A few months ago I wrote a post about how we build a product vision and roadmap for Postmark. It’s now almost 6 months later, and I just published a big post on the Postmark blog about how things are going. From roadmap to shipping: effective product management for remote teams is about how we moved from vision to execution, and how we dealt with the many challenges that remote teams bring to the equation. For example, on communication:

As a remote team we have to walk a fine line between working in private and working in public. We see this as a basic sine wave, where balance is extremely important. Work in private too much and you become silo’d and isolated. Work in public too much and it gets distracting for the rest of the team (and you never get time to focus). So we ran with the sine wave metaphor to create a diagram that outlines our ideal approach to private/public working and how we gather feedback.

You can view the post to see this diagram as well as a bunch of other topics:

• How we made the transition from an exciting grand vision to the daily grind of working on projects and features to make that vision a reality.
• What tools we decided to use on a day-to-day basis to keep everything running smoothly — and how our use of these tools evolved over time.
• The challenges and opportunities of being a (mostly) remote team, and how we try to make sure we communicate enough without overdoing it.
• Some remaining challenges we haven’t quite figured out yet.