Sachin Rekhi

In Silicon Valley, we are all familiar with the concept of network effects, which describes what happens when products get more valuable as more people use them. We experience these effects everyday when we use products like Uber, where the more drivers who join, the shorter your wait times; Slack, where the more team members that join, the quicker it is to communicate with more of your colleagues; and Airbnb, where the more travelers that join, the better the listing reviews. And we have seen these network effects enable companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft grow their flagship products to over a billion users each. We also realize in today's highly competitive markets where defensive moats are weak that network effects are one of the best protective barriers for building an enduring business.

And yet despite understanding the importance of network effects, our collective understanding of the full dynamics of network effects has remained fairly limited. We don't have established best practices for building and scaling networked products nor addressing the inevitable challenges that arise when we attempt to do so. Today Andrew Chen fills this knowledge gap with the launch of his new book, The Cold Start Problem. He's created the definitive guide on network effects targeted at practitioners seeking to build and scale the next generation of networked products.

I believe every product manager and entrepreneur should deeply understand network effects and how to wield them to build and scale successful networks. Given this, I wanted to share my biggest take-aways from reading The Cold Start Problem.

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.

While I can't claim Taylor Swift's level of productivity during the pandemic with two major album releases, 2020 was still a prolific year of writing for me, publishing 18 new essays and remastering 3 existing ones. I thought I'd take a moment to recap the product essays that resonated the most with readers in case you missed any of them.

Video: The Factor with Sonny Mayugba and Sachin Rekhi, Co-Founder & CEO, Notejoy

A few weeks ago I had a fun opportunity to be a guest on The Factor, a new show hosted by Sonny Mayugba highlighting entrepreneurs, their journey, and the factors driving their success.

In this episode, I got to share the journey of Notejoy. I start by telling the origin story of the idea and why I was convinced to leave my cushy leadership role at LinkedIn to start a collaborative notes app. I then share what we learned after launch and how we pivoted our target audience based on new audiences that we discovered were resonating strongly with our offering. We also discuss the growth channels that ended up being most effective for us. We cover a lot more ground in the discussion, including pricing strategy, M&A, and developing a compelling product culture.

Today I'm excited to announce the launch of offline support in Notejoy, our collaborative notes app for individuals and teams. You can now view, edit, and create notes while offline and have it all seamlessly sync whenever you come back online. More importantly, we've also made the overall Notejoy experience much faster by first loading notes from your local device before also checking Notejoy's servers for any changes. This is an important milestone for us, as offline support has become our #1 requested feature over the past year, so it's great to finally get this in the hands of our customers. For those interested, I wanted to share a behind-the-scenes look at how we thought about the requirements for offline support, the design principles we employed, and the ultimate architecture we settled on to develop a first-class offline experience in Notejoy.

In Silicon Valley, we've become well-versed in the importance of finding product/market fit as the most important early pursuit for any new product or startup. We've continued to refine our understanding of the definition of product/market fit, developed customer discovery techniques that can help guide us to product/market fit, as well as established several benchmarks to assess whether we've achieved initial fit. While this obsession with product/market fit is warranted since it remains so elusive, it is necessary but ultimately not sufficient for building a significant and enduring business.

Beyond product/market fit, it turns out business strategy really does matter. A sound strategy can make the difference between our initial product/market fit being ephemeral versus the beginning of a meaningful and lasting business. The most successful businesses realize this and work hard to continually protect their strategic position. But the young upstart that has been laser-focused on clearing the initial hurdle of product/market fit may find itself less equipped for developing a winning strategy.

I recently read Hamilton Helmer's 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy and found it to be an excellent primer on business strategy. Hamilton published this work in 2016 after a career of working with over 200 clients as a strategy consultant, including Netflix, Spotify, and Adobe. He then further refined his concepts as a business strategy professor at Stanford University. I wanted to share his central framework for those looking to develop their strategy chops.

Ada and I both had the privilege of working at two data-driven companies, LinkedIn and SurveyMonkey, led by two analytically rigorous leaders, Jeff Weiner, and the late Dave Goldberg. Those experiences shaped the way that we both now think about building an effective data-driven product culture. One practice that both companies established was weekly executive-level metrics reviews. LinkedIn had two such meetings: the first was a member value meeting focused on the consumer experience, and the second was a monetization meeting covering each of the company's business lines. SurveyMonkey, on the other hand, had a single meeting called ACER, which stood for acquisition, conversion, engagement, retention, where they covered these funnels across all A/B tests happening in the company. I've come to believe that establishing such a metrics review meeting is critical for developing an effective data-driven culture and I wanted to share some of the best practices around doing so.

Over the years Ada and I have both enjoyed being informal career mentors to countless of our friends and colleagues. We were recently reflecting on how dramatically those career conversations have changed as our friends and colleagues have aged from early in their career to mid-career.

In many ways, early career conversations were actually far simpler in nature. Like a video game, most individuals were focused on leveling up as quickly as possible and wanted to know how to acquire the hard and soft skills they needed to climb the career ladder laid out in front of them by their current employer. Or they were exploring a new role or company that might meaningfully accelerate their timeline for leveling up. When asked about their dream job, they often aspired to one of just three roles: a VP in their discipline, a CEO, or ultimately a startup founder.

In stark contrast, the midlife career conversations we've been having look entirely different. While to some it may initially feel a bit like a midlife crisis, the reality is that through the course of their careers many friends and colleagues have developed unique insights and a deeper self-awareness that enable them to now re-orient their career towards truer fulfillment.

I wanted to share some of the most common insights friends and colleagues have at this stage in their career that lead them to be more thoughtful about their next career move.

So many of my colleagues have recently been introduced to working from home for the first time and will likely have to for the foreseeable future. But many are finding their home environment to be far less productive than their traditional office. I, on the other hand, have now been working from home for over four years. Each year I've found a variety of ways to optimize my home office setup to maximize productivity. And I can now safely say that I'm far more productive in my home office than I've ever been in a traditional office setting. So I thought I'd share all the gear that has contributed to my productivity.

Given all the recent interest in remote work, I spent the weekend reading Remote: Office Not Required by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. As the founders of Basecamp, they have been practicing remote work for over a decade now, well before the present-day excitement around it. In the book, they cover everything they have learned from their experience, including why remote work is good for a company, how to hire for remote work, collaborating effectively, managing remote workers, and more. However, what I found most interesting were the tips for how individuals could cope and ultimately thrive in a remote work setting. I wanted to share five such tips I took away from the book.