Key takeaway
For a distributed team, the tool isn't a nice-to-have layer on top of communication, it's the thing that has to work when nobody is online at the same time.
A co-located team can paper over a weak project tool by just walking over and asking. A remote team, especially one spread across time zones, cannot, which means the tool itself has to carry information reliably, on its own, without a person available in real time to fill the gap. That changes what actually matters in it, compared to a team that sits in the same room.
Async visibility is the core requirement
The single most important property for a remote team is that anyone can check a task's owner, due date, and status without needing to interrupt someone else's night to get an answer. That means dependencies and blockers need to be visible on the task itself, not something someone has to remember and mention live in a meeting that half the team is asleep during. If getting a straight answer about a project's status requires waiting for a specific person to wake up, the tool has failed at the one job that matters most for a distributed team.
Reminders replace the tap on the shoulder
In an office, an overdue task often gets caught by someone noticing in passing. Remotely, that informal catch never happens, so the tool has to do it instead: an automatic reminder to whoever owns an overdue task, sent the moment it becomes overdue rather than surfaced days later in a weekly call nobody in every time zone can actually attend live. A roster a new hybrid hire in a different time zone can be added to by email, with their own dashboard of what's on their plate from day one, matters more here than it would for a team that sits together and can just introduce someone in person.