Last week we held the next session of our webinar series and asked the question, “How can product managers thrive when working remotely?” Craft.io CEO Elad Simon sat down (virtually) with Arif Gursel, CEO of ViBEHEAVY, for a lively and insightful chat that touched on the best ways for remote teams to communicate, avoid potentially detrimental tools, and the role PMs have to play in this transforming world of remote work.

Now that we’ve all dived into the deep end of remote working (thanks, #covid-19), it’s time product managers take stock of which tools and practices will help their teams maintain both focus and motivation. Previously PMs enjoyed the co-location perks of in-person stand-up meetings, watercooler chats, and live dynamic brainstorming. But without those opportunities for nuanced face-to-face communication, how can you lead your product effectively?

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses worldwide are switching their mindset and employees to working remotely. This change has introduced us to a myriad of challenges: whether it’s juggling the reality of working with your kids in the house (read: zoo), ensuring you maintain a healthy work-life balance, or finding the right tools to help you get your work done.

With COVID-19 in full swing, today’s businesses must adapt faster than ever. Travel restrictions, quarantines, and business closures are all having a detrimental effect on our economy, way of life, and livelihoods. As product managers, we are the linchpins governing the decision-making process, requiring constant communication with our stakeholders. On a good day, this comes with many difficulties, but during a pandemic, when everyone is working remotely, these challenges multiply exponentially.

Every Product team likes to run their product management processes their own way. We all know that. Prioritization, workflows, dependency management, and sprint planning all look and feel a bit different depending on the team. Yet, when you need to collaborate and share information you still want your entire team to work from the same source of truth. That’s quite a challenge! To help achieve this we are rolling out two new features we are very excited about: Saved Views and Shared Views.

As Product people, we all know how important our product roadmap is. It allows us to connect product strategy to a timeline, outline what’s coming when and clarify why you are doing things. But we heard from many of our customers that they expect for more, so we’ve revamped the roadmap. Now, it doesn’t only tell everyone what you’re planning to do, it also keeps track of the actual progress of your development teams so everyone is informed on what actually happened.

It’s clear that feedback can – and should – be a critical part of the product management decision making process. When planning your product strategy it is essential to find out what real users think and then strike a balance between coming up with your own innovative ideas, reacting to market trends and taking customer opinions into account.

Decisions, decisions! Life’s full of them – from life-changing choices such as if you should accept that enticing job offer or relocate to another country to those smaller things like what to have for lunch! And decision-making is a central aspect of the product management role: the success of the product depends on the ability to make the right decisions at the right time and then communicate them effectively.

When it comes to online tech products Google is the undisputed world leader – almost everything it launches turns to gold, swiftly becoming the industry standard. From Search and Gmail to Chrome, Docs, Maps, Translate, Drive and Google Plus the massive successes have far outweighed the failures. It only makes sense then that any insight we can get into the processes used by Google Product Managers should be treated as a great reference for how to deliver high quality products.

For most Product Managers the roadmap is a classic double-edged sword. On the one hand it provides a valuable and welcome opportunity to focus your product vision and share it with colleagues, managers and customers. But all too often the process of creating, presenting and retaining a roadmap quickly evolves into an unavoidable headache.