4 Tips to be more Productive when Working From Home as a Product Manager

Here are 4 tips to increase your productivity when working from home (WFH) as a product manager.

I’m a PM on the Bing Search team at Microsoft, and our working schedule allows for a hybrid environment. I go to the office 50% of the time, while working from home in the other half.

While many tech jobs are quite remote-friendly, the PM role by nature makes it potentially hard. We have to organize meetings to discuss product strategy, clean backlogs, go over priorities, and perform many other cross-functional tasks with other teams that best require us to be in the center of everything. You give presentations more frequently to the leadership team (who may be in-office more often). Finally, you just want to make yourself more available to your team in general.

It’s not necessarily harder to get all this done remotely, but there’s a ton of nuance. Being in-person means you deliver a greater presence among your colleagues, and they know they can stop by your desk to chat you up whenever. Brainstorming sessions using meeting room whiteboards are easier than working online, albeit there are many collaboration tools found for remote work nowadays too.

It sounds like being in-office is much more ideal as a PM, doesn’t it? Here are 4 ways you can improve…