The last few months have been a total disruption for businesses around the world. We’ve had to make adjustments on how we run our business, including working remotely.

It was tough in the beginning, but now that we’re more settled and comfortable in working remotely, we are also starting to establish new work routines and that including a new set of productivity tools.

As a product manager, I need a suite of tools that will specifically help me to communicate effectively, collaborate efficiently, share information conveniently and document processes with ease. 

With those factors in mind, here are six of the tools that I’ve been using as I adapt to managing a team of engineers, product managers and operations professionals while remote.

Google Docs/GSuite

Google Drive has always been useful for remote work because it allows you to gain access to your office productivity essentials from anywhere. Features like storage, spreadsheets, files, presentations, and document processing make this one tool that’s now more important than ever. The new addition of diagrams.net is especially helpful for creating workflows and wireframes to help get points across.

Documentation

While communicating with team members across different time zones and locations, it’s very important to have a good, solid documentation process that will help you keep track of everything that you’re doing. 

Our team uses documentation heavily in order to:

• standardize and align on processes
• audit work done
• communicate tools that need to be built

For this, I use a documentation framework within Google Docs that I pull up every time we have a meeting or my team needs to document processes that we can share effectively throughout our organization. It covers:

• What
• Why
• Why Now
• How
• Exceptions & Edge cases

We’ve found this simple. format to be extremely effective.

Loom

On the subject of documentation, my favorite tool to help with this is Loom. This tool was originally designed for teachers and students, but it’s now proving to be very beneficial for remote work too. The main feature of Loom is screencasting, which allows you to basically capture things that you’re doing on your computer and narrate them. 

Loom is especially beneficial for tutorials and helping engineers to understand specific workflows and processes.

Using the tool, you hit record and your able to quickly create a video recording. The tool quickly generates a preview of the video and a shareable link that you can include pass along to your to share with the team.

Another Loom feature that I especially love is that you get a notification every time someone views your video. You can also comment on the video directly and have the comments time stamped with the part of the video you were commenting on. 

As a product manager, Loom is very useful for getting check-ins with different team members, especially in product design, before we get into a meeting. It’s an effective way for team members to send in a daily reports/status update.

Since everything has already been discussed on that video, we can proceed to discussing issues and talking about the next steps rather than spending so much time going through the product itself. 

LightShot 

I have a need to quickly communicate with lots of people across my organization and provied visual feedback on how things are coming together. To do this, I take screenshots a lot and annotate them to share using a tool called LightShot, which is basically a screen capture application that allows me to capture a customizable screenshot and share my screenshots through email or Slack. 

What I like about LightShot is that it’s lightweight at just 4.44MB of space and it also has a shortcut where I can capture images, add text, draw shapes or edit the image before sending it to my team, which makes it easier for them to understand what I need. A picture is worth a thousand words.

ProductBoard

ProductBoard is the most effective tool for managing all of the work that goes into documenting product features, user stories and scoring the various attributes that help to prioritize a product roadmap. This part of the job is messy even under normal circumstances. It’s even harder at distance where you can’t easily consolidate feedback and need a way to unify insights. 

Productboard just does that and so much more. You can easily add different objectives, score feature sets across different dimensions, tag them, list them via hierarchy compare them one to the next. 

This is especially important amid a rapidly shifting external environment where product priorities shift quickly and you need to be able to react effectively.

Miro

When you’re in product design, it’s hard to explain your point or give directions without sticky notes or a whiteboard. I’ve gotten used to that process that it’s been one of my biggest challenges now that we’re working remotely. Luckily, I discovered a tool called Miro, which is designed specifically for visual collaboration. 

Described as “the online collaborative whiteboard platform to bring teams together, anytime, anywhere,” it’s basically like a whiteboard that you can your team can use to brainstorm, map out strategies, develop products, visualize processes and do workshops, all while you’re working remotely. 

It also has over 25 add-ons like Slack, Sketch and Jira that enhances your whiteboard experience, and you can use powerful sticky notes to remember important points. 

Miro also has the ability to recognize drawings and it works on all devices, which makes it extra beneficial.

Trello

We’ve used Jira to manage our engineering teams for a while, but I’ve found that for managing non-technical teams and specific projects that Trello is a bit better. Trello is basically a cloud-based project management tool that allows you to collaborate better and keep your projects organized and clearly seen by everyone. 

Trello approaches project management through visual representations. Each project will be assigned a “board” that contains cards that represent the individual tasks of team members involved in that project. 

Team members can then set up their task lists and discuss in real time. It also keeps everyone informed with email notifications, activity logs and task assignments, which I find very convenient as a product manager.

It’s really lightweight and deal simple for everyone to understand. 

Fiverr

Finally, there’s Fiverr. With this new setup of working remotely, I want my team to focus on their own tasks and not be bothered with short-term tasks that are not central to their jobs. 

So when I need to get things done fast, I look for freelancers on Fiverr to take care of the job for me. It could be anything from data entry, quick design tasks, wireframes and other one-off tasks. 

I especially like getting a logo made for a project to gain interest on a new product and I can easily find a freelancer on Fiverr to design one for me.