Covid-19: What Can Product Managers Do?

This blog post should not be considered authoritative in any way. It simply an imperfect attempt to highlight some guiding principles. I am convinced these guiding principles could be useful for you, your dear-ones and your team.

Take care of yourself

Social distancing can feel lonely — Photo by the Author

I think the first and foremost change is that you need to take extra care of yourself, your immediate family and all the people you are sharing your physical space with.

If you are in a dire emotional state, please reach out to your immediate network and seek professional advice as soon as you feel yourself drowning or if you are too anxious to be productive! Now is not a time to remain silent and “cope with it.”

Being emotionally available and aware is a pre-requisite if you aspire to help others: the person(s) you are sharing your space with, your family, friends and coworkers. Now more than ever, you need to have good-enough mental and physical health.

The remote impact

It is not in my job description!

If you were not working in a 100% remote environment before Covid-19, now you are. Most certainly, this is not your choice, and it was not in your job description. Get over this decision as fast as possible.

If you want to lead others, you have to first understand why this change is necessary. Then you will have to help others accept this new reality. 

Only once you are 110% convinced will you be able to lead others. If you are not convinced, read about it on Internet, document yourself, practice self-awareness and understand fully why self-isolation is good for you and for the world.

It is all about remote communication now!

This is the new normal — Photo by Matthew Henry from Burst

It is now time to step-up your remote-communication game: communication is now remote. For most of your family and friends as well as for work. Become an expert rapidly: find and explore new tools, learn to use all the tools at your disposal and then help others adapt.

Whether you take care of your grand-mother getting comfortable with Zoom or support a coworker having similar issues: be there for others and help them master this new form of communication. Being human is all about communication: if you or the person you are talking to are not comfortable with remote-communication, you can not help them. 

In this new world, remote-communication is not optional, it is a per-requisite for any meaningful social, familial and work related interaction.

Daily & weekly rituals

I am not sure there is anything specific about product management. Product managers are leaders without authority. This post very generic to any business and profession.

Life is now almost 100% remote. Your professional life is now 100% remote as well. As a consequence, you have to set-up and implement new daily and weekly rituals for your team.

Throw away all the recurring meetings you had before Covid-19. Remote-team do not work like in-person teams. Document yourself, read blogs, listen to podcast, watch YouTube videos, listen to audiobooks. Learn and adapt.

Some guiding principle to set-up these rituals

At a high-level, the main difference is that you should try to communicate information via digital artifacts that can be shared easily within your organization. For instance:

• google doc
• prototypes
• videos

The extraordinary benefit of this approach is that from now on all the project history, status is now shareable within your team, other teams, to stakeholders and to anyone inside your organization. No need for an informational meeting. Everyone can now learn and get informed on its own time.

Synchronous rituals (aka meeting) should focus on two things only:

• Socialize and support each other during these times of changes: we need to move beyond the regular work facade. You now are in your coworkers’ house, home office, bedroom and kitchen. You will see your coworkers loved-ones, cats and dogs! The social distancing at the workplace is partially gone! Deal with-it together with your team.
• Solve an already identified problem. Empower the team to make great decisions quickly. Slow down when this is a super-consequential decision, speed things up if this is clear and do not seem to have a considerable impact.

Ideally, the two should not be mixed-up. If you support a coworker on the verge of depression, transitioning to a key-decision making meeting may not be the right thing to do.

The opposite is also exact.

Don’t sugarcoat reality

I am not aware of any business not impacted by Covid-19. We are on the edge of one of possibly the most important human disaster experienced by humanity. It will be followed by an unprecedented recession. It is already affecting billions of humans. It is only the beginning.

As a consequence, it is reasonable to assume that, like similar-scale catastrophe (first world war, great depression, second world war), It will have long-lasting effects on every government, business and individual. It will shape-up our future human society.

There was a world before Covid-19, and there will be a world after Covid-19. Those are not the same worlds.

As product managers, we are used to dealing with ambiguous decisions. We often have a deep domain-knowledge experience, and we somehow live in the future of our product. We own the future roadmap of our product area.

Product Managers are now the best suited persons to help the team make sense of all this and understand the real impacts of Covid-19 on your product area.

In these times of uncertainty, helping the team make sense is the most impactful you can do as a product manager!

How to help your team deal with it?

I dislike war analogies, but I think you need to consider that, for the first time in humanity history, each country and each human being share a common enemy: a small protein assembly nicknamed Covid-19.

We are at war with this thing and in this context, you should assume that all your prioritization efforts done pre-Covid-19 are now useless and wrong. Sit down with your stakeholders, understand the general guidance within your organization.

An efficient way to do that is to consider all your product initiatives stopped. It will help mitigate the sunken cost fallacy mental-model. It will also cut through the emotional attachment we all have regarding existing efforts and the fact that we all want to have an impact and succeed.

It makes for a great introduction to the stakeholders’ discussion you need to have: assuming all the teams are eager to change direction and help humanity, what should we continue doing or start doing now?

Provide extreme clarity on what your team will be building now and why.

Provide clarity is the best you can do right now — Photo by Verne Ho from Burst

Based on this discussion engage the team with the same premise: all efforts stopped. What should we continue doing or start doing?

Document and be prepared to have lots of radically candid conversations about: 

• Why are we stopping these products or projects?
• Why are we starting this particular project?
• Why all long-term efforts have to deliver incremental value as fast as possible?

Continuing the war analogy, you now are a war general and not a peace general. What you need to do is to focus more than ever on one of the product-manager skill: ruthless prioritization as well as your tactical skills.

Why every initiative should be an experiment?

You should consider every project as an experiment: speed and learning are crucial in an environment changing every day. As a war-time general, you need to adapt fast to an ever-changing environment and to each and every of your team learnings.

Change is an iterative continuous process — Photo by Matthew Henry from Burst

Now is not the time to start long-term infrastructure projects which are supposed to deliver value in 18 months. Use this new reality to split these risky and unproven bets into agile and incremental small-scale projects that will deliver additional value and learnings on a weekly or monthly basis.

In an ideal world, you should work hard to preserve optionality (see fs.blog): delay long-term choices, ship iterative improvement and learn the new priorities based on real-user feedback. Now more than ever, the future of your product is unknown.

Conclusion

Humanity is in the middle of an extensive adaptation phase, and truth be told, nobody knows how it will impact our political, economic and social structures. The best you can do, as a product manager, is:

1. Remain mentally and physically healthy
   
2. Help the team communicate in an all-remote family/social/professional environment
   
3. Help the team make sense of Covid-19
   
4. Provide ultra-clarity on the new priorities
   
5. Help the team become even more nimble and agile than before: today’s priority will change tomorrow as our understanding of Covid-19 and the measures taken to fight it progress

As natural leaders without influence, product managers have a moral obligation to help the team channel all its goodwill and desire for a better world to ship and launch their most impactful product ever!

Let’s help relieve our fellow humans suffering and ultimately win this unprecedented adaptation war.