Sachin Rekhi

Everyone knows that a critical part of developing a new product is talking to potential customers. So most product managers and founders dutifully have customer conversations as part of their product development process. But what's insidious about the way that people talk to customers is that they often fail to glean any new insights or worse, get a false positive, causing them to over invest their cash, their time, and their team in an unvalidated product idea that ultimately doesn't sell.

This happens because our potential customers are unfortunately prone to lie to us. We are partly to blame for this, since we often lead the witness to a particular conclusion when we ask a question like "do you think it's a good product idea?" Our potential customers also tend to be overly optimistic people who want to make us happy when we pose hypothetical questions to them like "would you buy a product which did X?".

Rob Fitzpatrick has written the definitive playbook on how to ask questions in customer conversations to ensure they can't like to you. He calls these techniques The Mom Test, because if you follow his approach, even your loving mom can't lie to you. I wanted to share my three most actionable takeaways from the book which you can apply to your next customer conversation.

Video: Annual Planning and the Art of Roadmapping with Sachin Rekhi

It's that time of year that product managers find themselves engrossed in annual planning. But the traditional frameworks PMs have come to rely on for roadmapping, like RICE, often are ill-suited for putting together a highly strategic product roadmap for the upcoming year.

I joined Reforge recently to give a talk about a new process I developed, called 4D Roadmaps, that leverages 4 distinct lenses to develop your roadmap, including a strategy lens, vision lens, customers lens, and business lens. In the talk, I share this actionable process for putting together a more strategic, aspirational, and well articulated roadmap for your product.

Video: Sachin Rekhi on Product Management & Innovation | Behind the Roadmap

I recently joined Productboard in my home for a conversation about all things product management and innovation.

We covered so many topics in this 15 minute video, including:

• My favorite books on product management, including The Creative Act by Rick Rubin, Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda, and The Everything Store by Brad Stone
• The 3 types of product managers: builders, tuners, and innovators
• Limitations of the lean startup for bringing a new product to market
• How to pick the next company to join on your career journey
• How to take advantage of the recent technology waves of crypto and generative AI
• A tour of my home office, the places I do my most creative work, and plenty of cameos from my dog Dexter!

I've always felt that product design was a creative endeavor and the work that most moves our industry forward stems from practitioners who could easily be described as artists. Given this, I've often wondered whether one of the best ways to improve our craft as product designers would be to immerse ourselves in the best practices of artists at large. I got the chance to explore exactly that when legendary producer Rick Rubin, behind iconic artists like Adele, Linkin Park, and Red Hot Chili Peppers, published his new book. In The Creative Act, Rubin shares everything he has learned about harnessing your creativity from his decades working with some of the most successful recording artists of our time.

Video: Product Strategy, Systems, and Frameworks with Sachin Rekhi
Slides: LinkedIn Learning: Product Strategy, Systems, and Frameworks

I was recently invited to speak as part of the Product Management Learning Series hosted by LinkedIn Learning. We covered a variety of my favorite product frameworks.

We started our discussion with some of the most effective ways to make a career transition into product management. The first approach is leveraging an adjacent role, like business operations, marketing, design, and engineering, to work with and impress your product partner and parlaying that experience into a product role. We also talked about how domain experts are often recruited to become product managers even without functional product experience. For example, I've had a friend with a masters degree in education become a product manager at an edtech startup, a sales operations professional become a PM at a sales tech startup, and an MD become a PM at a health care startup.

We then moved the discussion on to how to come up with a compelling product strategy. We covered the 6 dimensions that every product strategy needs to address, including the problem you're solving, target audience, value proposition, competitive advantage, growth strategy, and business model. And we discussed how you need to have strong interplay or coherence amongst the dimensions for your strategy to be compelling.

For years now loyal readers have been asking me to package up my learnings on product management into a cohesive course on the subject. This has always been a project I've been eager to take on, but I wanted to ensure that when I did, I contributed a novel perspective to the community. So in 2020, I took a survey of all the available product management courses out there. There were plenty of courses introducing product management to those new to the role. There was even an emerging set of courses focused on product leadership. But there was a distinct lack of focus on courses that were all about helping those already in the role to level up their capabilities, to truly move them from good to great PMs.

I found the same gap amongst the PMs I regularly mentored. Some mentioned that while they had worked as a PM at startups for several years, they felt they still lacked the skills and tools to reach the next level in their career growth. Or PMs at larger established tech firms might see great PMs at work within their company, but they struggled to reverse engineer just how to recreate their success for themselves.

I went on to discuss this skill gap with Brian Balfour, CEO of Reforge. He shared how Reforge was squarely focused on building programs specifically targeted at experienced practitioners and how they had been continually enhancing their cohort-based virtual programs with live case studies with industry experts, community-based learning opportunities, and a membership model that provided ongoing access to new programs from the industry’s best. I knew then that Reforge would be the best partner for bringing a course that solved this skill gap to life.

And that's how Mastering Product Management was born, a new 4 week, part-time, virtual course available globally, focused on helping existing PMs level up their product management capabilities by mastering critical product management tools. The course goes well beyond product management foundations to help you identify and execute high leverage work that generates disproportionate product returns. We'll revisit the product work you are already doing in your role and share unique tools that help you prioritize needle-moving work, develop your product intuition, empower your team, garner leadership buy-in, and focus your efforts on what truly matters.

This weekend I had the opportunity to read Ashlee Vance's Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. I've been a huge fan of Elon Musk since the early days of SpaceX and knew I wanted to dive deeper into the story of both SpaceX and Tesla. The book did not disappoint: it was a fascinating history starting from his childhood, to his early startup adventures with Zip2 and PayPal, to a deep dive into how he willed SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity into existence and ultimately to success despite the odds being continually stacked against him.

We often paint the picture of Elon Musk as a superhuman who has a boundless work ethic, willingness to take massive personal risk, and an incredible mind to make it all happen. All of this is certainly true and contributed meaningfully to his success. But as I read his story I came across so many examples of skills that Elon had mastered that any of us could also master to enable us to achieve our goals. I wanted to highlight five of those skills that are particularly relevant for product managers that can help them reach new heights in their own craft.

Mastering the craft of product management is no easy task. Much of the literature that defines the role as the intersection of business, technology, and user experience isn't particularly helpful for practitioners who are left wondering what skills they need to learn versus the fine people they work closely with in actual business, technology, and user experience roles.

I instead define a product manager as driving the vision, strategy, design, and execution of their product. Each of these four dimensions has specific responsibilities as well as skills needed to be great at it.

It's equally important for product managers to think about each of these four dimensions as having a concrete set of deliverables. Too often product managers perform the activities associated with each of these deliverables, but may not do so as rigorously as they could to maximize value. When you instead think of them as concrete deliverables you then can look for exemplars of greatness for each as well as hone your craft around each of them.

