Sachin Rekhi

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.

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.