I work at ChowNow (an online ordering system and food ordering app that helps local restaurants thrive, pssst we’re hiring) as a Senior Product Manager. 

I lead our onboarding program and internal tools team. We work on features to streamline the Restaurant onboarding experience for both our internal onboarding teams and our Restaurant partners. Our program delivers self-serve, automation and white glove features.

How big is it?‍

ChowNow has around ~500 employees. My primary team consists of 7 people: 2 Backend engineers, Front end engineer, QA Engineer, Technical Program Manager, Experience Designer and Product Manager. ‍

Where are your teammates located?‍

We’re all over the US. The majority is based out of the Greater Los Angeles Area and Kansas City (where we have physical offices) but we also have people from areas like Seattle, San Francisco, New York and Maryland to name a few.‍

What does your team do? What are you responsible for?‍

We streamline the onboarding process by increasing our throughput and reducing time to onboard, we also build internal tools to reduce operational costs and complexities so that we can scale helping local restaurants thrive.

My role is to create a vision and build cross functional alignment around it while delivering on a program or features that support all of the above.

Keeping our cameras on as much as possible: Eye contact and making sure we’re taking the time to connect with the people we’re talking to is key.‍

Communication: over communicate, repeat things in as many mediums as possible to ensure everyone is aligned (zoom calls, slack, emails etc.)‍

Collaboration: it’s difficult to emulate “white board” sessions remotely, I found Miro and Figma jam to be pretty effective tools.‍

Unwind: it’s important to not have “work meetings” all the time, or to make sure that not every meeting is “100% about work” we need time and space to connect, break from time to time and have fun.

We’re all people with lives outside of work so it’s important to stay connected and curious about each other. I try to put a smile on people’s faces when I can.

Our Agile methodology provides various essential meetings:

• Every two weeks, we plan our “sprint” for the next two weeks and discuss our goal(s) which will then dictate our approach to achieve that goal.
• We do stand-ups daily to talk about what was accomplished the day before, what is being worked on today and blockers if any, it’s a good moment for the team to connect daily and support each other and ensure we are on track and aligned.
• At the end of a sprint we review the work that was done (we usually demonstrate progress and collect feedback along the way) which is a nice way to celebrate and recognize the team’s efforts.
• My most valuable meeting is our retrospective. This is the last meeting we do before planning a new sprint. I find it extremely useful to get a good pulse check on team morale and engagement, this allows me to tune/tweak as needed to ensure the team stays happy and engaged.

Carving out more quality time to connect with people, as we grow and are spread across the US it’s harder to build trust and strong relationships with everyone. I wish I could clone myself.

Virtual hangs (over food, cooking, drinks, games etc.), we had a company picnic this summer in LA which was nice, when possible and safe we also attempt small outings in person such as team outdoor lunch or drinks.

Drawful 2 has been pretty successful.

We usually start our first standup of the week with a few minutes discussing each other’s weekends. I've found a few gems doing so, such as “I had a bear encounter” and “I made a homemade movie/podcast”. We also often ask new members what their favorite pickup food is. Some answers give you a bit of a glimpse into people’s lives and way of thinking and I like that.

Slack is our go-to day to day communication tool and we profusely use gifs or memes to express ourselves.

We record recurring meetings like Sprint Reviews via Zoom to celebrate our wins and learnings across the org so that people can catch up on their own times.

Miro/Figma are used for fun brainstorming sessions and we also profusely use stickers/emojis.

I’ve enjoyed attending INDUSTRY: The Product Conference which was an online event in 2021. I found the content of the talks to be inspiring and refreshing perspectives that I was able to share and bring back to my team.

I always have a couple of books on the topic, I like Marty Cagan’s INSPIRED and EMPOWERED books and Matt LeMay’s book Product Management in Practice is probably the most, well, practical book on the topic, he’s working on a second edition that i will probably pick up.