Since the pandemic, companies have increasingly shifted their business models towards remote and hybrid environments. This allows for more flexibility for employees, as well as enables teams to include members from all around the world. However, this can make your role as a product manager more difficult as you have to work across different time zones and cultures, each with different communication styles and preferences.
That said, rework work isn’t going away. To be a successful PM you need to adapt to these changing work conditions instead of putting up resistance. One of the ways you can do this is by running synchronous working sessions to get the most out of your team and resources.
In this article, you’ll learn about what synchronous working sessions are and how to run them effectively.
The problem of too many meetings or too much asynchronous communication
Remote work and remote communication are challenging. Do you have too many meetings and feel like you can’t finish any work? Or do you almost have no meetings with super short standups, but you feel out of the loop and spend hours communicating asynchronously? To combat the productivity challenges of remote working, teams tend to set up too many meetings, or revert to asynchronous communication.
It’s easy to use meetings and jump on a video call whenever communication is needed, but then hours are spent on meetings, and no time is left to actually do the work.
To reduce meeting abuse, you can use asynchronous communication. This happens with online tools that facilitate the conversations: messaging, documents, tasks, and updates. However, with this model things get lost in translation, or too much time is spent writing, reviewing, and creating context with a back-and-forth.
I have a love-hate relationship with remote working. I enjoy the opportunity to work with people across the world: a world-class team without homogenous perspectives. It challenges me to think outside of my paradigm and approaches to building products. I also don’t have to feel resigned to the software industry and community of the town and country where I reside.
This is freeing! It’s also great for deep work, focus time, and flexibility. I have had wonderful opportunities working with people from all over the world and having had a manager in each content.
Nonetheless, it is still very challenging, especially if you want to improve the outcome of your team or you are working with a new team. I’m constantly iterating and adjusting my approach as I go along to find solutions for remote working challenges.
In my new team, I noticed how the team worked in a team, but not as a team:
- We were not pulling the weight together and moving in the same direction
- We were focused on too many different projects (instead of overarching goals), so the work of each member was irrelevant to the other
- Our catch-ups were short, but we were scratching the surface with updates, and we didn’t get into the meat of the conversations around figuring out how to solve business or user problems
- I noticed that design and engineering weren’t collaborating — work was handed off with a big specification piece instead of the members being aligned on what we wanted to do and having shared context on the goal
- As a PM, much of my time was spent writing to create async context instead of working with the team through it
So we tried something new. I want to walk you through my solution that has been working well for the remote team I’m leading to communicate and get work done.
To the rescue… Synchronous working sessions
Synchronous working sessions are where you work with your team on a video call for a short period every day, just like you would do in the office. Well… kind of.
It’s not a meeting per se, it’s a space to think together and bounce ideas off each other.
So it sounds promising to achieve our mission, but how do you actually do it? You can achieve it in five steps:
1. What and who — This session is focused on a mission
Have a single, clear goal and involve only people who are working on this goal. \
It works when the group is focused on the same goal so that the content is relevant for everyone. I’ve found that this doesn’t work when the team is working on many different problems or projects because the conversation will be irrelevant to some and feel like a waste of time, if that is the case, it could be a subset of a team.
2. When — Set up the working session in your calendars
Decide on a timeslot that works for everyone — where the best overlap in time zones are and decide on a frequency that works for the team.
For my team, we had the best overlap in the morning and daily sessions worked best as the regular cadence created a habit. We set two hours per day out to work together over a video call. This could sound long, but we rarely use the whole two hours and are more productive than without committing this time together.
3. Why — Set the intention and rules of engagement
This session is to get things done, move things forward, and make quick decisions. Everyone joins. It’s not optional. It’s optional to leave sometime during the session if it’s irrelevant and you have something urgent to complete.
We want to make decisions quickly to move faster so decisions would not roll over for longer than the next session.
I found that it works well if everyone has their cameras turned on so they can show up (figuratively) and be involved. There have been numerous times when we were discussing a user challenge or a technical challenge and the solution would come from someone who was not close to it, from someone else on the team.
4. How — Now, you can have the sessions and work together in a virtual room
This is an open session of communicating and working together to get things done.
This session has a loose agenda based on where we are with a project. We usually start with updates and blockers, then share learnings or insights, then dive into specifics — a problem we’re working on to discuss ideas, solutions, and next steps. Sometimes we work together when a deadline is looming with our cameras on as we are way more productive and we can discuss things while working.
We purposefully stretch out the time and have a loose agenda so that more questions surface. Alongside this, we collaborate and divide the work that is needed to reach our goal day by day. We end with a recap on the next steps for each member to ensure everyone is aligned, knows what to do, and can continue with their work.
5. Lastly, use the rest of the day to do the work
Outside of this session, there are rarely other meetings. All that is left to do is to focus on doing the work for the rest of the day because the discussions are over. Time spent on async communication would also be minimal as everyone already has the context.
Final thoughts
Synchronous working combines the best of remote work, in-person office work, and workshops. It retains the benefits of teams working remotely (great talent, diversity, flexibility, and focus time) and working together in person (conversations, context sharing, and quick decisions and feedback).
If you work with a remote or semi-remote team, try synchronous working sessions* *to communicate and be productive so that you can achieve all your missions.
Featured image source: IconScout
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