Sachin Rekhi

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.

My passion has always been in building productivity apps for consumers and small businesses. The productivity space is a tough one though with thousands of applications but very few breakout success stories. While many apps promise significant improvements in productivity, they often still fail to gain any meaningful traction.

At the same time certain applications do succeed and I’ve tried to discern what sets these applications apart from the numerous failures. I’ve concluded that for productivity applications, success comes down to the following value equation: the productivity gain from using the app must exceed the cost of the constraints imposed by it.

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.

I’m a big believer in Marc Andreessen’s view that software is eating the world and more and more of our daily lives will be improved by technology running brilliant software. One sector in which we are already seeing this shift is personal finance.

In just the last few years I’ve moved much of my financial management to next generation software solutions that greatly simplify my life. I wanted to share how Mint, Personal Capital, and Wealthfront have each become important parts of my financial management strategy.

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.

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.

The meteoric rise of developer platforms over the last seven years has been impressive to watch and a major boon to the social and mobile ecosystems. Twitter (API launched in 2006), Facebook (2007), and Apple iOS (2008) alone have spurred developers to build massive businesses on top of their platforms and simultaneously driven significant user growth for the platforms themselves.

Despite these successes, designing a successful platform today remains an elusive challenge for new entrants. Through my work of building Microsoft Visual Studio's extensibility platform as well as imeem's Media Platform, I know first hand how difficult it can be to get the equation just right. In addition, Connected is in many ways the ultimate mashup, leveraging over 30 different third-party APIs to give you a consolidated view of your contacts and conversations. In developing Connected, I saw some third-party APIs that had well functioning API ecosystems, while many certainly did not.

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.

Alec Baldwin’s epic performance in Glengarry Glen Ross is a great reminder that selling is all about confidence. And it’s equally important when selling yourself when first meeting someone. Having strong conviction and confidence will signal that you are certainly someone worth remembering.