Product visioning workshops with the whole (distributed) team
In the beginning of the product development, the team together with business creates the product vision in a workshop. It is very important to include all the team members in the product visioning exercise from all the locations, otherwise, people would never be able to understand the purpose of the product.
The very first choice of the business should be to ask people to fly to a central location for this exercise. If some people can not join, they should be included through some other means.
Many teams do not invite their mates from other locations because they like to use sticky notes on walls to conclude vision and not having everyone in the same room could create problems in using physical boards. In these scenarios, I recommend using online boards likehttps://realtimeboard.com/with video conferencing for better collaboration among remote teams.
If teams are using simple techniques like Elevator Pitch or Business Model Canvas, in every location people can create their own version and share pictures of the final version to everyone. Then on video conferencing discuss all versions and converge to one.
A few years back, when I was building a new product, we started with a distributed team right from the beginning. One of the first things we did was creating a business model canvas together with our distributed team. In this team, we were all distributed (two working from home in Holland, four in India and one in Turkey). Each team member prepared by watching some videos about the business model canvas. Everyone made some notes for himself about the contents of each block in the canvas. I facilitated the session, which took us about 3 hours. In the session, I tried to go through the canvas block by block, eliciting ideas from all our team members. The result was a business model canvas, which gave everyone a deep understanding of the product we thought we should build (we changed a couple of times). I believe this is a strong start for any team; let the whole team join the ideation phase, so they understand the idea, the market, the cash flow, instead of just 'features'. Here's what the canvas looked like, built incanvanizer: