As a product manager for the last 6 years, I've had the opportunity to work for outsourced teams in India, Romania, and Ukraine. I've become really good at mana

As a product manager for the last 6 years, I've had the opportunity to work for outsourced teams in India, Romania, and Ukraine. I've become really good at managing remote teams, and it can work out really really well. What I write below is based on single data points in each country... India: I didn't like working with the Indian team. They had the tendency to be overly literal and "by the book" - the book being whatever tech stack they knew. They wouldn't ask questions or push back on things, and the result was crap. Romanian and Ukrainian teams: did / doing an excellent job. We were able to get them at $40-50 an hour, and they are every bit as good and productive as local teams. I sometimes feel like I like working with outsourced teams better than local teams, because the relationship is straight-up business. I have to make sure that everything I ask for is really strong and really helps the business because I'm very aware of the costs involved. Having said that, it is important to have a couple things: have someone local who can look over the code and be a man on the inside, to make sure everything a PM can't see is to the standard, having a good project manager of the remote team, and have someone who manages the whole thing who knows how to do it.