I wanted to share what I believe are the top ten most important deliverables for product managers across each of the four dimensions of product management. In doing so I hope to help demystify what you actually do in the role, provide a framework for assessing what dimensions of the role you are already good at delivering against, and opportunities for improvement on each. While I should write an entire essay on the best practices associated with each deliverable, I'll instead focus for now on introducing each of them and providing a perspective on why they are important.

Product managers most often reach out to me for advice when they are in the midst of contemplating their next role. In our discussions, we talk about all the usual things: their ultimate career aspirations; their understanding of their own strengths and weaknesses and the skill gaps they hope to fill; as well as the specifics of each role they are considering, including scope, responsibilities, title & compensation, and manager. But the one conversation that people often tell me they find uniquely insightful is our discussion on finding product culture fit. So I wanted to share my thoughts on this more broadly.

It has been incredible to see such a positive response to my OKRs post. So many of you reached out telling me how valuable it was to hear about the details of implementing a successful OKR program. Many of you also reached out with follow-up questions asking me to dive deeper into aspects you were struggling with in your own implementation. I thought I would share the most frequently asked questions as a follow-up post for those interested.

I'm a firm believer that Objectives & Key Results (OKRs), the goal-setting framework invented at Intel and popularized by Google and John Doerr, can be a highly effective leadership tool for a team of any size. When done right, they help drive focus, alignment, accountability, and an outcome-orientation throughout the organization. However, too often, OKRs are implemented poorly, resulting in the promised benefits never being realized. After spending the last 8 years implementing OKRs at both large organizations like LinkedIn and small startups like Notejoy, I wanted to share what I've come to appreciate is required to develop an effective OKR program.

James Clear's Atomic Habits provides a compelling rationale for why frequently practicing small and easy to do atomic habits consistently compounds in benefit to ultimately generate incredible results. It then goes on to provide a comprehensive guide for reliably forming such atomic habits, regardless of the level of self-discipline or willpower you may naturally have. While many of his ideas naturally appeal to those seeking to develop lifestyle habits like exercising, losing weight, or quitting smoking, I found his ideas to be equally relevant for product managers looking to accelerate their career.

There is a whole host of skills that product managers seek to develop that can only truly be built through deliberate practice. This includes everything from honing your analytical rigor, to building your product intuition, to becoming more strategic. You can't just attend a class or read a few blog posts and expect to become great at any of these. At the same time, simply doing your product role the same way you've always been doing it is also unlikely to help you develop the specific skills you're after.

Instead, the formula for mastering these types of skills requires first developing atomic habits to encourage daily or weekly practice and then performing the habit with deliberate practice. For example, building your analytical rigor requires setting aside time every day to critically review dashboards and form hypotheses from the trends that you see, running weekly ad-hoc queries to deep dive into specific user behavior, putting together metrics recaps a week after every feature launch, as well as spending time each month determining how to improve or augment the dashboards you currently have. Yet the daily demands of a product management role are already so taxing that if you aren't already performing these activities, you'll find it difficult to incorporate them into your weekly routine. That's why to successfully build any of these skills you'll need to first develop the right atomic habits to support them. I wanted to share three of my favorite strategies for doing just that from the book.

I always cherish the holidays because it gives me the perfect opportunity to reflect on the past year from both a personal and professional perspective. This year, as we roll past the end of the decade, I've found myself taking it in as a whole. What I came to realize is that this blog had it's humble beginning in 2009, meaning I've now been writing for over a decade! In that past decade, I've authored 150 essays, mostly sharing everything I've learned about product management and entrepreneurship throughout my career in Silicon Valley. But I occasionally dabbled in other passion areas of mine, including career optimization, life hacks, and software engineering. Over the years, readers have pushed me to expand beyond just the written word to a variety of other preferred mediums. Not to disappoint, I ultimately published 12 talks, 10 podcasts, and 13 SlideShare decks as well. What has absolutely blown me away is that all of my content has now been viewed over 1.5 million times! I never set out to build this blog with a certain reach in mind, but even if I had, I certainly couldn't have imagined how many people would find their way to my little corner of the Internet.

I want to thank each and every one of you as you are my continued motivation to share everything I learn. I have saved every note you've sent me over the years as a rallying cry to keep on penning my thoughts. I always thought that if my career in technology didn't work out, I would have been a teacher. So I feel blessed that I've found a way to still do exactly that through my writing. 🙏

Today I thought it'd be fun to take a trip down memory lane and recap my 15 most viewed posts over the past decade.

Listen: SoundCloud | PMLesson
Transcript: PMLesson
Original Essay: 5 Paths To Your First Product Manager Role

I was recently invited on the PMLesson podcast to share the 5 most common paths to landing your first product management role. We discussed each of the following ways to break in as well as best practices for each path to increase your chances of successfully making the leap.

1. The computer science graduate
   
2. The engineering undergrad + recent MBA graduate
   
3. The adjacent role
   
4. The entrepreneur
   
5. The domain expert

Video: The Style of Product Management
Slides: The Style of Product Management
Essays: The Art of Being Compelling | Engaging in Product Debates

In January I was invited to Atlassian to share my wisdom on product management with the global product organization. I decided to delve into the style of product management, covering some of the critical soft skills that are so crucial for the success of product managers. I dove into the art of making a compelling argument, a task a product manager does every week in their role, whether it's with peers, R&D team members, executives, and more. I shared 6 specific style techniques that can be used to make effective arguments. I also dove into how to engage in productive product debates, which product managers also often find themselves in. I talked about how to make these discussions effective, fruitful, and ideally enjoyable instead of how dreadful they often end up being.

Video: What is Product Management?
Slides: What is Product Management?

In January I was invited to the UserTesting Sales Kick-Off in Napa Valley to give a keynote on product management. This was a far more foundational talk compared to many I've given in the past, really trying to establish what the role is all about for those just starting to get familiar with it.

I set out to address three key questions in this session:

1) Where do product managers fit in the R&D organization?
2) What do product managers do?
3) How do product management roles differ?

Listen on: Mixergy | iTunes

I got a chance to sit down with the famed Andrew Warner of Mixergy, who's shared the startup stories of over 1000+ entrepreneurs in podcasts and videos. In this candid interview we cover everything from my entrepreneurial roots, my first two startups, as well as the story of my current startup, Notejoy.

Probably the most frequent question I get from product managers is around how to successfully prioritize a product roadmap. I think when folks come to me with this question they are often looking for a formula they can apply or at least an algorithm they can go through to prioritize their roadmap. But the reality is crafting a successful product roadmap is far more art than science.

