By Melissa Perri · melissaperri.com · @lissijean on X · LinkedIn
Melissa Perri interviews two product leaders, Alicia Hurst (Group PM at JW Player, hiring for an NYC team) and Vibhor Chhabra (VP of Product at TaxJar, a company that has always been fully remote), about hiring, onboarding, and working on distributed product teams during COVID-19. The conversation covers how geography stopped being a hiring constraint, which skills rose in importance (written communication, autonomy, customer-driven thinking), and how to build rapport over Zoom. It matters because it gives job seekers and new remote hires concrete tactics for standing out and integrating, and gives managers practical guidance on intentional relationship-building.
01Key takeaways
- Expand your candidate pool beyond the local area, since remote-friendly hiring removes geography as a filter for many roles.
- Test for written communication, autonomy, and customer-driven discovery, not just the ability to execute a roadmap.
- Prefer complementary strengths and growth potential over 'culture fit' when evaluating candidates for diversity and balance.
- In remote roles, intentionally schedule informal interactions such as Slack check-ins and calendar time, because they will not happen by accident.
- Build strong written, asynchronous communication to reduce unnecessary meetings and force deeper clarity in your thinking.
- Before interviewing with a remote team, ask how they collaborate, handle discovery, and balance asynchronous work with meetings.
02Key sections
- Remote team life before and after COVID
- Alicia Hurst describes how her team's work mechanics stayed similar but lost the informal, interpersonal moments that built rapport. Written documentation and Slack became more central.
- Hiring beyond the local market
- Hurst explains how she was persuaded to drop the requirement for local candidates and hired someone on the West Coast for her NYC team. Questioning the assumption of returning to the office made this possible.
- Reprioritized skills and interview changes
- Hurst shifted emphasis toward writing, presentation, and autonomy, using a take-home written exercise and dropping 'culture fit' in favor of complementary strengths and growth potential.
- Standing out and onboarding remotely
- Both leaders advise candidates to bring energy, prepare anecdotes, and ask strong questions. They describe self-directed onboarding and the need to deliberately schedule interactions with new hires.
- TaxJar's distributed model
- Chhabra explains how TaxJar's remote-first design shaped its hiring, asynchronous writing culture, Mutual Assessment step, two-part onboarding, and boundary-setting practices.
03From the post
“How can you stand out in a larger pool of candidates, now that geography is no longer a factor? How can you make a strong impression when interviewing from your living room? When you do land a job, what is it like to be onboarded entirely via Zoom? And how can you be a productive PM on your new, fully…”
04Frameworks mentioned
Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.