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Collaboration | What does remote collaboration mean for product owners and executives?

The world has just experienced the biggest shift to remote working in modern history. For product managers and teams, this is challenging as most teams work across numerous of projects and multiple stakeholders. To remotely manage your product and keep up the momentum, here is part 1 of our 3-part series guide - The Product Manager’s guide to remote working: Collaboration. Collaboration is an important key to solving product lifecycle challenges. It enables product leaders  to deal with disruption and iterate product lifecycle decisions more effectively.

Product lifecycle management is evolving, and we are witnessing a shift in approach which is now focussed on alignment and collaboration.  In our recent ebook What is product management, we define modern product lifecycle management and explore what success looks like. 

Lead a productive virtual team so you can work anywhere, at any time and remove internal silos. Product management is most effective when you align with other teams in your organisation.

The future of product lifecycle management points to people being virtually aligned around product growth and adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI) to make fast and efficient decisions."

The way things work today for product executives often requires influencing across the organisational silos to get support for your product strategy and this can be time consuming.  Skyjed helps bring all this together to build a virtual team to collaborate on improving the health of your product.

So what is best practice for remote product collaboration and our tips to get you started?

Build an inclusive product team 

In Skyjed you can create and invite functional groups to your product 360-workspace in minutes. You can wake up in the morning and log-in to Skyjed and communicate easily with your colleagues from anywhere in the world on your product growth challenges. The product owner or manager hosts the virtual team in Skyjed and all the roles and permissions are set-out to make remote working more effective.

Clear and aligned product responsibilities 

Skyjed defines the product owner or manager as the single point accountability for product lifecycle growth, compliance and ongoing customer trust. The roles and permissions include inviting team members that are clearly defined as

1. Product Owner
2. Product Contributor
3. Product Reviewer
4. Product Leader
5. Advisor

Clear communication and product updates

Skyjed has reinvented traditional lifecycle management by reassessing product success metrics through defined domains rather than revenue alone. The 5 domains are health - revenue, value, customer experience, innovation and regulatory compliance.  These new domains are similar to 'channels in Slack' and 'issues in Jira'.  

Align on product goals and action plans for strategy changes and risk mitigation.

In Skyjed, we have automated the setting of strategic and risk actions. These can be monitored together with your risk and regulatory teams to keep on top of compliance.  A Skyjed action plan is a detailed plan outlining actions required to reach your product vision and metrics. It is the step by step plan needed for your product strategy to succeed. Setting an action plan can help your product executives turn their visions into reality and increase efficiency and accountability in your organisation.  Action plans encompass both strategic actions and risk based actions.  Actions include information such as:

• What is the action
• Who will carry out the action
• When is it due

Search history of the complete product lifecycle.

Skyjed is designed to be a collaborative workspace or product community in your organisation so you can work remotely from anywhere, at anytime.  By aggregating all your product knowledge in a single online repository, Skyjed helps you to create, share, store, search and filter all your important product lifecycle history. 

Here are some of the use cases and reasons why agile teams are adopting Skyjed for collaboration.

1. The product owner can set the design requirements, figure out what problem the product strategy is solving, and update the assumptions for growth and profitability. Skyjed includes a set of minimum commercial metrics for success, product experience, regulatory compliance and a launch-ready check-list  so that you can get to market faster. This halves the time it takes to build reports and provides a system of record for virtual team interactions that are securely time stamped and available instantly when required.
   
   
2. The MVP is a challenging stage for all product executives . In Skyjed, you can work with your virtual team to execute the product strategy, complete monthly and 90-day reviews/audits, measure the future trajectory of your product, iterate and evaluate. 

Check out our Best practice product governance for remote working ebook on a new model to help you understand your product regulatory obligations.