How do I get a remote product manager job with a company abroad?

I answer this as someone currently doing it. I lead four product teams at a loyalty superapp serving Saudi Arabia and the wider GCC, and I do it from Indonesia. So this is not theory for me.

Where to actually look

Skip the general job portals in your own country. Cross border remote product roles rarely land there, and when they do, you are already late.

The realistic places:

1. Remote boards built for product and startup roles. The ones listing real product companies, not outsourcing agencies. Check daily, apply in the first week a role is posted.
2. Career pages of products you already use. If you are a user and you understand their problems, your cover letter is instantly in a different class.
3. Your startup alumni network. The most underrated one. People who worked with you and then moved to a company abroad are the fastest door in. A referral skips the queue of hundreds of applicants.
4. English speaking product communities. Not to show off, but to be visible thinking. Plenty of hiring managers recruit from people whose writing makes sense.
5. Talent agencies that specialise in remote hiring from your region. Some are legitimate, some are just brokers. Ask about the contract and the end client on day one.

What belongs in the portfolio

This is where most people get it wrong. They fill a portfolio with UI screenshots and a list of shipped features. That is a designer portfolio, not a PM one.

What hiring managers abroad want is evidence that you can decide with incomplete data, and that the decision showed up in the numbers.

The format I use, one page per case:

• Context: company size, what you owned, what constrained you.
• Problem: stated as a bad number, not as a missing feature.
• Options you rejected: almost nobody writes this, and it builds the most trust. List what you killed and why.
• What you shipped: keep it short.
• Result: before and after, with the time window.

Two examples from my own work, in that shape: customer support automation scaled from 0 to roughly 70 percent of about 10,000 monthly tickets, with support cost down 42 percent. Or the Tokopedia and Gojek account integration, work spanning two large companies, with a three month target delivered in one. Two sentences each, and the reader immediately knows the scale and the outcome.

On English: it is entry criteria, not a differentiator. What gets you picked is how you build a product argument. If the thinking is shallow, fluent English will not save it.

One thing is shifting fast. Saving companies money is an old habit of mine, from well before AI was trendy: more than 4 million US dollars per year, saved every year across a range of initiatives, from process improvements to cost optimisation to more efficient product decisions. Back then that leverage needed a senior seat, an engineering team, and expensive systems. Today AI is the sharpest tool for that same habit, and it can be trained into everyone on the team. Small scale proof: my content distribution system across 8 channels, built and run by me alone.

Put one AI case in your portfolio. Companies hiring remotely are looking for PMs who have actually worked with AI, not ones who can talk about it.

If you want to build AI work worth putting in that portfolio, that is what I coach inside AI Circle.