I instead wanted to share the three lenses we apply each time we put together a quarterly product roadmap at Notejoy. Each of these lenses looks at prioritizing a roadmap from an entirely different perspective. The art then comes in determining how to ultimately put together a roadmap balancing these often diverging priorities. Let's look at each of these lenses in turn.

Video: The Art of Being Compelling as a Product Manager
Slides: The Art of Being Compelling as a Product Manager
Essay: The Art of Being Compelling as a Product Manager

At the beginning of October, I got the chance to present my talk, The Art of Being Compelling, at INDUSTRY: The Product Conference, a premier product management conference that took place in Cleveland, Ohio. The 20-min video from this talk is now available online, so wanted to share it with all of you.

I've long believed that the most innovative products are built by teams who innovate on the very process by which they develop those products. And it's why I've always been a student of companies that consistently deliver innovation to the market. It's no wonder I loved reading The Everything Store sharing the story of Jeff Bezos growing Amazon to the e-commerce juggernaut that it is today. Or Creativity, Inc. that provided an inside look into Pixar's consistently creative hit machine. And that's precisely what excited me about diving in this weekend into Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda, a new book providing a detailed look inside the design process at Apple.

Creative Selection did not disappoint. While much has been written about Steve Jobs and Apple, I found Creative Selection particularly insightful because it provided a vignette into the development of the first iPhone, and in particular, one of it's most critical features - the keyboard - from the perspective of Ken Kocienda, the software engineer ultimately responsible for developing it. Ken goes through the many challenges and subsequent iterations to address those challenges with building the first keyboard to be presented only on a glass display. And in doing so, it showcased how Apple's design and development process was different from traditional Silicon Valley companies in subtle yet incredibly important ways.

I just finished reading The Messy Middle by Scott Belsky and highly recommend it for product managers at both startups and established tech firms. Scott Belsky shares his lessons learned optimizing and enduring the messy and unsexy middle every product goes through before (hopefully) thriving. He does a great job of sharing lessons from his own experience founding Behance and navigating Adobe post acquisition, as well from the many startups he has worked with as an investor or advisor, including Pinterest, Airbnb, Periscope, Square, and more.

It's a difficult book to summarize because it's organized as 100+ mini-essays that succinctly teach a specific best practice around optimizing your team, your product, and yourself. But what I loved most was that Scott brought a far more human lens to creating winning products than traditional product best practices. I wanted to share 5 such non-obvious lessons that really stem from Scott's deep understanding of human behavior, human psychology, and human intuition.

After spending over a decade in product management in organizations large and small, I've come to believe that great product management is 60% substance and 40% style.

The substance of product management is the hard skills you need to learn and excel at to build great products: customer discovery, prioritizing a roadmap, deriving insights from data, and so much more. But equally important is the soft skills needed to get things done: effective communication, influence without authority, executive management, and more. I call this the style of product management. I find that the best product managers spend about 60% of their time on the substance of product management, while the remaining 40% is spent on the style of product management.

Video: Developing a Continuous Feedback Loop
Slides: Developing a Continuous Feedback Loop
Essay: Designing Your Product's Continuous Feedback Loop

Earlier this year True Ventures invited to me to speak at True University, their annual conference for portfolio companies. I decided to expand upon an essay I originally wrote in 2016 about developing a continuous feedback loop for your product with detailed case studies of how I have implemented such a feedback loop for my current startup, Notejoy, as well as while leading LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Wanted to share the video, slides, and original essay from that talk.

Podcast on SoundCloud

Ravi Sapata recently interviewed me for his Yours Productly podcast in a mega 2 hour discussion on my journey building Notejoy, the collaborative notes app for your entire team, that we launched just a few months back.

As product designers we spend a lot of time trying to understand user friction and solve for it in the products we build. Doing so is absolutely critical to delivering delightful experiences for our users. I find though that sometimes teams are only perceiving and solving the most basic forms of user friction and aren't taking on some of the harder to perceive yet incredibly important higher level forms of friction that users are experiencing. So I wanted to share how I think about the hierarchy of user friction and provide examples and best practices for solving for each.



User friction is really anything that prevents a user from accomplishing a goal in your product. I categorize user friction into a hierarchy of three levels: interaction friction, cognitive friction, and emotional friction. Interaction friction is what I hear talked about most often amongst product designers, but the higher levels of cognitive friction and emotional friction are equally important to solve for to build a great user experience.

I'm often asked what's the best way for a new product manager to learn the fundamentals of the role or for an experienced product manager to continue to master their craft. Most folks are looking for a pointer to a book or a class they can take on product management, but I always reply with a collection of blog posts from practitioners sharing their best practices. I still believe these remain the very best resources on the topic. So I wanted to share the collection of posts I've curated in Notejoy over the years from incredible practitioners, writers, and thought leaders across the industry both in and outside of product roles.

I've organized this collection into several sections, starting with product management 101. I then break down the resources into the way I think about what a product manager does, which is drive the vision, strategy, design, and execution of their product. Each section covers the best practices for each of these four dimensions of product management. I then explore growth, which is essential to make any product successful. I go on to include a section on product leadership, which is important for all product managers, but especially for senior folks looking to advance in their career. And finally, I include a set of resources for managing a career in product management. In order to provide a comprehensive resource, I've included a few of my best posts at the bottom of each section.

The best way to take advantage of this collection is to dedicate 10-20 minutes each day to read through a post or two and work your way through the whole collection. Once you have you'll undoubtedly have a deep understanding of the role and what it takes to be a great product manager.

When I first started learning about product design, one of the most influential books I read was The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. In this classic work, Don Norman sheds light on the design of every day objects like doors, stoves, thermostats, and more. He then applies these universal design principles to designing technology products. Don Norman is one of the leading thinkers on human-centered design and the principles he writes about are required reading for every product designer. I still reference these principles daily in my work designing Notejoy. So I wanted to walk through each of Don Norman's six principles of designing interactions and how they remain relevant to designing digital products today.

When I went to college I knew that my ultimate aspiration was to found my own tech startup and in order to prepare myself for that goal, I decided to pursue a dual-degree at the University of Pennsylvania from both the engineering and business schools. I studied computer science in the engineering school and ultimately settled on finance at Wharton. While I may have been better served studying marketing or management, I did learn some important finance principles that I still use day-to-day in my product management role. I wanted to share three such principles that I find incredibly relevant to product.

[This is the third post in my Understanding User Psychology series. If you haven't already, make sure to check out Meet Your Happy Chemicals and The Psychology of Persuasion.]

When looking to understand user psychology to design better product experiences, one of the richest sources of knowledge exists within the game design world. Game designers have been refining their techniques for decades to build ever more engaging and enjoyable experiences that drive specific player behavior. Their techniques are rooted in a deep understanding of player psychology and have built an incredible set of mechanics that they repeatably leverage to design addicting games.

