After the Spring Festival, Ant Financial started its telecommuting routine. Like many companies, the ants are feeling their way through the sudden shift to telecommuting. After a few weeks, we invited three ant employees to talk about their experiences from the perspectives of product managers, technical managers and open source contributors. This article is one of them.
9:00, prepare the morning meeting of the project
At 10:00, conduct requirement review with product team
11:00, call the customer, communicate the product function problem
13:00, the second phase of product planning and design
15:00, communicated with the R&D team about product details and coordinated resources
17:00, due to the epidemic, the products may not be delivered in time, so timely risk management is needed
21:00, development brother has questions about product details, online chat
…
This is a typical day for Zhang Wen, a senior product specialist at Ant Financial, after she started working from home.
When Mr Zhang see “home office notice” issued by the company, his mind is collapse, because of his work can be severely affected, according to the original plan, he will by the end of march together with the customer office to catch up to delivery project, and even partners clearance of product design and mysterious, the little black house with central office into a remote collaboration, All this becomes uncertain.
Zhang Wen is a product manager of Ant Financial’s intelligent Technology business group, mainly targeting enterprise customers, and transforming and exporting ant Financial’s accumulated technical capabilities into products. Over the years, he and his colleagues have successfully developed ant’s core technology, such as financial distributed middleware SOFAStack, distributed relational database OceanBase and mobile development platform mPaaS, into products, which have been applied in many industries such as finance, insurance and education.
His daily work can be summed up in three categories:
- Communicate with internal product related R&D teams and external enterprise customers. He needs to translate product requirements of enterprise customer projects into internal R&D plans and tasks, and then make project execution schedule with customers.
- Planning, including demand analysis, product design, product acceptance, specifically refers to the ability to transform the business needs of enterprise customers into products, and finally deliver to customers. Manage the schedule and risk of product iteration during the development phase.
- Promotion, including product capability promotion, customer POC verification, etc. Promote product capabilities to enterprise customers, verify and explain product capabilities to customer scenarios, and assist customers to implement project solutions.
The most direct impact of working from home is that communication is more difficult, and remote communication is not as effective as face-to-face communication.
For example, in the milestone of project products, public management is needed, which used to be on-site management, but now needs to be remote. The product manager has indirectly become the leader of cross-company technical project cooperation.
In addition, I had to communicate on site in some important occasions. For example, I had to demonstrate on site and answer customers’ questions at any time when I presented product demos to customers. But we can’t do that now.
To B The important responsibility of a product manager is To connect the internal and external, collect customer needs and convert them into tasks To drive the internal R&D team. Under the epidemic, both internal and external variables will be amplified, which also increases the uncertainty of the whole project.
Faced with such a situation, ant product team adopted a multi-pronged approach. First of all, the objectives should be clear and disassembled. The overall product planning objectives should be clear and can be divided into specific small teams. A small team tries to be responsible for only one technical module without too many horizontal connections.
For example, for those product plans that need to be completed by the end of March, after clarifying the responsibilities of the partners, the team should be responsible for specific functions according to the requirements of functional modules, and the interaction scheme between modules should be clarified with the technical architect, so that each team can work independently and reduce the loss of collaboration between teams.
Second, break tasks and plans down to each person on a weekly basis so that they are manageable. By planning weekly tasks and dividing them into reasonable and fixed tasks for each person, the task progress can be controlled by setting the start and end time of tasks and other project information. After the requirement responsibility is assigned to the team, the team continues to break down the overall product requirements into weekly milestone plans and allocate them to people reasonably to ensure transparent progress and controllable risks on a daily basis.
In process management, the daily meeting is adopted to eliminate project risks in time and flexibly control the deadline of tasks. And communicate with projects, products and customers in time every day to ensure proper understanding, consistent communication, and avoid directional errors. In the product demand development stage, Zhang Wen’s team tracked the progress of the daily meeting every day. The daily meeting needed to be efficient and completed within 30 minutes, focusing on the project progress, problems, risks and coping strategies of each person and each team. In terms of project cooperation with customers, I also communicated the progress and risks of both parties through brief daily meetings with customers to ensure that the project situation was transparent and controllable.
It is worth mentioning that, in the product publicity, before will go to the customer there face to face demonstration and answer questions, now, they become a live broadcast online celebrity, through the way of online video, product publicity to customers. For example, they made a Demo of product best practices on the public cloud through video, so that customers can watch and learn about ant fintech’s technical products online.
Finally, product managers who telecommute need to be adept at using collaborative tools to do their jobs well. In terms of communication, Ali has relatively perfect solutions for video and teleconference, such as Dingding, which has become popular among teachers and students during this period. It is more convenient to communicate and coordinate with customers by means of dingding tasks, dingding meetings and dingding documents.
In terms of product PRD and design requirement review, I can better cooperate with Yuq launched by Ant Financial. For example, create a new document on the language sparrow to write PRD documents online. Team members can subscribe to each other and participate in PRD discussions at any time. When the product manager completes the PRD, the online asynchronous review can be initiated, and everyone can communicate under the PRD document.
Through the drawboard knowledge base of the drawboard, the design draft can be uploaded to the drawboard, team members can make online comments on a design draft, and designers can also make simple prototype drawings on the drawboard to quickly understand the product logic online.
After these adjustments, product managers work from home on the right track, and at present, zhang wen has several projects in good condition.
Thoughts on telecommuting for product managers
Telecommuting undoubtedly puts higher demands on product managers and team members. During this time, Zhang wen also thought more about the capabilities and working methodology of product managers.
In terms of product manager, you first need to have the ability to project management foundation, including the objectives, tasks, risks, milestones aspects such as management, second, because of the particularity of enterprise customer oriented, ants tee product manager need business product technology, also is to understand business, understand the product, understand technology tee talents, can acquire.
Secondly, the working environment at home is not as good as the centralized working environment, so it needs to be regulated from the system and other aspects, and it also needs to build a self-driven team. Centralized work allows you to keep track of everyone’s working status, so you don’t have to punch in on time. After working from home, we added daily meetings and daily papers to add a sense of ritual to the daily commute. At the same time, we required everyone to be online during office hours and respond within 30 minutes, trying to create a slightly nervous office atmosphere.
In addition, working from home puts higher demands on communication skills, and as there are more things to communicate, communication and collaboration efficiency also need to be higher. For example, avoid inefficient meetings, set deadlines, require participants to prepare their presentations in advance, and set goals and action plans for each meeting.
Finally, it is necessary to establish a set of efficient online collaboration mechanism, including demand management, task management, risk management, customer project management and so on. Through documentation and standardization, experience reference can be provided for the future telecommuting. Through experience sharing between different teams, good experience can also be absorbed and bad areas can be modified.
Many teams were unprepared for this sudden shift in telecommuting, with no staffing or project planning specifically designed for telecommuting. It also tests the team’s ability to adapt and embrace change. For product managers, the remote collaboration brought about by this pandemic is a good opportunity to test their capabilities in all areas, and if you find it difficult to work, it is a sign that it needs strengthening and attention.
Telecommuting during this pandemic may not be a “first year of telecommuting” for Ant’s product team, but it’s a great practice for future telecommuting that may come in even more handy someday.
From February 19 to February 26, Ant Financial will launch an online live broadcast of the digital class “Fighting the epidemic together, Technology breaking the situation”. To learn more about Ant Financial’s technology, please scan the QR code below and enter the live broadcast room.
