We all experienced a tremendous change in the digital technology spectrum this year.

While a lot of companies were already experimenting with remote teams/remote workspace, the pandemic in 2020 leads to a huge remote revolution.

The only way left for most of the industries was to move their business to virtual during the crisis situation.

But as technology improves and business widens, remote work booms recently highlighted in Zoom’s revenues report.

As the evolution of remote working has taken place, it has become difficult for business leaders to align their remote teams with a clear product vision.

The questions may often come to entrepreneur's minds that is their business ready to be a part of this new paradigm shift. Is their team well-equipped with the right set of tools to deliver the best despite this big change?

You get the answers once you get confronted with this big change. For this, you need to understand remote product development and the big secrets behind the success of remote development.

Remote Product Development - What All You Need To Know

Remote product development is simply the process of getting your product developed by some external group of talented and expert professionals.

Remote product development facilitates you to outsource your new product and get it done by expert professionals sitting at different remote locations. Remote product development is something away from sticky notes, whiteboard sessions, physical presentations, and the other things that we often do at the office.

Remote product development comprises the best talents across the different parts of the world that form a team and get your product developed faster, with quality codes.

6 Secrets To Remote Product Development

Successful remote product development is a collaborative and fruitful effort of a team of best developers, testers, designers, project managers, and others who contribute their bits and bytes in developing a product.

Working with remote product development teams is not a trend anymore - it is the present persistent reality and the upcoming future.

Having a great product idea is not enough? A full-fledged product that excels on quality, budget, performance, time, and developed with talented professionals will provide you a great digital product.

Building strong relationships in an increasingly virtual workplace leads to a rise in virtual teams. More than 43% of the US workforce today is working remotely fully or partially. Strong leadership can have a great impact on employee productivity and morale.

Let’s dig out some secrets behind successful remote product development. They will encourage remote teams to stay motivated and productive.

Also Read- How To Build A SaaS Product?

Project Management To Align Tasks

Implementing a project management system into your project enables project managers to create assignments, track progress, and monitor the productivity of their employees. Remote teams can make use of remote working tools like Trello, Asana, and Jira during remote product development See how Asana compares withJira, for example, to choose the right one for your needs..

Remote teams must take care of various tasks such as project management, task management, configuration management of application code, document management, and team management.

A product idea that you want to nurture into a full-fledged product should excel on all your expected parameters that are quality, budget, performance, and time.

And with talent scattered across the globe, remote product development is the perfect solution to supercharge your digital product.

Follow The 3Cs Rule Of Communication

Every communication that carries out between the remote team members should be clear, consistent, and concise. The more clear your conversation is, the faster is your product launch. Make use of the best communication tools and channels to communicate and collaborate.

Ensure that the time zones of teams match with each other when working on a single project. Every single update of the project running irrespective of the stages handled by multiple teams should be shared by the teams.

It helps them to work seamlessly with each other and make the remote working more productive. Seamless communication is the foundation of successful product development.

Make the best use of popular remote tools like Slack, Skype, Teams, Zoom, and GoToMeeting and make your team communication smoother.

Also Read: Hiring Remote Developers For Your SaaS Development

Document Everything To Get Things Clear

Detailed and rich-featured documentation provides a key to a smooth and frictionless remote development process. You must document everything. To ensure all development tasks are prioritized in the right manner for the product development success, document each and everything.

It is easier for the remote development team to check if everything is going in the right direction by detailed documentation.

Here are the things to include:

• Defined requirements
• Means of communication
• Knowledge transfer for all the information
• The timeline along with the sprints
• Expectations from each deliverable

Defining Clear Goals To The Team

The development changes can be easily done when working in proximity and in a flexible time zone. Establishing clear protocols, in the beginning, should be a good start when you have a team working at different remote locations.

Let remote team members know each other, the people they should contact in case of any suggestion or problem, and how they can collaborate seamlessly. Remote teams should be clear of the deliverables and the type of reporting expected.

You may also read: Outsourcing Product Development Guide

Make Best Use Of Remote Collaboration Tools

There is no better way to collaborate and communicate with remote teams than leveraging the right tools when it comes to remote working. Remote working brings all digital tools and technologies together.

You can easily connect and collaborate with your remote team using some great remote working tools.

Here are some tools you can use:

• Jira & Basecamp for project management & collaboration
• Zoho for onboarding and other HR activities
• Slack for communication, document sharing, and instant messaging
• Google Drive for keeping everything in one place
• GitHub for code creation and reviews
• Trello for organizing teamwork in a visual manner
• Zoom for virtual meetings and daily standups
• WebWork Tracker for monitoring employee’s productivity

Tips To Get The Best Out Of Your Remote Team

When you are thinking about getting remote product development, remote teams often face many challenges and opportunities. In this section, we will check out some tips/tricks that can solve your problem or help you overcome them when working remotely for your product development work.

