Marty Cagan argues remote and hybrid work is bad for Discovery (Product Discovery Process) and for the psychological safety that healthy team friction requires, citing Steve Jobs's "The Lost Interview" on the value of hallway collisions and in-person debate. He acknowledges remote work solves real problems too — talent access regardless of location, and lower cost of living for employees — so he doesn't recommend a blanket return-to-office mandate. His partial mitigations: a daily "Prototype of the Day" session where the team reviews a fresh prototype together, and writing PRDs after discovery concludes rather than before it starts, so the document captures what was learned instead of presupposing the solution.
Cagan frames his own stance on remote work as genuinely unresolved rather than decided: the companies he personally advises are hybrid/remote, and he says he 'hates it' for discovery purposes ('Slack is no substitute for actually talking to the person'), while also acknowledging the value of the global-talent access remote work provides.
Apply: don't read this concept as an absolute anti-remote argument — treat the discovery cost as one real factor to weigh against talent-access benefits, not a decisive verdict against remote/hybrid arrangements.
Cagan is specific that remote/hybrid work's cost lands on Discovery (Product Discovery Process), not on Continuous Deployment Cadence — delivery is largely unaffected. What's lost is the "necessary friction" of in-person collaboration that discovery depends on. He says he still doesn't have good tools or techniques to substitute for that friction, and is holding off on a third edition of Inspired until he does.
Из тем: The Product Operating Model