Today I wanted to provide an overview of some of the tenants of game design and particular game mechanics that can be leveraged to drive user behavior in any digital product.

2016 was another great year of writing for me. I published my 100th essay at the beginning of the year and wrote another 20 essays throughout the rest of it. I grew unique visitors by 50%, page views by 80%, Twitter followers by 30%, and email subscribers by 450%.

But just like everything I do in product, what excites me most is rarely the stats, but the impact I have on real people's lives. And this year I appreciated the outpouring of notes from readers. I relished the stories of helping a reader get their very first product manager job, helping an entrepreneur to reach product/market fit, and helping a new product leader find their footing in their expanded role. Please keep sharing your stories as it's really the fuel that motivates me to keep on writing.

As a quick look back, here are the five most popular essays I published this year in case you missed any of them.

One of the critical responsibilities of product managers is driving the overall execution of their product. Relentless execution will ultimately determine whether you'll be able to make your product vision a reality. Driving the execution of your product not only means doing whatever it takes to make your product win, but it also encompasses a set of core project management responsibilities. While many product managers are familiar with agile methodologies for managing a development team, I don't believe it provides a full view of how a product manager should be effectively managing their overall product process.

Today I wanted to provide a complete picture of a modern project management process for product managers. This covers a set of planning and project management activities that product managers should drive annually, quarterly, bi-weekly, and daily to effectively manage a product development process. It's rooted in the agile movement, with a deep recognition that customer needs and product requirements are ever-evolving and agility is absolutely paramount to enable you to swiftly change plans as soon as it's appropriate. At the same time, it recognizes that planning is absolutely necessary for enabling blue-sky thinking, thoughtful trade-offs of priorities, driving team alignment, and ultimately for enabling you to realize your product's long-term vision.

[This is the second post in my Understanding User Psychology series. If you haven't already, make sure to check out the first post: Meet Your Happy Chemicals.]

When looking to understand user psychology in order to design better product experiences, Robert Cialdini's seminal work, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, is a classic read. Robert Cialdini brings to bear his years of research on influence to detail the 6 weapons of influence leveraged by compliance practitioners (salesmen, car dealers, fund raisers) to get you to say yes to whatever they are selling. These same tactics can be leveraged in designing product experiences to help delight users as well as drive them to our desired product behaviors.

The most common question I get from aspiring product managers is how to land their first product manager role. Unfortunately it's not an easy question to answer because there isn't a single straightforward path into product management, but instead a variety of paths from which product managers typically come from. I wanted to share the five most common paths that I've observed for individuals landing their first product management role and how to increase your chances of landing the job through each path.

As product designers, we aspire to build product experiences that are not only useful (solve a real pain point for our users) and usable (effortlessly allow our users to accomplish their goal), but ultimately delightful (elicit a positive emotion from users). I find product teams are usually pretty good at building useful experiences, identifying pain points through market research, industry expertise, and their own experiences. Similarly we've established a strong set of best practices around building usable experiences, through significant design methodologies and established guidelines. Yet the dimension we continue to struggle with as an industry is repeatably building delightful experiences.

The challenge with designing a delightful experience is inherent in the very nature of needing to elicit such an emotion from our users. It requires us to get into our user's head enough to deeply understand what in fact will create such an emotional response. To build this muscle, I've found it incredibly helpful to invest in learning about human psychology. And specifically there have been a few frameworks that I've found particularly insightful and applicable to understanding user psychology. In this series of posts, I will share my favorite user psychology frameworks that will help you design more delightful product experiences.

One of the personality traits I value most in successful product managers is they are inherently truth seekers. Truth seekers have a strong bias towards discovering the truth being their primary motivation and what ultimately guides their decision-making. It takes incredible humility and curiosity to embody this trait, but when it exists, the benefits are felt throughout the entire R&D team.

Video: Developing a Continuous Feedback Loop
Slides: Developing a Continuous Feedback Loop

While every product team I've worked with leverages customer feedback to inform product decisions in some way, most fall short of designing their customer feedback loop to maximize the benefits to the product team of gathering, recording, and synthesizing feedback. They also often treat customer feedback as a point-in-time activity as opposed to a far more helpful continuous process. I wanted to share some of the best practices and techniques I've used for developing a product's continuous feedback loop, designed specifically to maximize the benefit of the customer feedback that your organization is already hearing.

Ever since I committed to being an infinite learner, I've been executing on a daily one hour learning ritual. While it's easy to say that continuous learning is important to me, I knew that if I didn't proactively dedicate time in my day to it, it wouldn't become a habit. So I set aside an hour first thing in the morning with my morning cup of coffee (or two) to this ritual. Over time I've refined what I actually do with that hour to maximize active learning of relevant skills and drive as much efficiency as possible in the process. I wanted to share my process in case it's helpful for formulating your own learning ritual.

I ultimately settled on a learning lifecycle of discover, consume, share, discuss, and write. I'll talk about each of these phases in-turn and it's importance to my overall learning process.

I just finished reading Creativity, Inc., by far the best book I've read on developing a culture of creativity within an organization. Written by Ed Catmull, co-founder and president of Pixar Animation and eventually Disney Animation, it takes us through the earliest days of Pixar, and most importantly, into the actual creation process of some of the most creative films Pixar ever made, including Toy Story, Wall-E, Up, Monsters, Inc. and more.

Ed dispels our romantic notions of what creativity is all about and instead replaces it with actionable insights on how any organization, with incredible dedication to culture and process, can create a far more creative organization. I wanted to share 5 key take-aways I had from Creativity, Inc., illustrated through quotes directly from the book.

The area I most often get asked to help product managers on is preparing them for their upcoming product management interviews. Given that I’ve evaluated hundreds of product management candidates, I wanted to share a set of sample interview questions I've kept in Notejoy that I might ask and what I’m specifically evaluating on to discern whether they are a great product management candidate.

Keep in mind that while these were common questions I personally asked product managers that I interviewed at LinkedIn, there is no standard set of questions nor interview template at LinkedIn. Every interviewer is encouraged to ask whatever set of questions they felt appropriate to help them evaluate the core competencies they were testing for. So don’t expect to receive these specific questions, but instead this should help you understand the competencies that are typically being tested for in product management interviews.

I'm a firm believer that the best product managers understand that mastering the discipline requires deeply excelling at both the art and science of product management. When you start your career in product management you tend to be largely focused on the science: how to effectively do customer research, run an A/B test, manage a sprint, write a spec, and so on. And while those are critically important to being a great product manager, they aren't sufficient. It's those that understand and appreciate the art of product management that do the best. They understand that certain aspects can't be learned by simply reading a set of best practices, taking a class, or applying a technique. They appreciate that certain innate skills and inordinate deliberate practice are necessary to truly excel. I'd put a bunch of aspects of product management into this category: prioritizing a roadmap, effective communication, formulating a vision, negotiating with stakeholders, and team leadership, to name a few. Over time I hope to dive deeper into each of these topics because I think they are so important and often not written about in-detail because the right approach is not easily picked up in a few hours, but instead requires years of focus and effort.

