[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.