In the world of remote teams, staying aligned can be a challenge. In product teams various versions of the roadmap begin circulating, discovery and delivery drift apart and key decisions are lost. When working towards a specific goal or trying to stay aligned with a transformation roadmap, equipping your team with the right tool can make all the difference between chaos and calm. For teams that lose alignment, delivery slows, decisions stall and customer value is delayed.
Long gone are the days where everything can be kept in a data table, and the world of tools has moved forward significantly, but this can add a layer of confusion to the decision-making process when it comes to selecting the right tool for your Product teams. Particularly with many tools offering similar functionality, it is not always clear what your team actually needs or how tools should work together. We’re a vendor-agnostic consultancy, because our experience has taught us that the right tool depends completely on what you are trying to achieve and how your teams work now.
We’ve broken down 5 types of tools that we think are essential to have in your ecosystem to ensure that your product teams are staying aligned with each other and with business goals. The tools we list are examples as opposed to endorsements. We have focused on the function they serve such as creating understanding and visibility, reducing friction, and supporting better decision making. For us, the tool is just the mechanism, and the value sits in what it helps your teams do.
1. Collaboration Tools
Such as Miro, Mural, FigJam.
The challenge we see: Staying aligned throughout discovery and making sure everyone has a shared understanding.
In our recent discovery work with a major retailer, we used collaboration tools like Miro to build a shared understanding from day one. Avoiding a fragmented discovery process and helping to surface assumptions and priorities.
A collaboration tool is exactly what it says on the tin, anything that replicates your team's ability to work together on a project or programme such as a virtual whiteboard or shared space. One of the biggest challenges that remote product teams face is isolation, and working independently can have negative effects.
These collaboration tools bring your team together, where they can work cooperatively to visually think through an idea or rapidly solve a problem together. They are useful to conduct workshops, ideation or discovery sessions that need to drive engagement or capture output.
These tools create the “in the room energy” that remote teams can sometimes miss and provide a digital alternative to the crumpled post it notes or whiteboard sprawl at the end of a session. Productive and collaborative, these digital tools allow your team to stay connected and work together through problems, benefitting from the collective experience and lateral thinking that problem solving can often require.
Asana’s research highlight this point clearly with “79% of workers at collaborative organisations feel well-prepared to adapt to emergent business challenges, which is four times higher than weak collaborators” and “87% of workers at companies with clear, connected goals say their organisation is well-prepared to meet customer expectations, more than double those without.”
Once teams have a shared space to collaborate, another challenge is keeping priorities, capacity and the roadmap understood and visible.
2. Delivery & Workflow Management
Such as Jira, Linear, ClickUp, Asana.
The challenge we see: A single source of truth - Keeping priorities, capacity and the roadmap visible and understood.
As a remote product team, there must be a central source of truth in relation to monitoring progress against your outcomes. A hub which breaks down goals and stages of completion into bite-sized chunks and evaluates progress against those goals. A project or workflow management tool allows you to centralise this information, and above a datasheet or text-based document, allows shared visibility, cross-stream alignment and easy access to insight and information.
This shared visibility assists in planning and roadmapping conversations, where your whole team, regardless of location, can see on one tool where they are currently and where they are aiming to get to. They are also essential for transparency and eliminating misalignment or hidden work.
The challenge of these tools when it comes to product teams is ensuring that data is not being squirrelled away in other places, that trackers are not being kept in isolation. When key insights, assumptions, and problems are not linked centrally. the connection from discovery to delivery is broken and context is lost. As is the case with any of these 5 tool types, ensuring you have full usage of your tool is essential to unlocking the benefits it can bring.
Even with clear plans in place, teams require reliable ways to stay connected on a daily basis to avoid confusion.
3. Communication & Connection
Such as Slack, Teams, Loom.
The challenge we see: Reducing miscommunication and maintaining connection between functions.
Communication is key for remote teams. Staying aligned while working on goals is almost impossible without one central point of communication.
Communication channels help teams stay connected without having to spend as much time diverted from their tasks and in meetings. Sources of information that allow team members to check progress and receive updates when it suits them can be crucial to maintaining momentum without losing connection.
Ensuring that you are utilising these tools to the best of their ability also makes the difference. Remote teams thrive when communication is thoughtful and not constant and selecting the appropriate communication channel can be the difference between overwhelming your team and keeping the balance just right.
For teams that do this well, teams keep things simple with short regular updates, clear requests for decisions and quick check ins that keep everyone aligned without additional meetings.
If communication and connection are an issue for your team, it may not be the tool or tools that need an overhaul, but perhaps how you are using it.
Alongside communication, teams need somewhere to log decisions, store research and keep frameworks to guarantee nothing gets lost.
4. Documentation & Knowledge Sharing
Such as Notion, Confluence, Google Workspace, Sharepoint.
The challenge we see: How to ensure frameworks, decisions and research don’t disappear into the void.
A central location for documentation and a single source of truth is more than a nice to have for a remote team. With data sharing and collaboration fuelling product-related progress, a centralised and orderly way to share knowledge and documents is the only way forward.
This is even more critical when you consider how much time is lost without it. Atlassian’s survey of over 12,000 people that found that “leaders and teams waste 25% of their time just searching for answers.” A clear example of how costly scattered or hard to navigate information can be to productivity.
The caveat for this, is that whichever tool or way of sharing information or knowledge both within your team and to the wider business, it benefits from being easy to use, universal and controlled. Simple search functions and consistent naming methods help unlock the benefits that these types of tools can provide.
If half of your team are storing sensitive data on their machine's local drives and the other half are utilising a top-down shared tool from the business, your team is always going to be behind on progress and productivity. Product teams regularly use these tools to store outputs from discovery, log decisions, and keep research easy to find, so work is not lost as it moves between functions and information can be followed from discovery through to delivery.
The choice of tool utilised in this area can also highlights security and risk issues. With processes and procedures incorporated into your documentation and knowledge-sharing system, you can ensure everyone is operating at the pace required to achieve your goals without compromising on security.
With alignment and knowledge sharing considered, the final focus is keeping product teams grounded in real insight from customers and end users.
5. User Insight & Feedback
Such as Dovetail, Maze, Hotjar.
The challenge we see: Staying close to customer insight and not assumptions.
As a product team, the customer’s needs must come first. Tools that allow you to collect insight and feedback from your customers allow you to maintain the focus on those needs with real-time and up to date data. Remote work can increase the risk of drifting away from the customer and selecting an effective and efficient tool for gathering this insight can help move your team forward, wherever they work.
The Tools You Use
Each of the tool types that have been discussed above have a wide range of products available to suit your needs. If the tool is unlocking productivity, increasing communication and collaboration and enabling you and your team to work more effectively, the benefits will be seen in the output of the work that is completed.
It’s worth taking the time to regularly assess the tools your team use at an enterprise level. Tooling can often grow quietly, creating overlap and unnecessary admin for teams. In some cases, it might not be a lack of tools, but rather too many, or an underutilisation of features within the tools you already pay for. Your teams may also be holding on to old ways of working and datasheets rather than adopting the better solutions available to them. Regardless of where your team sits on this spectrum, a clear and transparent assessment of what you are using and why can help you get more value out of your tools.
A few simple questions can help you gauge whether a new or existing tool is really adding value:
Does this tool make handovers between Product, Design, and Engineering smoother or more confusing?
Does it help us decide what to focus on based on the needs of our customers and aims of the organisation?
Does this fit or integrate with tools we already use?
No two product teams run in the same way, and the tools that you use should reflect that.
What are some of your favourite tools you utilise to keep remote product teams aligned?