Is Your Product Vision Clear?

The main issue that most of the remote teams face when they start with remote product development is understanding product vision.

Remote teams should share their personal views and ideas of the product with each of the team members. Set-up monthly or weekly roadmap reviews with the complete remote teams to ensure they are in sync with the product progress. They know where they are headed with the product and can even offer their inputs.

You may also read: Outsourcing Product Development Guide

Smooth Communication Is The Way Out

The remote members might face issues with virtual/digital communication- frozen screen, microphone not working, slow internet, and much more.

It is important to ensure that the remote product team has the right set of digital tools to communicate seamlessly. Select one platform where all the remote team members can have meetings, discussions, and have a separate space to know each other individually.

Schedule Meetings And Discussions On Regular Basis

Transferring or sharing knowledge might be a challenge when doing remote product development.

It is important to schedule remote meetings with team members daily and build an environment of sharing and collaboration. Make use of cloud environments and Google drive to share documents. “Creating a wiki or a knowledge base can also be helpful in centralizing information and making it easily accessible for all team members, regardless of their location.

Managing Time Properly

Your remote team members might even find it difficult to manage the time when doing remote product development. Be sure that remote teams should be comfortable working in different time zones. It will provide you an extra time to meet and discuss things working remotely.

Remote teams should manage the time accordingly to avoid confusion and getting overworked.

Product Development At Classic Informatics: How Do We Do It In Our Way

Remote product development is not a one-step process. For a product to make it market ready for launch you need to align it with your business goals and serve your customers, it needs to pass through several steps.

With different teams having designing, development, testing, and marketing specialized under one roof, Classic Informatics offers their clients a comprehensive way to launch your innovative product faster even in remote environments.

Brainstorming The Product Idea

Keeping a brilliant idea in your mind is not enough. You have to implement it in the most innovative way. This is a crucial responsibility of every product manager and the first priority in the product development process.

And thus, our team sits with yours to sort and set priorities to the product features. Product brainstorming can be a challenging task for remote teams. The team together schedules meetings and conferences to share ideas and discussions.

Decide On The Type Of End Product

Before initiating the product development process, our team of developers first sit with the client to understand the product requirements and what would be the resultant end product. 

The discussions are conducted with the client to know whether they want to build a full-fledged product or just an MVP(minimum viable product).

MVP is the minimum viable product that offers customers with minimal features to get validation and move ahead with building the final product.

Our product development team create best MVPs that can supercharge your digital product and help you scale it.

Our teams conduct weekly meetings with the client's to discuss the product development process and also incorporate their unique ideas and suggestions in each sprints.

Choosing The Right Tech Stack For Product Development

We have a team of talented software developers that have expertise and years of experience in cutting-edge technologies and frameworks.

We tend to develop the right kind of product by keeping the cutting-edge technology in mind that fulfills the client’s requirements.

Here are a few things that our expert consider when selecting the right technology:

• Product requirements, features, and implementations required
• Cost of the developer for that technology
• Time to find technology resource

Initiate The Product Development Process

The classic big team of developers, designers, and testers start working on the product prototype, adds new features, integrates it with the latest technologies, user-friendly and engaging.

Our team implements agile product development practice to deliver a full-fledged final product.

Here, the entire team share the product development process status with the client after each sprint. At last, your full-fledged final product ready to launch into the market.

Integrating Cloud Solutions Into Product Development

Our team at Classic helps clients to get optimized, efficient cloud-based solutions that transform our client's business to become more agile and reduce costs.

We deliver our clients with the best cloud solutions is Amazon AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform deliver quality software products.

Our cloud team comes up with the best cloud solutions to deliver quality software products. We help clients to have an amazing cloud experience with robust cloud solutions.

We Follow Distributed Agile Practices

During the remote product development phase, our team follows a distributed agile or sprint-based approach. Here, we divide the project into phases based on functionality and requirements.

Each phase is divided into small sprints where we divide tasks into sprints. After each sprint, the product manager discuss it with the client and gather the feedback regarding the product development.

Then the project manager schedules daily scrums, meetings, and presentations to allocate tasks to each of the team members using remote collaboration tools such as Jira, and Basecamp.

Closing Thoughts

Establishing a high level of trust between remote managers and remote team members starts with having good mutual understanding and communication.

Thanks to all the communication, remote, and collaboration tools that help remote tech teams to eliminate all the bottlenecks and barriers that come across the remote product development process and provide smooth remote work.

Remote work is all about building trust and smooth functioning of the remote teams on the project. As remote working has become the new norm and companies are looking for remote partners to fulfill their product development requirements.

We can be your remote product development partners! You can get end-to-end product development from us, hire a single developer or designer for your product or build your dream team for the product, including developers, designers, project managers, testers, technical writers, etc.