[oAlbe]

Why is it more difficult? Do you have some data or anecdotes to back up your claim? I'm really interested.

I've been working remotely for years now, and my relationships with the various PMs I've had has always been: talk about what needs to be done, and then be left alone to actually do it, check back when I have progress or if I have outstanding questions that arose from better understanding the problem domain. Plus the daily stand up meetings that have always been optional to attend. Done, nothing else, nothing complicated.

Is this uncommon across the industry?

[ta980345]

I've been working for a company where people optionally do remote work from home; the difference in communication and team cohesiveness is stark to me.

When people are colocated in an office (and I guess this is a generalization), there are more incidental chats, knowledge-sharing, status-updates, stress/challenge-sharing etc.

I do better work and get more done at home though, and from an environmental perspective it seems like an obvious choice.

[oAlbe]

There's a lot that can be written about the differences between remove vs on site work. Sure, remote does tend to feel more lonely. Sure, you are missing the whole water cooler effect (as I've seen it called) of running into a coworker at the office and just having a chat, and so forth. But I don't really see how that makes the job of a product manager any harder or how it makes managing remote workers harder.

Companies with offices still use work methodologies. They still use SCRUM, kanban boards, retrospectives, meetings, wikis/documentation, and above all tickets/issues/stories or whatever is the term your company prefers. And I'm sure they aren't writing their stories on pieces of paper, or their documentation in binders. Everything is done through a tool that saves everything online to make it available to everyone.

Your PM running into you at the office while you are taking a break and asking how the work is proceeding doesn't really add any value to neither the work you are doing nor the information they already have about it. Scheduling a weekly catch up meeting to discuss progress (depending on the size of the story of course and yadda yadda, just making an example here) makes more sense. And you can easily do that with a video call.

[notacoward]

> Why is it more difficult?

First, I think it's important to point out that there's a difference between a fully distributed team and a mostly-local team with some remote members. A lot (not all) of the problems have to do with the disparity between the colocated and non-colocated workers. For example, the colocated majority in a mixed team will often cling to old habits wrt soliciting or providing feedback/approval on commits, conveying important news, etc. Just turn your head a bit and speak a bit louder; everyone will get the cue and listen in. Ditto for learning new tricks by hearing or seeing someone near you. There's no incentive for them to do anything but what works for them. On a fully distributed team people do develop alternatives because they have to.

Other things that are more difficult remote include anything involving a whiteboard, from design discussions to planning sessions. Online alternatives are never as good. Inability to participate in group social activities, or to detect nuance in conversation based on tone of voice (where a fully distributed team would come up with textual alternatives) can lead to a surprisingly quick erosion of mutual trust. This is why people who do work "full time" remotely - like me BTW - still benefit from frequent in-person visits.

> Is this uncommon across the industry?

I think your experience sounds a bit exceptional, but there's probably a lot of variance according to technical area and project characteristics. For me, working on a large codebase with lots of hidden coupling so that no individual project can be accomplished without tight collaboration at least across the dozen-person immediate team (if not the broader 40-person team), being remote is a real handicap. Can/should the codebase be fixed? Sure, but that project itself requires even tighter coordination until it's done. Were I to attempt it, I'd have to be on-site for months.

I think there are more bad codebases and weak teams than there are the opposite, so my guess would be that my experience (and this is not the first team in which I've been a remote minority) is not far from the norm.