Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere

Regardless of covid 19 impact to work style, my working environment was remote with other countries among Singapore, Japan and India. So remote communication is a kind of basement of work. Recently due to prevention for infection, work from home has been spreaded to many industries and to many countries. Some of major IT Company (called “GAFA”) although are planning to back to office, still not sure the concrete plan to do and remote work will be continued. Under this situation, this book seems be in best seller in amazon.co.jp. Global company or IT company had already had good experience and many learning before covid19. But company in Japan faced some challenging to make sure “Work from home”. There are many fundamental issues in Japan’s company like HR system, management method and collaboration works. This book focus on “collaboration work” to delivery projects, not mentioning about HR system and management method which is most critical in Japan’s case. So I’m not sure How much effectively read and converted this knowledges to real world in Japan, but there are many good element for Remote work team if you don’t have any issue of HR system/management method in your company. If you need to make remote working environment with oversea team, this book is recommended to read.

just looking back my experiences, honestly say, first case was failure. but not caused by communication method and work style well mentioned in this book. As a part of this book, Language and culture were main issues we faced. And especially language issue is critical to make enough conversion in remote teams, unnecessary wall “us and them”. And translation cost by some alternative person is not reasonable for most of cases, so before starting remote work, I wanted to say from my experience, we should not neglect the issues. in this book, you can get good advice to solve those issues as well. That’s why I wanted to get this book at least 6 years ago.

Escaping the Build Trap

I read this book in this march although it’s famous in our web industry. Author has a variety of experience as Product manager, based no those, he explained success case/failure as organisation.

Most impressive thing in this book was difference between “output” and “outcome”. People who use English as 2nd language, sometime translation and understanding for the difference is not so big, but having good example in this book, I well reconginzed not same, it’s clear difference for business. Number of delivery as project is output, it’s apparently one of the realised thing into the world, but it’s not final goal, it’s just method to achieve the goal. Goal as business is definitely “Revenue”. Just delivered which is not related with any revenue / profit does not make sense for business. This author is saying that unfortunately of some product team has good KPI for project delivery as “output”, focus on making function first rather than to generate money. but it’s not good way to make strength Product management team, product team should focus on “outcome” like profit, revenue is main message in this book.

In fact, it’s heavy responsiblity to have outcome base target because there are many dependency with another team in company to make sure outcome. Sale and marketing team is one of the key to create great sales by making good messaging to appeal the product. But if product team ignore how they can do their work, at the end, Good result will be not happened. Sometime blaming each other is common issue in many product company, product team complains sale/marketing does not work well then sales number is not good, in opposite case, sale team criticises that product is not attractive for our customer as reason of not good sales. To solve those chicken and egg issues, product team should have wider view and mind for product’s outcome is my understanding of this book.