Communicating Clearly When Working From Home
There are so many ways to communicate with your team. Sometimes you need to make rules and policies to keep the lines of communication clear. Listen to Erik Skurka, VP Product, describe how his teams keep it all organized.
“We have a shared language and policies and procedures for communication [in Slack].”
Transcript
Jim Morris:
Hi there, fellow product leaders. Here's a snippet from Erik Skurka describing how his product and engineering teams communicate clearly when working remotely from each other. Enjoy.
Erik Skurka:
At ReviewTrackers we've had a work from home policy for the three years that I've been at the company where everybody's got the right to do so at least once a week. So, while not completely foreign to having people working remote, we certainly are now all in the same boat together of being 100% remote. So, some of the things that have really worked well for us on the work from home front is really around a shared language and policies and procedures for communication. So, in our product and engineering playbook, we call it our wiki, we have guidance on how you should behave in Slack, what types of messages are appropriate for Slack. We try to keep channels full of hygiene where if it's fun and quirky stuff, they have their own channels that can be muted and then all the business stuff has a prefix in all the channels. So, that works out really well.
We also have our own slang and setting expectations of when we're going to be away from the keyboard. So, there's no judgment on when we're going to be away from the keyboard, but in your team channel, whenever you're going to go for a walk, walk the dog, make lunch, we just say to post that you're away from keyboard AFK, and then as soon as you're back, you update the team and that way everybody knows that you aren't going to have an immediate response. So, those are some of the things that we've used at ReviewTrackers and it's worked out really well. Everybody's informed and seems to really like it.
Jim Morris:
Thanks for watching. You can find more product discovery resources at productdiscoverygroup.com.
Jim Morris, Product Discovery Group
Jim coaches Product teams to collaborate with each other and seek customer input early and often during the design and ideation phase.
