A Product Manager’s Approach to Running Delightful Remote Meetings
With the circumstances surrounding COVID-19, we have been forced to transform the way we work. More than ever, we are rethinking how we can get things done when physical co-location is not an option. A recent survey by Gartner revealed that 74% of companies intend to shift to remote work permanently after the pandemic is over. Whether this is the outcome we had hoped for or not, we are going to see a major shift towards remote-work culture in the near future.
Remote meetings are hard for many and they could be a major source of stress. Collaborating remotely is even harder. I have many meetings and workshops to facilitate in the coming weeks and months. Facing the fact that these events now have to be held remotely, I set out to find an approach that ensures meetings still deliver value and create delightful experiences. Let's walk through my approach and provide you with the steps required to adopt the same mindset.
The approach
As a product manager, users are always at the center of every decision made for a product. We should constantly be thinking about what creates the most value for users and what problems need to be prioritized over others.
Can meetings be treated the same way? I believe so. A well-designed remote meeting can create positive experiences for participants (aka users) by addressing and eliminating barriers to collaboration (pain points). This leads to value generation for everyone.
Let’s see what a participant-centered design approach looks like in practice:
- Define meeting goals and success criteria
- Understand your participants
- Map out participants’ journeys and identify major pain points
- Find solutions to address pain areas
- Gather feedback to improve your next remote meeting and iterate
The same approach can be leveraged for in-person meetings, however, we are going to focus on remote ones here.
Define meeting goals and success criteria
Start by asking what success means for your remote meeting. Know the desired outcome and how to demonstrate key results for that outcome. Document what metrics could be used to measure.
Understand your participants
Remember, participants are the users of your remote meetings. Having an understanding of their characteristics is key to the success of your session. These characteristics include their working style, behavior patterns, individual goals, needs, and things they like or dislike.
Consider the space and the context in which your participants are located in order to challenge your assumptions about their work setup, technology, and tools. Validate them ahead of the meeting as much as possible. Introductory chats with your participants or someone who has previously worked with them could provide great insights about them. You know, User-Centered Design tactics.
Document these traits and create one or more personas that are representative of your participants. Here’s an example of a remote participant persona that we are going to call “Franky”.
Map out participants’ journeys, identify major pain points, and find solutions to resolve pain areas
This is the step where you visually create a map of what you and your meeting participants will go through and the emotions associated with them. As you empathize with your participants, potential pain points, and challenges start to emerge. If you have never done a remote meeting, play the agenda in your mind. Consider the persona you developed in the last step and imagine how the items on the agenda are likely to be received. Make (educated) assumptions and put those assumptions to test during the meeting.
I examined the recent remote meetings that I either attended or facilitated and created user empathy maps (journey maps) for them. Comparing their common elements and pain points, those remote meetings can be classified under 3 types:
- Virtual Meetings & Presentations such as Daily standups, 1-on-1s, User Interviews, Presentations
- Remote Collaboration such as Retrospectives, Value Stream Mapping, Goals & Anti-Goals
- Remote Work Sessions such as Pair Programming and Paired Document Review
Type 1 — Virtual Meetings & Presentations
The simplest type of remote meetings are, well, virtual meetings; A bunch of people meeting virtually connected via an audio/video tool such as Zoom or Webex. One person is in charge of managing the A/V tool and acts as a host. Information is often shared verbally, or on a shared screen. As mentioned, Daily standups, 1-on-1s, presentations, and user interviews are examples of this type. In the following diagram, all the components present in a virtual meeting are visualized.
Mapping out the journey of a host and meeting participants for a sample virtual meeting gives us an understanding of key moments in the meeting, the participant experience, and the pain points they may encounter. In Journey Maps, time is represented on the horizontal axis and the users’ emotional states form the vertical axis.
The first pain point, for every meeting it seems, is the audio/video too. The tool must be easily available for all to set up and use, which is usually a non-issue when it is well-known and used regularly, but it becomes a problem when participants are new.
