have taken in my Product Ops capacity to support excellent efficiency and practicality for globally distributed businesses.
Asynchronous, on Demand, on Schedule
Let’s get the obvious out of the way first - with teams all over the world, it becomes very difficult to hold synchronous events such as virtual calls or meetings, that are within typical working hours. One-off events or monthly all-hands are OK, but daily or weekly general events such as product demos, feedback sessions, planning sessions, these become tiresome.
Even if you do hold such live sessions, that live time is incredibly valuable and it is important to make every minute count.
Actually, the same really should be said for many meetings (traditionally those in more senior positions but everyone’s time in work is valuable!), where that synchronous time needs to be on topic, and covering things that need different people hearing or discussing things together. Setting the scene for 10 minutes, going over past meeting minutes, these are all a waste of that synchronous time and can be facilitated through asynchronous ‘offline’ actions (pre-reading, meeting prep processes etc).
To that end, the proposals in this article are just as valid regardless of how ‘distributed’ your business considers itself.
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