Today I wanted to dive into one such critical aspect of the art behind product management, which is developing user empathy. The reason this is so important is that I've seen product teams who faithfully have run a customer validation exercise and have executed incredibly well against the science of customer validation: identifying the specific target audience, recruiting a critical mass of folks to interview, developing a strong interview guide to answer their most burning questions, and synthesizing the feedback across interviews into a set of product requirements for their next iteration. And yet, the product plans that come out of this process can often be uninspired and little more than a regurgitation of the feedback customers directly gave them on what to develop and how to design their product. Worse, after developing the product directly based on the results of this customer validation process, I've seen products still struggle to find the elusive product/market fit. So what's going on here? To me this speaks to how the science of product management isn't enough to develop compelling products. Instead this is where the art is needed, and specifically in this case what's often missing is a strong dose of user empathy.

As the product management role has become far more popular here in Silicon Valley and at technology firms in general, we’ve started to see specialization in the role begin to emerge. While these specific product roles rarely have differentiated titles or formal separate requirements, savvy hiring managers are certainly looking for product managers with specific skill sets and passion areas depending on the specific product stage and challenges they are solving for.

I’ve had the opportunity to serve in many distinct product roles as well as lead hiring for such roles as well. So I wanted to share my view of 3 high-level product management roles that exist in the field, which I affectionately call builders, tuners, and innovators.

Slides: Product Management Career Ladders by Sachin Rekhi, Founder & CEO, Notejoy

One of the areas I often mentor product managers on are the career paths available to them within the profession. Since there isn’t a lot of discussion about this out there, I wanted to share what the career ladders look like for product managers at 8 top technology firms as well as some of the key dimensions upon which advancement in the profession occur.

Product organizations tend to be a small proportion of technology firm’s overall R&D teams, with ratios of up to 1 product manager to 10 engineers as common. Given this, companies tend not to focus on developing the same formalized career ladders compared to their engineering counterparts except at the largest tech firms who have achieved the scale of hundreds of product managers within their organization. The 8 technology firms whose career ladders I’ve showcased below have all achieved this scale and have thus invested in career ladders for their respective product organizations.

Video: The Art of Product Management
Slides: The Art of Product Management

Recently Professor Karl Ulrich asked me to give my talk on the Art of Product Management at The Wharton School. They recorded the video and I wanted to share it here as well.

Product managers drive the vision, strategy, design, and execution of their product. While one can often quickly comprehend the basic responsibilities of the role, mastering each of these dimensions is truly an art form that one is constantly honing.

In the last decade as a product manager here in Silicon Valley I've learned an incredible number of important lessons on how to be better at this role. In this presentation I share my lessons learned on the art behind each of these four dimensions of product management. I cover role models that exemplify each dimension, best practices on excelling at that dimension's discipline, and countless examples from Valley companies that exemplify these traits.

Video: The Hunt for Product/Market Fit
Slides: The Hunt for Product/Market Fit

Last month I was asked to come by Pivotal Labs to share my learnings on finding product/market fit. The team recorded the video and I wanted to share that here for those interested.

The hunt for finding product/market fit in an early-stage startup is an elusive one, often fraught with chaos, and certainly never easy. However learning to leverage a cycle of defining, validating, and iterating on each of your most critical product/market fit hypotheses is a sure-fire way to bring some predictability to the process and provide guidance on whether your team is getting closer or farther from the ultimate goal.

Slides: The Art of Product Management
Video: The Art of Product Management

Product managers drive the vision, strategy, design, and execution of their product. While one can often quickly comprehend the basic responsibilities of the role, mastering each of these dimensions is truly an art form that one is constantly honing.

In the last decade as a product manager here in Silicon Valley I've learned an incredible number of important lessons on how to be better at this role. In this presentation I share my lessons learned on the art behind each of these four dimensions of product management. I cover role models that exemplify each dimension, best practices on excelling at that dimension's discipline, and countless examples from valley companies that exemplify these traits. Look out for links in the footer of slides for further reading from my blog on each topic that wouldn't conveniently fit in the slides. I hope this helps fellow product managers accelerate their own learning on mastering this craft.

One of the challenges we've long acknowledged in the tech industry is how difficult the transition can be from a software engineer to an engineering manager due to the vast distinction in the skill set to be great at the new role. Equally challenging but less talked about is how much this same challenge exists when transitioning from a product manager to a manager of product managers, ie. a product leader.

I wanted to share some of the best practices I learned along the way making my own transition from a product manager to a product leader.

Every startup I've worked at folks have lamented about how there were never enough resources to accomplish everything they wanted to. Whether it was not enough engineers to build the desired features, not enough designers to design those experiences, not enough marketers to drum up interest, or not enough salespeople to generate revenue. It always felt like the startup couldn't hire fast enough to meet the desires of the business. And the classic belief was that we would be able to achieve our goals if we just had a few more people on the team. It's easy to understand why folks have that mentality given resources are certainly a necessary ingredient to getting things done. When a startup is in the company building & scaling phase, excellence in hiring and on-boarding quality talent faster than others is a potential competitive advantage.

But I want to make the counter-argument for why a minimum viable team, or a small team just big enough to ship and iterate on your minimum viable product, has it's own advantages at the earliest phase of a startup when you are pre-product/market fit.

2015 was the year I returned to writing. It's reminded me just how much fun it is to reflect on what I've learned over the years and try to distill those lessons into repeatable practices for myself and others. I tried my best to keep a weekly cadence in the second half of the year and generally did with a few brief hiatuses.

I wanted to share the 10 most popular posts I published in 2015. While I wrote mostly on product management, design, and entrepreneurship, I had a few well-received posts on optimizing your career and life hacks in general. Take a look and I hope you enjoy any posts that you may have missed in the year.

A decade ago Steve Blank authored the book The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win to share with the world his philosophy for building winning products: customer development. He espoused that the reason so many startups failed was they were too focused on product development without an equal focus on customer development. He suggested we all needed to "get out of the building" and speak directly with our potential customers to truly understand the problems we are solving for them. Eric Ries further popularized customer development techniques with his Lean Startup methodology, which has customer development as one of it's key components alongside minimal viable products, validated learning, and more.

Marc Andreessen initially introduced the concept of product/market fit in this post published in 2007. It was an incredibly helpful notion to explain why startup products were failing left & right as well as provided a guiding north star on what you ultimately needed to achieve to build a successful startup.

