Product Management in Practice, 2nd Edition

Chapter 13. Try This at Home: The Trials and Tribulations of Remote Work

Several decades ago in mid-2019, I found myself having a conversation with a few product managers who had made the transition to working remotely. “It’s fantastic,” one of them said. “I don’t have to waste half of my life traveling from place to place, and I think I’m actually getting better at my job!” With an air of self-satisfied contrarian certainty, I responded, “Yeah, I mean, that sounds great, but I can’t imagine not being able to spend time face-to-face with people. I actually love the amount of travel I’m doing for work, and I don’t think I’d be nearly as good at my job if I had to do it remotely.”

Whoops.

In the last several years, countless guides to remote and distributed work have been published, each with its own “useful fictions” that may help you think through how best to work with your own distributed or hybrid team. But, just as there is no such thing as a single step-by-step guide to doing product management, there is certainly no such thing as a single step-by-step guide to remote product management. If anything, the ever-shifting trends toward and away from remote work only add more variables to an already-overwhelming equation.

In this chapter, we’ll discuss some of the common challenges of doing product management remotely, and the tremendous amount of effort and thoughtfulness that goes into doing it well. Note that the word remote generally refers to an individual working outside ...