Sachin Rekhi

As product managers we engage in product debates every day with our design and engineering partners, fellow product managers, cross-functional partners, managers, executive stakeholders, and more. The best product debates help refine our solution, make us better as product managers, and are intellectually stimulating. Yet so often they don't feel anything like that. It turns out expressing a dissenting opinion and constructively coalescing on a better solution requires the skillful practice of the art of discourse by all participants. So I wanted to share some of the best practices I've learned to make product debates constructive and valuable.

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.

One aspect of startups that the ecosystem is getting better at is designing our startups for learning from our customers to find product/market fit. Steve Blank and Eric Ries helped popularize these notions and the ecosystem has embraced them.

But what I've found surprising is that these learnings haven't been readily applied to the development process and they definitely should be. From the earliest stages of a startup, the R&D team should be designed in such a way to maximize learning for improving the R&D process itself.

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.

One of the classic pieces of software engineering literature that has had a profound influence on me since first reading it at Penn Engineering is The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Books. Fred initially authored the book in 1975 based on his experiences at IBM managing the development of OS/360. His central thesis is that leveraging man-months, a hypothetical unit of work representing the work done by one person in a month, as an effective way to estimate software projects is a myth. Put more simply, adding manpower to a late software project in fact makes it even later. This is because adding additional people to a software project significantly increasing the communication overhead and more people need to communicate in order to ensure they are aligned and aware of what everyone else is doing on the project. This significantly reduces the incremental output from each added resource.

While this is a well-understood and generally accepted reality, I still see many software organizations using some form of man-months for their estimation and jumping to add additional resources to their team in order to try to speed up their projects. I wanted to share some of the lessons I've learned on how to improve software engineering team velocity without simply adding additional resources to the team, which has all the challenges that Fred describes.

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.

One of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had at LinkedIn is the opportunity to see Jeff Weiner’s leadership in action. His disciplined approach to leadership has transformed the concept in my mind from an amorphous set of soft skills to a key competitive differentiator in scaling organizations.

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.

The best startups choose a main dimension or two of innovation and invest significant effort to truly differentiate themselves from the rest of the market along that dimension. At the same time, they leverage existing best practices along other potential dimensions of innovation and choose not to reinvent in those aspects of their business. This enables them to take smart risks by focusing on what they can dedicate the needed resources to win.

On the other hand, those startups that choose to innovate across a myriad of dimensions often find it difficult to focus given the large number of unknowns they need to solve. And while in theory the sum of their collective innovations should result in an even greater reward, the reality is executing extremely well becomes exceedingly difficult.

When evaluating a startup idea, it's important to leverage the collective wisdom of what makes a startup successful, including evaluating the market opportunity, understanding how your product will significantly improve upon what already exists, evaluating the team's strengths, understanding your user acquisition strategy, and critiquing the business model. These are all critical criteria that are indeed important in understanding the potential for success of your next venture.

However, in addition to these standard criteria, I'd like to suggest three additional ones that have become extremely important in my own evaluation of startup ideas.

Last night I had the pleasure of attending the latest Startup2Startup on engineering management with Yishan Wong, an early director of engineering at Facebook.

The area we spent the most time discussing, both during the presentation and during the discussion that followed, was how to hire great engineers for your startup. I thought it was a particularly appropriate topic given that I receive weekly requests from colleagues asking me for help on their quest for engineers. So I thought I'd take a moment to post on some of the most actionable take-aways from the discussion.

I had lunch with an old college buddy last week and he has been considering moving to San Francisco to start his next venture. We got into a discussion of the potential advantages and disadvantages of doing so. I thought I'd throw up my thoughts on the subject for those interested.

I've been in San Francisco now for the past three years. My immediate prior residence was up in Seattle, but I originally grew up in upstate New York. I have come to love San Francisco for many reasons, but mostly because it's an ideal place to start a technology venture.

While I am clearly biased, here is my attempt at a balanced discussion of the pros and cons of starting your venture in San Francisco or the Bay Area in general.

I'm always interested in improving my development stack in order to maximize productivity, facilitate rapid iterations, and maintain flexibility. Over the years I've periodically iterated my web stack, from a Microsoft-based self-hosted environment, to a PHP-centered world, to finally my present Python\Django stack on top of a cloud platform.

I thought I would detail my current stack and technology choices for those interested. I would also love to hear from you on what you use or if you have any suggested improvements.

As many of you know, I spent the last two weeks getting married. Yes, it did indeed take two weeks, including a wedding on April 24th in the Bay Area, as well as a reception in my home town in Rochester, NY on May 1st. Beyond the actual wedding festivities, there were months of planning and preparations prior to the events. Now that all of this has culminated, I thought I would take a moment to reflect on the lessons learned relevant to the startup community from my recent wedding experience.

Based on a suggestion from Andrew Chen, I spent Saturday afternoon reading The Monk and the Riddle by Randy Komisar, which put me in a reflective mood on my own goals and vision for success here in Silicon Valley.

