Sachin Rekhi

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.

Last week we announced the launch of LinkedIn Contacts, a smarter way to stay in touch with your most important relationships, based on the acquisition of Ada and I’s startup Connected by LinkedIn.

The launch received positive feedback not only for being a better way to manage your professional relationships, but equally for being a successful acquisition story.

As it’s been over a year since the acquisition of Connected by LinkedIn, I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on the most important lessons I learned as a founder of Connected.

Connected has been by far the most rewarding, successful, and fun startup adventure I’ve had to date, full of experiences I hope to repeat as well as mistakes that I hope to avoid in the future.

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.