Collaboration without whiteboards: a survival story
By: Ryan Andrews
Tags: Working From Home, Team Collaboration, Whiteboards, Collaboration, Product Management

I Miss My Whiteboard

You don’t understand. Whiteboards are a big deal. These hard plastic canvases are how product managers like me communicate. We draw squares and diamonds and cylinders with too many lines connecting them. It’s breathtaking. Every time I pick up a dry erase marker, a new Sistine Chapel is gifted to the world. You’re welcome.

They smell of cheap ink, stale and rigid. They feel smooth with a slight chill. They look beautiful. Well, at first they’re beautiful. Eventually they look like shit. I can’t be trusted to actually erase my magnificent works consistently, let alone clean these things. Who has time for that? I’m too busy slaying customer problems and building awesome software. Awesome software that was once nothing but black, blue, and red lines floating in glory on the office walls.

But now, those office walls are gone. Well, the office is still there. I’m not there. I’m at home, under stay-at-home orders, with no whiteboard. I suppose I could order one. Many people probably have. But I’ve got paintings, pictures with my wife, and cool Mad Men art prints everywhere. Hanging a whiteboard would be a whole to-do. No thanks.

Even if I did take the time to hang one up, what would that get me? I could draw my boxes and cylinders, but I’d just end up staring at them in solitude. I’d still be without my favorite part of the whiteboard — everything that happens around it: the collaboration with my fellow product managers, the haggling with a tech lead, the late afternoon debate, the Venn diagram that helps us decide where to eat lunch. I’d be isolated even more than I am now, just me and my etched and sketched ideas with no practical way to share them. Do I point my webcam at my whiteboard? Do I take a photo with my iPhone SE (don’t @ me) and post it on Slack? I guess. But that’s not my kind of collaboration. And what do I do when I realize my initial iteration is trash? How do I edit a photo of a whiteboard?

No. This isn’t for me. I’ll keep my art prints where they are on the wall, thanks.

So what should I do? What should we all do? Well, after a few weeks of being in a state of quarantine, there are some ideas and practices I think can help teams survive these times with minimal, whiteboard-less friction, and be set up for success in whatever the new, new world is.

Whiteboard levels without whiteboards

Sure there are virtual whiteboards and apps. I got that. What I actually miss is that micro-community that forms around a whiteboard — that half circle of curiosity and ideation. At my office, the whiteboard behind my desk was a billboard shouting out to all who passed by. I miss the prominence of that something on the wall. There’s a gravity to content and ideas that are wall-worthy. How many of the thoughts that pop into your head actually make it on a wall?

With a whiteboard it was easier, clearer. Want to know what I think is important? It’s behind me in size 389 font. Take a look for yourself. Let’s talk about it right now while you stand here with me looking at it.

Now, with everyone dispersed, that conspicuousness requires a bit more effort. If you want the same prominence you need to publish, share, post, and email until someone asks you to stop. What once was a mockup designed in tandem on a whiteboard is now a first pass you’ll need to do alone, ripe for comments and a second pass by your collaborator. What previously would have been a brainstorm with pros and cons on a glorious ten foot wide canvas is now a spreadsheet with n number of contributors all adding their thoughts at different times of the day.

Changing formats and channels isn’t enough. There has to be a behavioral change with ongoing effort. Coworkers should be sick of looking at our words and our plans and our designs. They should know them just as well as we do. Now we’re in sync. Now we’ve reached the same level as face to face collaboration and can move forward. Repeat.

A few tips to help you stay in sync:

Kick every meeting off with one or two slides that help set the context for what you are discussing. Include visuals, graphs, mockups and examples. Share these slides before the meeting for everyone to review. You think everybody else knows what you’re meeting about. They don’t.

Assign action items to a specific person and make this visible. If everybody is doing it, then nobody is.

Use apps and tools built for teams. If multiple people can’t work on the same thing at the same time, pick a different tool.

I won’t give you a list of collaborative tools here. You know what they are. If not, Google it or get a different job.

Over-Communicating is Communicating

Years ago, a former boss labeled me “writer downer guy”. It was a not very clever, but descriptive nickname for what just seemed like the best way to do things. Now, in a COVID-19 world, we all need to be writer downers.

Teams are scattered across space and time. There’s a large set of professionals working remotely that aren’t really used to it. Over-communicating is your baseline. If you feel like you are starting to annoy people, you’re just arriving at where you should be operating. Keep pushing it. Don’t assume anyone knows anything, because they don’t. And even if they do, you’re competing with dozens of other incoming communications that bombard their senses every hour (both work related and non-work related). For collaboration and idea development, you need to keep your subject top of mind, your progress clear, and your expectations defined without question.

Asynchronous is the new standard. Transparency levels are low, just above Everglades swamp water.

The whiteboard was my communication convergence point. It’s where brainstorming and research came together communally. In a physical conference room (remember those?), this meant everyone was looking at the same thing at the same moment in time. Conversations had a purpose, a literal focal point made clear by its presence on the wall. Weeks of forethought, days of prior research, and years of lessons learned came together to be shared. We were hunter-gatherers, and the whiteboard was our nightly campfire. Do you miss that warmth like I do? Sigh…

Without this centralized location for collecting our foraged goods, with schedules all out of whack and home life variances, our ideas flourish asynchronously. And that’s okay. We can survive. We can still build amazing things and solve complex problems. Our communication just needs to adapt. We need to write everything down. If not, words will vanish into the cold night.

Some ways to be a write downer:

Take detailed notes of meetings on shared document platforms for others to review at their leisure.

Post summaries and follow-ups from discussions in relative Slack channels (or whatever your chat app of choice is).

Document your decisions thoroughly and publicly — technical, design, strategy, all of them.

Take advantage of comment features in your tools so people can share ideas and respond to others whenever it works for them. Your schedule is not their schedule.

A lot of this is probably familiar, things we even did pre-pandemic. But the importance of writing and documenting is magnified right now. The fluctuations in schedules, availability, and levels of understanding can’t be over-emphasized. And if we want to survive, we can’t under-communicate.

Over-communicating is communicating. Communicating is under-communicating. Under-communicating is failure. You get it.

The New, New World

Where will this take us? A year from now when I am (hopefully) back in an office, surrounded by my fellow product managers, eager to share ideas face to face, will I stick to my virtual documents and asynchronous over-communication? Will I return to my beloved whiteboard, hungry for real-time and verbal debates as my primary?

No and no. We should anticipate an increase in working from home, in continued dispersion. I’ll definitely be lurking around the office once allowed. I like it there. The snacks are good, and I miss the Bevi machine. But if my ideas are to be collaborated on, I will need to adopt lessons learned now. The new, new world will be a mix of pre-pandemic traditions and novel habits. Be ready for then by surviving the now.

As for today, I’ll keep working to recapture the magic of my beloved communal collaboration without my colorful markers and worn eraser, wondering if that whiteboard back at my office misses me too.