We're a bootstrapped team of 2. We don't find people thinking like this. It was a question. I answered in the affirmative.
We have bet all our savings on saying a bold YES to this question. I think we have the right to comment here. We've spent a good 15 months thinking about this problem.
We've read a ton of material. From the Principles of Product Development Flow to Joel Spolsky's article on Evidence-based Scheduling, distilling everything down into our product.
When you make something, and run into trouble finding early adopters, I'd like to hear all your thoughts on self-promotion.
I manage a group of people and we went fully remote when Covid started last year. Personally,I am a fan of remote work and I don't want to go back to office environment, unless it's literally across the road from where I live. Having said that, I do understand why some people want to be in the office:
remote can feel disconnecting. My team occasionally have really tough moments due to work specifics,so they used to go outside and just vent out,talk to each other. You can't really replicate it over Zoom.
Some people rely more heavily on those around them for day to day support,so they can struggle when left on their own at home.
Not everyone has a good environment to work from home. No company is solving this by saying 'you know what,why don't you get yourself a big house,so you could work quietly'. Heck,even my boss with a nice house was running some meetings from his kids room, because that was the only quite place in his house.
For some people,work is life and their colleagues are friends, or at least those they spend some time outside work. It is important for some, while other don't care.
Written commutation is difficult for many: people rarely can express themselves well in writing,as opposed to a few min chat face to face. This creates some absurd situation from time to time and it has made me completely rethink some priorities,when hiring people.
Some find it hard to communicate remotely, whether it's socially or work related. Some people binge on games or porn when they get stuck on something tough. I'd love to say that everyone who has a degree and can do assignments are mature enough, but some people just have self-control problems.
Well I think both are intertwined. It's a lot easier to get everyone pulling in the same direction with the help of social bonding.
Partly what I see in remote work is a deterioration of good faith assumptions. E.g. two people on different teams, who would normally see each other and chat in a small office, end up never really interacting when we're remote (just because they don't happen to have meetings together, say). If Person A then does something that affects the work of Person B, I find that Person B is more likely to interpret this action negatively or as being detrimental to the overall company goals if they don't have regular social interaction with Person A.
We're one PM and one EM who didn't like to spend any time on Project Management. So we got rid of the usual UI/UX that Project Management apps use to try an automated approach with an opinionated UX.
