What are your thoughts on fully remote product teams? Can they work long-term?

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4 Answers

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Bryan Dunn

Nextiva Head of Product, Developer Ecosystem | Formerly VP Product at Localytics, Crayon, Redox, CoreStory • 1y

I've been working at fully (or practically) remote companies for ~5 years now and I believe they can certainly work. Tools like Zoom, Slack, and Miro can (mostly) handle the day to day activities of product teams. However, in person time is still critical for some activities and for building a product culture you want. Some rules I have: I try to do a team offsite at least quarterly. This allows for free flowing discussions and brainstorming that don't translate well virtually. I plan a few days ...Read More

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Melissa Ushakov

GitLab Group Manager, Product Management • 3y

Working at GitLab for the last three years has shown me that fully remote teams can work and be highly effective. Teams at GitLab are remote and highly distributed and work asynchronously first. For example, we run all the typical agile ceremonies (refinement, spring planning, sprint retrospective, standups, etc.) asynchronously. This way of working provides a high degree of documentation for all decisions, allows for greater collaboration, and more thought to be put behind critical decisions. ...Read More

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Aleks Bass

Typeform Chief Product Officer • 3y

There are very few hills from a professional perspective that I would be willing to die on, but this is definitely one of them. I absolutely believe that fully remote product teams can work in the long term. I currently lead a fully remote team and I've seen some of the best product management work of my career being produced by this team. The challenges I've seen with remote work for product management have been when the structures of the team are not consistent (i.e. some people work in an of ...Read More

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Sharad Goel

Carta VP Product, Upmarket & Private Equity • 3y

I don't believe those can work effectively - the nature of product is that it is very cross functional in nature and that requires a lot of interaction and I have found technology to be a constant barrier here. Nothing beats a good old fashioned whiteboard discussion or scribbling together on a design board.

Is there a healthy hybrid model - yes because there are periods when you need to focus on getting stuff done by yourself.

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