Remote Product Management
Product managers act as the glue between multiple cross-functional teams and effective communication is the foundation of their success; from here the general sense that product managers can’t do their job productively unless they are co-located with their teams.
I definitely believe that it’s harder to work as product manager remotely, compared to other roles, but I also believe that it is possible if supported by proper organizational measures, company culture, and tools.
There are plenty of articles and resources online, as well as inspiring books, that articulate the general challenges and opportunities of remote work and distributed teams. But how does this apply to the PM role?
Remote vs fully distributed
I believe that in general, it makes a big difference working in a fully distributed scenario vs having a remote individual working with other co-located team members. Fully distributed teams tend to deliberately evolve and optimize their practices and culture around remote working, everyone experiences the same challenges and try to promote the same level of interaction that they’d have if they were all in the same physical location.
If you work remotely and everyone else is co-located, most of the conversation flow will naturally happen in that room and you’ll have a harder time to stay in the loop and get the team to adapt to interact with you effectively. If you are a remote PM, this situation is even harder, you won’t be able to fill the white spaces leveraging those natural interactions, you’ll tend to be marginalized and become just an administrator. To compensate for that you’ll need to set up additional practices and communication tools to work effectively.
Lessons learned
Here the two major differences I learned from my personal experience:
- More private time for deep work.
You might argue that PMs don’t need to as much deep work as designers and developers since the nature of their job includes by definition a lot of coordination and meetings.
I do believe, however, that PMs need to find the right balance between time spent to coordinate activities and private time to analyze inputs and elaborate strategies. In my personal experience, being able to allocate at least 30% of my time to deep work allows me to step back from the day to day “emergencies”, see the overall picture, focus more on problems rather than on solutions and, overall, elaborate a more effective strategy.
Remote work facilitates these circumstances and allows you to focus without distractions for a significant amount of time on these cognitively demanding tasks. - More challenging communication
As a PM, you don’t manage people, you don’t tell people what to do; you are a leader but your power is purely based on your ability to influence. To do it effectively, a strong data-driven, evidence-based approach is necessary but not enough, you need to establish good human relationships to have deep dialogues with your team.
Remote dialogues are more challenging, that’s a fact. Communications are often asynchronous, so you also need to adapt to the fact that you’re not always going to be able to get your questions answered right at the moment you want it. To make sure “your” team gets access to the info they need when they need it, you might have to compensate by investing more on documentation and content.
Part of your role is also making sure that all the right people in the organization, not only your team, know about things, as well as making sure the wrong people don’t get distracted by things they don’t need to be involved in. Achieving this remotely requires a more structured communication flow.
The minimum conditions
I believe there are some basic conditions that need to exist to let a remote PM performing his job effectively:
- Access to customers: you can’t build a product strategy and a roadmap purely based on market research and data. You need to get access to the voice of customers. Wherever you are physically located, you need to get access to it, better if directly. If you can’t get access to it directly, you have to create the conditions inside your organization to gather these inputs from all your colleagues (pre-sales, sales, customer success, support, marketing)
- Access to stakeholders: of course you need access to your team and the rest of the organization, but is especially important that you can keep an effective dialogue with your stakeholders and strategy contributors. As a product leader you run a strategy that must align to the business strategy and goals, if you lose that alignment, everything you do is at risk. Poor alignment with your team can cost you more efforts on the next iteration, but a lack of alignment on a common vision with your stakeholder is much more painful to recover.
Tips
Here the 4 top pieces of advice I would give to remote PMs, based on my personal experience:
- Establish human relationships
Whenever you can, try to get to know your team personally, bound on in-person events and when you are remote try to get personal when possible. Use video call as much as you can, rather than audio-only; start conversations talking about not work-related topics to compensate for that moment in front of the coffee machine that the others have every day in the office. Check-in often with all members of the team, whether it is a weekly standing meeting or simply a five-minute chat to say hello.
Finally, just because you are remote, don’t forget to celebrate! Take extra steps to show team spirit and acknowledge how everyone’s contributions impact the work.
There is nothing more important than this, you might be a clever strategist, an excellent designer or a knowledgeable technologist, but it’s worth nothing if your team doesn’t trust you personally. - Build continuous alignment on the vision and strategy
When you work in the same room with your team, your presence itself is a reminder to the team that there is a plan, a strategy, and clear goals. When you are not there, you need to make sure people stay aligned and know why we are investing in certain initiatives, why we build specific features, what are the pains we tackle and where we are going to be in the next 6, 12 and 18 months. - Invest in the right tools
As PM, your leadership depends on your capacity to influence, so it is part of your job to facilitate communications. Find the right tool to optimize communication and sharing across distances. For remote PMs the communications tools have to work perfectly, not just fine; there is nothing worse than choppy audio to distract a critical conversation.
Instant messaging is great, but it is not always the best choice. If you are sending too many back-and-forth messages you risk to create more confusion than clarity, in that case don’t hesitate to jump into a web meeting and use your video camera every time.
Whatever tools you opt for, be smart in the way you overcome the adoption of new processes and tools and remember, the right tool is the one that people love to use. - Optimize for async communications
Many times, you are not going to get (or give) an answer when needed.
Using the right tools is essential, but you also need to set rules to ensure people trust and keep using these tools effectively. Some channels, such as email, are by definition asynchronous, while instant messaging, for example, can be used for both real-time and async conversations. In order to avoid frustrations and generate a lack of trust in the tools, you should set rules to establish what channels are meant to be used for high priority communications, as well as how to respect the personal time of team members.
To compensate for lack of direct access, you need to be more verbose and precise on the documentation and contents, from product requirements, stories, comments, notes, design specs, etc… All modern product development and management tools are evolving with native collaboration and documentation features that can make a difference in these conditions.
To optimize for async communication, the most important skill to master is be very clear in your messages and contents, at the cost of over-communicating. Either in the case you write an email that expects an answer within 24 hours, a comment on Jira, a message on Slack or even during a video conversation, it is more effective to spend two extra seconds to formulate your point in a clearer way than having to make 3 iterations to correct a misunderstanding.
I spent half of my PM career working with remote teams. Currently, I live in California managing co-located teams based in Europe; full remote scenario plus 9 hours of time zone difference doesn’t make it easy.
Something that facilitates my work is a peer on the inside, a PO who works where the rest of the team is located and we work closely despite being in different locations and time zones. A few other key relationships inside the company give me direct access to customer insights and being co-located with the management team allows me to drive the product strategy effectively.
Being a successful remote PM is not impossible — I do it every day! For sure there are challenges, but there are steps you can take to proactively manage them.