As a rule of thumb, don’t make any assumptions about the familiarity of your participants with any tool. Be sure to include precise and step-by-step instructions for them to follow. Make time for them to connect with you ahead of time and get their technical issues resolved, or simply provide links to the tool’s FAQ/help pages. When it’s time to open the meeting, be early and ready. Test everything.
Another noteworthy pain point felt by all remote meetings, is engaging with participants during the meeting. Keep everyone engaged by asking questions and making time for them to speak and comment. Be fair and efficient, and remind participants how to mute/un-mute themselves.
Type 2 — Remote Collaboration
Remote collaborations are where participants gather to collectively work on things and generate output. The host often facilitates the meeting and instructs participants to perform tasks in the collaboration tool. I’d recommend adding the co-facilitator role to help orchestrate tasks in larger and more complex settings. They will reduce the complexity of managing multiple components (A/V tool, collaboration tool, time management, etc).
The added component here — when compared against virtual meetings (Type 1) — is the existence of a collaboration tool that all participants use to create outputs together. This could be a shared Google Doc or a virtual whiteboard such as Miro. In the diagram below, you can see all the typical components and layers involved in virtual collaborations.
As a host, extra time is possibly needed to prepare the agenda, select and test the tools, and onboard participants. Your participant’s experience is going to be directly linked to the level of complexity for navigating the tools. Pay close attention to the onboarding process and the usability of the collaboration tool. If you are using a new tool, spend time to thoroughly inspect all the features; discover what it can and cannot do, minimize surprises. Don’t forget to consider other factors like cost & fees, technical requirements, and different access levels.
Enhanced Remote collaboration: A way to enhance participant experience is to use input forms instead of having everyone on the collaboration tool. In this model, the user interaction is simplified by creating an easy-to-use, easy-to-access, and no-learning-curve interface where participants’ input is captured.
Imagine you are managing a remote Strategic Planning session with the goal of defining the top strategic objectives for the next fiscal year. All participants are asked to write down their objectives and then rank them as a group. With the enhanced collaboration model, instead of having everyone onboarded and logged in to a shared whiteboard such as Miro, you can design a simple input form in Google Forms and ask participants to enter their objectives there. The data is then presented, discussed, and then moved to another form for ranking. This could mean more prep-time for the host but it greatly improves the participation level as well as the experience.
Tools such as Mentimeter and AhaSlides make this model super easy to implement. The chat interface in Zoom or any other messaging tool could be used for the same purpose although an extra effort is needed to move and reformat the data.
Now put it all together and map out the steps for the host, co-host, and participants. Our updated journey map would look like this:
Type 3 — Remote Work Sessions
Remote work sessions are essentially another form of collaboration but done in pairs. This is equivalent to your colleague coming over to your workstation to work on something together. In other words, another pair of eyes on the work. In the context of Extreme Programming, it becomes pair programming.
Depending on the nature of collaboration, either both participants simultaneously contribute (writing on a shared document), or one drives and another one navigates (pair programming).
The pairing tool and its capability to keep all the actions on both sides synchronized will likely have a huge impact on the overall experience. To make the session more social, it’s highly recommended that participants keep their cameras on all the time. Being able to see and hear the other person builds trust and exhibits attentiveness. Virtual wallpapers and blurred background features could alleviate concerns about privacy.
Keep in mind that pairing is often intense. Breaks must be planned and taken. Time management techniques such as Pomodoro cut down on interruptions and increase productivity and focus.
Gather feedback to improve your next remote meeting and iterate
No design process is ever perfect. They’re meant to be iterative. During or after your remote meetings, seek honest feedback. Surveys or retrospective exercises are great ways to reflect back on what went well and what needs to improve. Refine your weaknesses and repeat. Practice makes perfect.
Conclusion
As we transition to a remote culture, our needs and expectations evolve. New tools and technologies emerge to address them and in the process will create new challenges. By creating delightful remote experiences for our remote participants, we build an environment where outcomes — not outputs — are achieved faster.