The hunt for finding product/market fit in an early-stage startup is an elusive one, often fraught with chaos, and certainly never easy. I've led the hunt for product/market fit in 3 startups that I co-founded and also had the opportunity to do so for 3 new products launched at established tech giants LinkedIn and Microsoft. Most recently, in advising 5 early-stage startups, I have been helping other founders through their respective hunts.

I put together this presentation to share a framework I've leveraged in my own startups as well as now in those that I'm advising to bring some much-needed discipline to the hunt for product/market fit. While there is certainly no silver-bullet, I do find that leveraging an iterative cycle of defining, validating, and iterating on each of your most critical product/market fit hypotheses is a sure-fire way to bring some predictability to the process and provide guidance on whether your team is getting closer or farther from the ultimate goal. I hope some of the best practices I detail in the deck can be helpful for your team as well.

One of the characteristics Reid Hoffman often mentions he values in great entrepreneurs is that they are infinite learners. Those who possess this quality are constantly expanding their expertise to new domains, regularly overcoming their own shortcomings, and their capacity for taking on new challenges seems limitless. Mark Zuckerberg is frequently cited as an infinite learner who has grown immensely in his ability to lead Facebook’s now 10,000 person organization and shape a product experience that touches over a billion people daily. In the world of technology where absolutely all the rules are constantly being re-invented, being an infinite learner has become a critical skill to the survival and longevity of great leaders and their organizations.

Today's best products not only solve a clear pain point, but do so while understanding, eliciting, and amplifying the emotions of the consumer. The gold standard of this is Apple, whose products are not only useful, but delight us, surprise us, amaze us, and elicit incredible emotional responses. Yet designing such products is no easy task, requiring product designers to bring deep emotional intelligence into their product and product design process. I wanted to share some examples of products that do this well as well as techniques to bring such emotional intelligence into your own product design.

One of the most critical aspects of finding product/market fit in the earliest stages of a startup is identifying and targeting your ideal customer. I find though that many startups don't give this task as much attention as it deserves. Sure, coming up with an initial hypothesis of a high level ideal customer description is easy. But the challenge often is that these descriptions are not nearly as specific and narrow as they need to be to be actionable for the business. Equally concerning is that the rigor leveraged to ensure that the initial target audience hypothesis is truly ideal and validated is often lacking.

On the other hand, in the search for product/market fit, I've seen successful teams find it not only by pivoting and adjusting the value proposition they deliver on, but also simply by pivoting their target audience to a more ideal customer who better resonates with the value position they've already delivered against, further justifying the importance of getting your target customer segment just right.

Given this, I wanted to share a set of strategies that can be leveraged to help guide the process of finding your ideal customer segment.

In my previous post I detailed how I typically go about documenting the initial set of product/market fit hypotheses for an early stage startup and each of the key elements that are important to capture as part of it. Once you've done that, then the far more interesting work begins: validating whether there is in fact truth to each of your most uncertain hypotheses and iterating upon them to eventually find product/market fit.

When it comes to customer validation, the most important piece of advice I can give you is exactly what Steve Blank has been prescribing all along: to get out of the building and talk to potential customers and eventually actual customers leveraging your MVP or later product iterations. This advice sounds so simple and so obvious, yet I see way too many product and design teams spending significant iteration time within their four walls holed up in conference rooms debating the merits of various strategies, features, and design decisions with limited direct customer input. Or maybe they did talk to customers, but months ago on the last iteration, and haven't incorporated it into a systematic process for getting regular feedback from customers. Quantity and quality of customer feedback are both important, but if you have to pick one to optimize for, frequency of exposure to actual customer feedback is incredibly important. Jared Spool's research showed a few years ago that increasing exposure hours to customers had the strongest link to building great customer experiences. So heed Steve Blank and Jared Spool's advice and get out of the building and talk to your actual customers early and often.

For years now in the valley we've been shunning the traditional approach to launching a startup: writing a formal business plan, pitching investors, assembling a team, launching a product, and selling it like hell because we've learned the hard way that more than 75% of all startups fail and we needed a more iterative approach that allowed us to learn from our failures and refine along the way.

The customer development and lean startup methodologies evangelized by Steve Blank and Eric Ries brought us a better approach that favored experimentation over elaborate planning, customer feedback over intuition, and iterative design over traditional “big design up front” development. It championed the creation of minimal viable products (MVPs) as well as pivots when necessary to quickly adjust directions.

However I've seen too many startups use the lean startup methodology as an excuse to fly by the seat of their pants and shun almost any structure to their approach to iterating, validating, and finding product/market fit.

When LinkedIn acquired my startup Connected in 2011, Elliot Shmukler was the sponsor for the acquisition and I ended up reporting directly to him. At the time his team was not only responsible for the core experience at LinkedIn (profile, connections, pymk, search, and more), but he also led the LinkedIn growth team. It ended up being an incredibly fortuitous place for us to land in the organization, as both Ada Chen Rekhi and I learned an incredible amount on growth through working directly with Elliot. These invaluable lessons from such a growth expert who helped scale LinkedIn from 20M to over 200M+ members certainly shape how Ada and I think about driving growth in every future endeavor.

Over the past year at LinkedIn I developed a strong appreciation for using Net Promoter Score (NPS) as a key performance indicator (KPI) to understand customer loyalty. In addition to the standard repertoire of acquisition, engagement, and monetization KPIs, NPS has become a great additional measure for understanding customer loyalty and ultimately an actionable metric for enhancing your product experience to deliver delight.

Sample personas from MailChimp
Personas are an important design tool that should be in the toolset of any product manager or designer. Personas are fictional characters developed to represent the different archetypes of users of your product. A persona typically describes the goals, pain points, behaviors, and psychology associated with members of a particular segment. To bring them to life a name, a profile image, and sometimes even a background history are associated with them. A team usually develops one or more personas to represent the core audience of users they are optimizing their product for.

Throughout my career, I’ve had the opportunity to launch innovative new products not only as an entrepreneur at my own startups like Anywhere.FM and Connected, but also as an intrapreneur at Microsoft and LinkedIn, bringing brand new products to market at these established tech firms.

Every established tech firm aspires to bring the innovation culture that’s so native to startups to their own organization, but often struggles to do so. I wanted to share my perspective on what causes this inertia to innovation at scale and how to overcome it.

I’ve had the chance to work with a variety of product managers across tech giants and startups alike. While there are many critical skills for being a world class product manager, I’ve noticed one pattern amongst the very best: they fall deeply in love with the problem their product is solving.

I’m often asked how I think about coming up with the product roadmap for an upcoming release. To help answer this, I thought I’d share how my team recently went about thinking through the roadmap for an upcoming product we’re working on.

One lesson entrepreneurs often learn the hard way is that even if they build a product that is better than the established players in the space, it doesn’t always result in them winning the market. I wanted to highlight the three most common reasons I see this occur and ways to mitigate these challenges.

