Product at a Distance - by Dave Scott (Paperback)

About the Book

Product innovation in the era of distributed teams-the playbook product leaders have been waiting for.

Book Synopsis

The missing playbook for envisioning and building great products, regardless of where your team sits.

Every product team needs a destination before it needs directions. When teams are distributed across time zones and continents, agreeing on that destination-and keeping everyone navigating toward it-is where most organizations miss the mark.

Product at a Distance is the GPS modern distributed product teams have been missing. Built on three decades of leadership from startups to Silicon Valley giants like Intuit, SurveyMonkey, frog design, and Tonic Health, Dave Scott addresses one of the most underserved challenges in modern product management. At the core of the book is the Product House: a complete framework running from company vision through execution and organizational design, with "Distance Adaptations" built into every step.

The book is organized into three parts:

• Decide - How to set a compelling product north star, build winning strategies, and create a roadmap your entire organization can execute against
• Build - How to run research, drive innovation, and shepherd ideas from opportunity definition to shipped product, whether your teams are across the hall or across the world
• Operate - How to build, lead, and scale a distributed product organization for the long haul

Through collaborative workshops and artifact-driven processes, Product at a Distance gives distributed product teams everything they need to build the right things, the right way, and all without being in the same room. Essential reading for product managers, designers, UX researchers, and the executives who lead them-especially those navigating the realities of globally distributed teams.

Engineering teams got a wave of serious literature on offshore development twenty years ago. Product teams have been waiting. This is that book.

Review Quotes

"ProdPad has been a remote-first team since day one, and I still found myself nodding through this book. Dave covers the parts of remote product work that most people wave away with just use Miro or hop on a Zoom. The reality is messier than that, and this book actually gets into the mess: how to run discovery when you can't read the room, how to facilitate ideation without losing energy, how to keep alignment without defaulting to more meetings. If you're building product with a distributed team, this is the book I wish had existed ten years ago."

-Janna Bastow, CEO of ProdPad and Co-founder of Mind the Product

"Applies classic strategic lessons to modern product challenges."

-Rich Mironov, founder of Product Camp, and author of The Art of Product Management

"Product at a Distance speaks to product leaders who feel the tension between the familiar and the future. This work is a refreshing and honest assessment of what leaders must unlearn, and then learn, to thrive in the distributed era. Scott has created the atlas that tomorrow's PMs will navigate by.

-Darren Murph, Founder & CEO of Page 52 Consulting

"There's no shortage of product frameworks, but very few bring coherence to the whole system. Dave's Product House does exactly that. It forces you to think about how vision, strategy, and execution reinforce each other, rather than drift apart as teams grow and distribute. For leaders navigating complexity, this model brings discipline without slowing you down.

-Al Ko, CEO of Auctane