Is Remote Work Fit For The Product Manager?

As a writer who blogs for both art and money, it's pretty easy for me to go anywhere in the world and do my job, as long as I have a stable internet connection.

Can the same thing be said about product managers?

I've pondered this question recently for a few reasons.

The first is that of collaboration. Writers like me have everything they need without the need to collaborate. There might be the occasional interview, depending on your reporting. Yet that's as simple as directly messaging back and forth without needing to send a single calendar invite. Product managers, on the other hand, need to have constant communication with their teammates. CEOs of the product don't work alone.

The second reason why this interests me is technology. Writers only need grammar-checking programs and platforms like this to write their words and save them on the cloud.

But product managers work with more tools than I could imagine. Software engineers, the beef audience of this platform, need terminals and GitHub. Anyone involved in the product needs collaborative tools to vote on ideas for features and plan them on the kanban. Many product teams also have data scientists to help analyze what works and promote the product, a profession that has its own software needs.

Between the need to schedule communication with so many folks and the various program needs of the workforce, is it really possible to work remotely as a product manager? Especially in an asynchronous environment where employees work in various time zones?

When perusing the Web to find my answer, I only found articles that addressed the benefits of being a remote product manager. I couldn't find an article discussing someone's experience being a remote product manager until I found this one.

Rian van der Merwe, at the time of his writing, was a product manager working on Postmark, an application email tool owned by Wildbit. While he addresses the challenges that I wrote above, he wrote of one important benefit of being on a product team that's remote: Deep working.

As Rian said in his essay...

"Because it’s easier to shut down distractions as a remote worker, the deep work part of that cycle can be immensely efficient and dramatically increase both the speed and quality of work that gets done."

Perhaps it isn't a lack of what we have, tools, that is the problem. If anything, we're plentiful in those. Team alignment is an issue yet it's not the reason why remote work as a product manager is tough.

The problem is knowing how to do deep work and focus.

Maybe meditation should be part of every product manager's checklist.

Disclaimer: The writer is affiliated with Chisel Labs.