The modern day business has come a long way in leveraging technology to enable global-scale collaboration, real-time communication, data-driven decision making, and so much more. Business software has been one of the biggest benefactors of all of the recent innovation waves, including cloud computing, big data, and mobile.

Yet despite this there remains an incredible amount of opportunity to disrupt business productivity through the continued challenges in our workday that hold us back from achieving our collective full potential. To help illustrate this, let me showcase ten pain points I face every day that remain opportunities for innovation.

I’m often asked by fellow or aspiring product managers how best to master the craft. They are inevitably looking for classes or books they might read to pick up the basics of product management and product design. While I do point them to some of the best blog posts on the subject, I focus them on learning the craft the same way I do: by carefully studying the products I love.

Most entrepreneurs assume that the marketing and audience building phase of their startup begins post product launch. Yet I’ve seen some startups successfully build their audience well before they reach this point.

They’ve been able to do this by investing heavily in building out a blog with independent value separate from their product yet designed to attract the target audience that their product will eventually serve.

YouTube sets the gold standard on creating an experience built from the ground up to strongly encourage content discovery. I’ve been using YouTube for years and I’ve seen it continue to evolve the variety of approaches used throughout it’s site and mobile app and constantly refine them to drive yet more video views.

Given so many of the experiences we create across the web are similarly trying to encourage content discovery (whether it’s videos, music, photos, news, people, restaurants, experts, and so much more), I thought it would be valuable to catalog some of the best practices YouTube leverages for the benefit of other product designers looking to refine their own experiences.

I recently gave this presentation on product management at LinkedIn that I thought was worth sharing more broadly.

I’m a firm believer that despite the growth of social networks and messaging app alternatives, email is far from dead as an important communication channel. Usage continues to grow with Google reporting over 425 million active users on Gmail and Microsoft with over 400 million on Outlook.com.

It also remains one of the most effective channels for startups to drive user acquisition, engagement, retention, and monetization.

I wanted to highlight one engagement mechanic that I’m seeing on the rise that strongly leverages email: the weekly digest email. A variety of tech companies leverage a weekly digest email as an avenue to deliver content and value directly to a user’s inbox as well as a key engagement tactic to remind the user of the service.

I thought I’d share my top ten favorite tools for helping me accomplish my day-to-day responsibilities as a product manager. These tools fall into three categories: collaboration, user feedback, and analytics.

In the ever evolving world of web and mobile products, it’s incredibly important to have a constant pulse on the sentiment, needs, and frustrations of your users. While traditional user research and usability studies are still an important part of the product development process, the web today affords real-time alternatives for getting daily insights into the minds of your users.

I spend 15 minutes every morning peering into the following five real-time channels to hear from users in their own words what they like, don’t like, want, hate, and love about our products.

It's customary in the design world to evaluate a designer's existing portfolio as part of the interview process to get a better understanding of their work and the process they leverage to develop their designs.

I find it equally valuable to evaluate a product manager's existing portfolio of products as part of a product management interview. When evaluating a product manager's portfolio, I'm looking to assess how successfully the product manager has owned the vision, design, and execution of their product and how that exhibits itself in the success of the product.

I usually summarize the role of the product manager as the CEO of their product. But I had a great conversation with a fellow product manager a couple of weeks ago who was telling me what he loved most about being a product manager was being the quarterback of the team. That stuck with me and the more I thought about it I realized it was another great way to describe the role and the key attributes needed to be successful in it.

Product managers spend much of their time communicating ideas, plans, designs, and tasks to their teams. This includes everything from emails communicating decisions, to presentations communicating product roadmaps, to specs communicating product designs, to bug tickets communicating errors in the product.

Mastering effective communication is known to be an accelerant to the dissemination of ideas, to team cohesion, and to even the motivation and inspiration of team members. Given this, it’s worth spending time as a product manager thinking about how you can improve the various communications you have with your team.

I wanted to share some of the best practices I’ve observed on effective communication around the three high level responsibilities of product managers: vision, design, and execution.

Product managers have to make many decisions every day, including product prioritization decisions, product design decisions, bug triage decisions, and many more. And the process by which a product manager makes such decisions can result either in an extremely well functioning team dynamic or... quite the opposite.

The role of a product manager is a broad one and there are variety of tasks you could be involved with each day. You could be performing core product responsibilities including conducting a customer interview, triaging incoming bugs, reviewing a new design, authoring a feature spec, brainstorming improvements for your next release, testing the latest release, and more. Or you could be performing team activities including preparing a presentation on the updated roadmap or on-boarding new team members. Add to that the constant meetings and emails you have to attend and respond to each day. This doesn’t even include the many non-role related activities that end of filling your day.

Product managers require a diverse set of skills to excel at their role, including design, technical, analytical, communication, and more. Yet there is one skill that I find is often underrated but critical for the success of a product manager. And that is the skill of influence without authority.

Product managers have a unique challenge in that they own the product, yet do not manage any of the people who are directly responsible for executing on the product. While I agree with this organizational design to ensure separation of concerns and specialization of skills, it leads to product managers needing the ability to influence others to help them achieve their objectives without the direct authority to do so.

I thought I'd follow up my recent post on What is Product Management? with a summary of ten of the most informative and inspiring posts I've come across on the role from some of the greatest product leaders in the industry. I consider these must reads for any product manager looking to understand different perspectives on product and excel in their career in product management.

The role of product management in technology firms is a critically important one that is often misunderstood.

I’ve done product management at Microsoft, LinkedIn, and various startups, though my product management experience during my years at Microsoft (where it’s called program management) were the most formative and I continue to leverage those lessons to this day, especially when advising new product managers on how to think about their role and where they should be focusing their time.

Product management boils down to owning the vision, design, and execution of your product.

Startup2Startup has been on a roll lately with great events and this week was no exception. BJ Fogg, a professor and researcher from Stanford University, stopped by and shared with us his secrets on behavior change. For those of you who are not familiar with BJ Fogg, he has been studying behavior change for over a decade, is the founder of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford, and author of the book Persuasive Technology. He also led the first Facebook Apps class at Stanford, which was massively successful in generating explosive growth for student apps. BJ Fogg has leveraged his insights into how technology can be used to bring about behavior change both in his academic work as well as in industry work, especially in the mobile and health sectors.

His focus for the evening was around how we can leverage his research in our own startups to help bring about the behavior change that we seek in our users. Practically every startup is trying to elicit some behavior from their users, whether it’s getting them to log into your site daily, signup for a new service, or share their content with their friends. And the lessons from BJ Fogg help us to understand the psychology behind eliciting these behavior changes and how we can ensure they happen. I thought I’d take a moment to summarize his 5 key secrets from the evening.

