There are a lot of hard skills required on your path to becoming a great product manager such as coding, data analytics, user experience design and digital marketing. But developing your soft skills is just as important, especially as you grow into senior product management roles.
What is it like to work as a product manager for hybrid teams? A product manager’s day is rarely uniform, especially if they’re working in a different location from their team. If you’re transitioning from a co-located product manager role to a remote or hybrid environment, you’re in the right place.
Product development teams today are working in a changing environment: our work is becoming more distributed, and our tools for work and communication have migrated online. Not only that, but teams are highly cross-functional in nature: we are designers, developers, product managers, scrum masters. We have different backgrounds and speak different problem-languages, making effective collaboration all the more complex.
You may have already heard the news that we recently rebranded: RealtimeBoard is now Miro. In previous posts, we’ve covered why we felt this change was necessary and how our CMO approached the rebranding project. This post is focused on how we worked with our agency partner, Vruchtvlees, to create our new brand identity.
As digital businesses realize how outstanding UX design gives them a competitive advantage, they’re investing in talented teams to deliver the exceptional experiences that users demand. Over the past several months, we talked to the leading companies in this space, including WhatsApp, Salesforce, and Upwork, and collected the insights about managing UX teams. Check out our guide to learn how good UX design can help you build the next big thing.
Visual thinking is one of the most valuable parts of the creative process. It helps you think: drawing makes you get specific with your ideas and see them in new ways, so you can continue to iterate. Visual thinking frees up mental energy, offloading some memory into external displays and taking advantage of the human capacity to recognize patterns.
From the beginning, we have aimed to help distributed teams work as if they were sitting in the same room. Through our journey, we discovered that the whiteboard was at the center of a lot of team ceremonies—a place where people would gather around, share their ideas, express themselves and solve big challenges. We called our product RealtimeBoard—this name was direct and defined a brand-new category of collaboration tools which help teams to align around a shared vision in real time.
Onboarding new people at a company can be a challenge. As a leader, you need to create a process that gives a new hire the ability to understand your team’s unique workflow and goals, and also ensure that they are fully equipped to start working and secure their first wins. These few months are so critical for a new employee, and they can be especially hard if you are working in a remote team.
To build best-in-class teams, win the competition, and, ultimately, create the next big thing, organizations are hiring talent from all across the world, making teams increasingly distributed. Some companies open hubs in booming cities to attract professionals from the region. Others, many of them leading tech companies like Automattic, Buffer, and InVision‚ prefer to create fully distributed teams, allowing their employees to work from anywhere.
Working in a remote team can be very challenging, especially if you’re trying to schedule a meeting with someone in a different time zone. As a distributed organization of 150+ people working from Europe, the United States and Australia, we know first-hand how painful this scheduling process can get, but we also understand that real-time communication is critical when you are building the next big thing.