Randy Komisar put together a short narrative that challenges the traditional assumption of the deferred life plan, romanticizes the notion of business as a creative pursuit, and even finds room to go into a discourse on self-knowledge of one's own motivations. Beyond this, Randy litters throughout the book a great set of lessons from his own career as a successful entrepreneurial executive.

I thought I'd take a moment to share some of the highlights through a set of my favorite quotes from the book.

Every week I meet with different entrepreneurs asking for my advice on topics ranging from funding strategy, exit opportunities, user acquisition, monetization, to technology investment. However, unlike others who often have a set of best practices they like to dispense around these topics, I find myself spending a considerable amount of time understanding the entrepreneur's personal goals before laying out my recommendations.

Entrepreneurs come in all shapes and sizes and there are a variety of successful outcomes that can be achieved. It's therefore important to be wary of anyone that gives you one-size-fits-all advice before understanding your needs.

One dimension along which I wanted to elaborate is a founder's choice to optimize for building fundamental vs strategic value. Let's start with some definitions. An entrepreneur that focuses on building fundamental value is optimizing for creating a standalone business that generates meaningful cash flow and profit as an independent entity. On the other hand, an entrepreneur optimizing for strategic value is one that is building their organization in such a way to maximize potential value to a larger organization that will ultimately benefit from an acquisition of the entrepreneur's startup.

As many of you know, I spent the better half of 2009 as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Trinity Ventures. It was one of the most rewarding experiences I've ever had and would encourage anyone who gets the opportunity to do it. Working alongside Gus Tai, Ajay Chopra, Jim Tybur, Dan Scholnick, and the rest of the Trinity team provided an inside look into the world of venture capital. Given that I've spent most of my entrepreneurial career in scrappy startup environments, I developed a valuable new perspective on evaluating opportunities.

I thought I would take a moment to share some of the most compelling lessons I learned during my Entrepreneurship-in-Residence.

I was perusing Andrew Chen's bookshelf and came across The PayPal Wars by Eric M. Jackson. It turned out to be a riveting tail of the entire journey of PayPal, from its early conception to its monstrous success, retold by one of its earliest hires in marketing. It's a story I thought I knew, but there was so much more to it than the simple success story we all hear about.

I thought I'd take a moment to reflect on the five most important lessons I learned from their journey and my thoughts on their application to today's entrepreneurs.

In a departure from my usual focus on startups, I thought I would take a moment to reflect on my most recent experience in jury duty.

I was selected as one of twelve jurors for a murder trial against a defendant who was accused of beating up his girlfriend and throwing her out of her apartment window in San Francisco in 2005. After an intense 2 week trial and jury deliberation, we today found the defendant guilty. His punishment is still to be determined.

This was my first experience with jury duty and the criminal trial process and I must say I was impressed with the court proceedings and the overall fairness of the trial. I've included my specific thoughts on the jury selection process, the burden of proof standard, and the trial timeline.

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.

As today marks my first day as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Trinity Ventures, I'm spending a lot of time thinking about how to formalize my process for starting a new venture. Every startup goes through phases including brainstorming ideas, selecting evaluation criteria, performing due diligence on top ideas, picking a winner, deciding on a corporate structure, putting together the team, evaluating funding options, and more. While the popular press often glamorizes the startup story as an epiphany moment from an opportunistic individual that grows to a successful corporate behemoth, I prefer a much more systematic approach to entrepreneurship (and life in general, for that matter). As I begin this journey myself, I thought I'd document my new venture process along the way, share it with all of you, and hopefully hear from you on your own thoughts.

While I am a big believer that entrepreneurs should spend the majority of their time focusing on getting a quality product to market, one piece of overhead that should never be overlooked is incorporating or forming an LLC prior to product launch. To some this is obvious. Of course you setup your corporate structure before anything else. But to hackers and hobby programmers this may not be their first instinct. Sometimes you have a hobby website that just starts taking off and you never planned on it being a real business. But then it starts to become one and you may not have the protections incorporation affords.

I'm often asked about my Y Combinator experience so I thought I would take the time to blog about it. I did Y Combinator the Summer of 2007 in Boston with two awesome co-founders. We built Anywhere.FM, a web music player that brought an iTunes-like experience to the web, and eventually sold it to imeem.

So what is Y Combinator? Y Combinator is a new kind of seed stage venture firm. While they provide financing and advice like all venture investors, their model for doing so is very different. They give small amounts of cash (<$20,000), take small amounts of equity (<10%), and fund startups in batches twice a year. These summer and winter batches bring all the entrepreneurs in a given batch together in Silicon Valley for 3 months to have each startup build a demo-able product to show off to investors at the culminating Investor Day in hopes or raising a follow-on angel or VC round.

I would break down the value of the Y Combinator experience into four main benefits: jump starting the startup process, access to a fraternity of entrepreneurs, investor day, and funding.