Delivering in a pandemic
Hello there,
It’s been a while since I wrote a blog post. I don’t know why it’s taken me so long, there are a variety of reasons but they are all excuses really.
The last time I wrote I was knee-deep in securing a new role after coming out of maternity leave. I found a role as a Regional Product Manager for a Global FinTech Company. Which translates to working across 3 time-zones and with that, childcare and lockdown madness, it has eaten up all my time.
But these are just excuses, so here I am, back and loving being able to write again.
This month I wanted to talk to you about how to look after yourself in a Product launch. I delivered a huge project in January that was related to Brexit. It had a long delivery lead time on this, I worked for 6 months solidly. There were lots of things that I learnt in this time - you always learn new things on every launch so I wanted to share those learnings with you around how to take good care of yourself and your team during the launch as well as being realistic about what can be achieved.
Here are my tips:-
Realistic Timescales - Be agile with your launch date - we are working in exceptional times, therefore productivity is not going to be at the normal capacity
Launch dates - What happens if you are not in charge of the launch date (your launch is dependent on an external event) be realistic about can be delivered for the launch deadline. Can you release something on your deadline date and then roll out several mini iterations consecutively after to soften the pressure of a big bang release?
Your Team - Factor in the teams that will be working on this, their energy levels and personal circumstances, some might have to deal with Covid related issues; childcare or a family bereavement. Ensure you do some scenario planning to cover the teams resilience to deliver
Documentation - Document as much as you can, whilst it’s not very agile (practice) to be heavy with over documenting stuff, when lots of people are dealing with high stress situations (pandemic’s/kids appearing on Zoom/Zoom fatigue) the memory of the conversation might not be so fresh, find a way to document the meeting, conversation and meeting outputs. We used Confluence as a team collaboration space as well as Jira to document our user stories for Epics and features but there are multiple software tools you can use such as :-
Sharepoint
Basecamp
Slack
Google Drive
Asana
Proofhub
Communication - In order to keep momentum up with the team and within the company, communicate the wins and progress, call out key members that are excelling in delivery, focus and collaboration and say thank-you often, a thank-you goes a long way!
The next 5 are things are more soft skills for yourself as well as your team. It hurts to work 12 days for 6 months, there is no doubt about that, it is even harder when you are remote, with caring responsibilities, dealing with the confinement of lockdown and world news of pandemics, this will crush your brain and often your soul. You HAVE to look after yourself and you HAVE to look after your team so consider the following:-
Days off - I had to start building in a day or two off before a weekend or after to literally do nothing, as I could feel the effects of burn out starting to take shape. That meant a complete switch off. There is no doubt that switching off for 3-4 days to then throw yourself into another 1-2 month stretch of continual work is not good for your health and a short break will not support the long term sustainability of working at this level, but you will know your limits, if you listen to your body. A few short mini breaks often was just enough to refill on the energy I needed to carry on. Everyone’s limit will be different, as well as everyones situation so be aware of this
Check-in’s - This leads me on to regular check-in’s for yourself as well as for your team. It’s really important to check in with how your team are doing outside of work. These people are your team mates and you are their captain, if one woman/man goes down, you all do, so you need to make sure everyone is doing OK. Likewise find someone separate to the team you can trust so you can offload whats happening. Could be a mentor, your boss, or a peer, someone you can trust who can give you some pointers and call you out when you are not doing what you said you would do by sticking to any boundaries you set yourself.
Boundaries - I will mention boundaries lightly here as I think it’s tough and unrealistic to stick to them when we are going through what we are going through (pandemic). I broke the boundaries I set myself regularly as I do have perfectionist tendencies (it’s a work in progress to try to accept a good enough approach). But perhaps if I didn’t have a partner who could help with the childcare, or I didn’t have a child who slept a good chunk of the day or I knew I couldn’t survive on less than 5 hours sleep, then maybe I would have been slightly more rigid with those boundaries because I had to. I flexed my boundaries where I could to get the job done. I know most people will tell me this is a terrible approach, and I accept it’s not a long term solution and something I need to do better at (see book recommendation below).
FUN - I would like to mention that having fun with your product team is a MUST. All those zoom calls you have every day, start with a funny anecdote, you can still be professional and get the job done, in these times we desperately need laughter. Try out fun things instead of another meeting, can you have a virtual beer at the end of the week? Can you have a Friday afternoon TUNE OFF, where you share you favourite songs of the moment? Anything to lighten the mood.
PARTAY - And don’t forget the LAUNCH PARTY!! Even if it is a virtual one :)
CHECK OUT >>>>
For further reading on burn out I’m keen to read this book by Selina Barker that has just been released early due to the need of everyone struggling so much. Hopefully my pre-order will arrive soon!
Selina Barker is a Life Coach, you can find her on Instagram @selinathecoach
Let me know what you think…Was there anything you have been doing that has really helped you in this difficult time with the delivery of launches? I’d love to hear.
More installments from me very soon, I won’t leave it so long next time!
Stay safe and thanks for reading!
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