Nickey Skarstad: evaluation

Transcript context

…Got it. One last question before we get to our exciting lightning round. And it's something that I've been thinking a lot about recently, which is around remote work as a product manager. I left Airbnb before COVID, and so I never lived in this world of everything is remote and product managing remotely. Is there anything you've picked up or learned that has been really helpful to being a product leader in a remote world? Yeah. I would say last couple years have just been a huge shift in my ways of working. I sort of grew up as a PM in IRL environments where we did the majority of our work together in the same room. So that was whiteboarding, having a quick sync after you had an in person meeting to finalize some details or keep hashing out a problem. It's so cheesy and overhyped, but the proverbial water cooler moment where you see somebody, and you're like, "Hey, how are you doing, Hey, did you hear about this thing? " All of those things literally went away overnight. And I think especially the job of a PM, it's hard under normal times because you are doing so much labor to make sure people are informed and give feedback, et cetera. And then overnight you took away a lot of the methods that they were using to do it. And so I think that has been a pretty profound shift for a lot of people working in product roles. The good news is there's a ton of new tools and new technology that's actually being built right now that's majorly helpful for this. So I use Slack in very new ways today than I did two years ago. Things like just making sure to post more asynchronous updates. Trying to actually take the burden off of an IRL or a Zoom meeting. Can we talk about this asynchronously and do it in Slack? Slack has this really great feature called huddles where you can just quickly get on. It's just audio. So there's no video. And you can just have a 30 second conversation. It's good for standups and things like that. Suggest you try it if you haven't yet. And then a lot of the old in person whiteboarding, things like that, you can do those now using awesome tools like Miro and FigJam. And I feel like, especially at Airbnb, we had such an international team that there was always somebody who was remote typically. And I think we never really got the remote experience right. And now that the majority of our teams are remote, I'm a fully remote person, I've been a lot more thoughtful about making sure we're creating a really good experience of how we're working for the larger team. And so I think you have to hack on this with your team. Different teams have different ways of working, but trying to be a synchronous, using Slack, making sure you're following up in very visible ways where people can see. Don't rely on Zoom meetings to fill all of your time. Otherwise people will literally hate you. And things like that really make a huge difference. Awesome. Super helpful. All right. Nickey, are you ready for the lightning round?…

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