Last night I attended another fantastic Startup2Startup event focused on Interaction Design. The lineup was terrific with Jason Putorti, lead designer of Mint.com and now co-founder of Votizen, Kate Aronowitz, Director of Design and User Experience at Facebook, and Garry Tan, co-founder of Posterous and Designer in Residence for YCombinator. They brought together a breadth of experience in design across all stages of the startup lifecycle.

I thought I’d briefly summarize by sharing five key quotes from the night and some of the discussion around them.

One of the most disruptive trends in the Internet era has been turning a culture of scarcity on its head and transforming it to one of ubiquitous access. No longer is the news, music, videos, and games we consume controlled by powerful oligopolies who artificially constrain supply in order to increase the value of their offerings. Instead, the new found democratization of media and information has been a win for all consumers, giving them the ability to consume their content wherever, whenever, and however they wish. While this transformation isn't complete, it is well on it's way across almost all major content verticals.

Yet with this new world has come new challenges. Specifically, finding the information most relevant to you right now has become a real struggle with the explosion of availability of content. When you look across the web today at the most successful properties, they can often be looked at as productivity tools helping us to increase the signal-to-noise ratio to make sense of our new information overload challenges. These services help us to filter and discover the content that is most relevant to us right now.

Given that this is still an emerging space, there are a variety of tactics that are being used across these services to increase the signal to noise ratio. I thought I'd take a moment to discuss ten trending tactics that these services are leveraging so that you can bring them to your own applications. I expect to see us refine our best practices across each of these tactics as well as see new ones emerge as we continue to understand how to handle this explosion of content that empowers the Internet today.

Andrew Chen asked me to write a guest post on his blog about some of my experiences monetizing music at imeem. I wanted to share it here as well.

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Introduction
In its search to find the most effective way to monetize user’s time spent listening to music, imeem has become one of the early innovators in the nascent online audio advertising space.

From the process of designing, testing, and iterating on imeem’s unique audio ad product, I wanted to highlight 5 key lessons learned that are applicable not only in developing imeem’s ad offering, but in general to designing any innovative ad product.

Lesson 1: Align the ad product with your site’s user experience
Lesson 2: The easy way is often not the best
Lesson 3: Pick the right metrics to optimize
Lesson 4: Make sure to look at qualitative feedback
Lesson 5: Iterate on the sell in addition to the ad product

1. Align the ad product with your site’s user experience
imeem had classically employed a variety of advertising strategies to monetize users, including display ad inventory that was filled by our direct sales team through high impact brand campaigns as well as dozens of ad networks we used to fill our glut of remnant inventory. Yet we knew with our audio consumption experience, we were creating a new kind of available ad inventory which could be much more effective at reaching our users than display ads since audio-based advertising better aligned with the activity users were most engaged with on the site. With terrestrial radio ads still generating $21B in revenue, there was clearly an opportunity to shift some of those dollars online and provide a better experience for both users and advertisers.

2. The easy way is often not the best
Online audio ads are not a new concept. They have been used by a variety of major online streaming outlets, including AOL Radio, CBS Radio, Live 365, and Yahoo LaunchCast. However, the initial incarnation of audio ads took the easy way out. They typically ran 30 second audio ad spots which they obtained from ad agencies that re-purposed their terrestrial radio creative for online audio ads. This made it very easy for agencies to get their feet wet with online audio advertising with no additional creative costs. While this may work for traditional online streaming services, the new generation of music streamers like imeem, Last.FM, and Pandora would not be willing to run such long audio ads out of fear of losing their user base.

So what was needed was an audio ad unit custom tailored for personalized streaming services. And that’s what we ended up creating at imeem. We came up with an 8 second audio ad spot that would advertise a national brand and show a standard IAB medium rectangle (300×250) banner on top of the player during the audio ad playback. The user could click-through the medium rectangle to the advertiser’s landing page like classic banner ads. We started with a very low frequency of a maximum of 2 ads per user per hour. However, this was far from easy, as it required imeem to develop in-house production capabilities for the 8 second audio creative, as agencies never had existing creative and were rarely willing to develop another set of creative themselves. While this was an undertaking, it is often necessary to bear the cost of innovation to deliver the right ad product to your audience.

3. Pick the right metrics to optimize
In order to understand the effectiveness of any ad unit, it’s important to systematically test it. The first step in designing a successful experiment was determining what were the metrics that we were testing. We knew that we were trying to satisfy two customer segments with this ad product: advertisers and users. For advertisers, there were a variety of ad-related performance metrics that we could measure. However, we decided to start by measuring the advertiser metrics that ad agencies had classically been most interested in. We wanted to determine whether we could make advertisers happy through the performance of these classic metrics, since trying to educate ad agencies on the importance of new metrics is an uphill battle that would significantly decrease your ability to sell the unit. Thus the initial advertiser metrics we tracked were click-through rate of the tethered medium rectangle banner as well as aided and un-aided brand recall as measured through quantitative surveys administered by our research partner Dynamic Logic.

For users, what we wanted to understand was whether introducing audio ads onto our site would decrease the amount they used the site. While we tracked page views, visits, session length, etc, we focused on number of songs played per user during the life of the experiment as the most important proxy for site usage.

4. Make sure to look at qualitative feedback
In addition to measuring quantitative metrics, it’s equally important to collect qualitative feedback from real users. The iModerate online focus groups we conducted ended up being very enlightening and allowed us to derive interesting insights of consumer motivations and behaviors that looking at the quantitative data alone wouldn’t provide.

For example, though initially we were significantly worried that the introduction of audio ads would cause users to flock to our ad-free competitors, we learned through interviews that many of our young users had developed a strong affinity with imeem, understood the need for imeem to monetize, and were eager to suggest ad verticals they would be most interested in hearing to improve the product.

5. Iterate on the sell in addition to the ad product
An area that’s as important to iterate on as the ad product itself is how you sell or position this offering in the marketplace. Selling innovative ad products is actually the greatest challenge in the process. Anytime you introduce a new ad unit, significant education is required for brand marketers and agencies to help them to understand the importance, effectiveness, and promise of this new medium.

Our sales planning team iterated many times on the pitch to advertisers for the audio ad product as well as how we reported on ad unit performance at the end of each campaign. This was regularly refined based on feedback we elicited from our advertising partners.

Conclusion
While many have claimed the death of online advertising in light of the recession, its important to remind ourselves that ad dollars are still being spent online. Now is an opportunity to innovate on the ad products that we offer advertisers to show greater value, brand awareness, and performance. We must keep in mind that ad agencies are eager to find better ways to spend ad dollars, as they are equally interested in showing results to their brand clients to hold on to their ad budgets. We should partner with our advertisers and users to find the most efficient way to leverage online advertising to monetize our sites.