Product Management was a tough job before COVID. Moving a product from concept to production while keeping multiple teams with competing priorities moving in the same direction is a combination of cat herding and ballet on a normal day. Add in a globally distributed workforce that’s working from home, and things just got exponentially harder. Unless you’ve got a plan. That’s where the RingCentral Xiamen Product Team comes in. On September 3, 2020, they held a Remote Product Management seminar via WoshiPM (China’s largest online community of Product Managers) that shared crucial lessons for managing every aspect of the product lifecycle…wherever the teams driving that lifecycle happen to be.
From mind-mapping exercises to role-playing, the Xiamen team helped participants understand how to better see their product as a whole, and shared valuable tips on the ways empathy can help PMs communicate more effectively with developers. When the Xiamen team hosts events like these in person, they might average an audience of 70. Other virtual events have hosted as many as 1,000. For this event, Xiamen partnered with leading Chinese product management community WoshiPM, boosting the event’s exposure to 5 million, via WoshiPM’s multiple media and social groups. The result? 7,350 active participants, all ready to sharpen their existing skills and discover a few new ones. The team did their best to answer the 100+ questions submitted by the participants, and helped everyone walk away with a fresh perspective on the ways upgraded skills and approaches can help teams accomplish more, no matter how difficult the conditions. The event elevated RingCentral’s reputation as a thought leader in the product management community, and put thousands of active, engaged product managers on our recruitment radar.
The bottom line? With better communication, there’s always a better answer – and it’s usually found by #workingtogether.
Originally published Oct 27, 2020, updated Feb 24, 2021
