Sachin Rekhi

This weekend I had the opportunity to read Ashlee Vance's Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. I've been a huge fan of Elon Musk since the early days of SpaceX and knew I wanted to dive deeper into the story of both SpaceX and Tesla. The book did not disappoint: it was a fascinating history starting from his childhood, to his early startup adventures with Zip2 and PayPal, to a deep dive into how he willed SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity into existence and ultimately to success despite the odds being continually stacked against him.

We often paint the picture of Elon Musk as a superhuman who has a boundless work ethic, willingness to take massive personal risk, and an incredible mind to make it all happen. All of this is certainly true and contributed meaningfully to his success. But as I read his story I came across so many examples of skills that Elon had mastered that any of us could also master to enable us to achieve our goals. I wanted to highlight five of those skills that are particularly relevant for product managers that can help them reach new heights in their own craft.

Mastering the craft of product management is no easy task. Much of the literature that defines the role as the intersection of business, technology, and user experience isn't particularly helpful for practitioners who are left wondering what skills they need to learn versus the fine people they work closely with in actual business, technology, and user experience roles.

I instead define the role of a product manager as driving the vision, strategy, design, and execution of their product. Each of these four dimensions has specific responsibilities as well as skills needed to be great at it.

It's equally important for product managers to think about each of these four dimensions as having a concrete set of deliverables. Too often product managers perform the activities associated with each of these deliverables, but may not do so as rigorously as they could to maximize value. When you instead think of them as concrete deliverables you then can look for exemplars of greatness for each as well as hone your craft around each of them.

I wanted to share what I believe are the most important deliverables for product managers across each of the four dimensions of product management. In doing so I hope to help demystify what you actually do in the role, provide a framework for assessing what dimensions of the role you are already good at delivering against, and opportunities for improvement on each. While I could easily write an entire essay for each deliverable, I'll instead focus on introducing each of them and providing a perspective on why they are critical for PMs.

Product managers most often reach out to me for advice when they are in the midst of contemplating their next role. In our discussions, we talk about all the usual things: their ultimate career aspirations; their understanding of their own strengths and weaknesses and the skill gaps they hope to fill; as well as the specifics of each role they are considering, including scope, responsibilities, title & compensation, and manager. But the one conversation that people often tell me they find uniquely insightful is our discussion on finding product culture fit. So I wanted to share my thoughts on this more broadly.

It has been incredible to see such a positive response to my OKRs post. So many of you reached out telling me how valuable it was to hear about the details of implementing a successful OKR program. Many of you also reached out with follow-up questions asking me to dive deeper into aspects you were struggling with in your own implementation. I thought I would share the most frequently asked questions as a follow-up post for those interested.

I'm a firm believer that Objectives & Key Results (OKRs), the goal-setting framework invented at Intel and popularized by Google and John Doerr, can be a highly effective leadership tool for a team of any size. When done right, they help drive focus, alignment, accountability, and an outcome-orientation throughout the organization. However, too often, OKRs are implemented poorly, resulting in the promised benefits never being realized. After spending the last 8 years implementing OKRs at both large organizations like LinkedIn and small startups like Notejoy, I wanted to share what I've come to appreciate is required to develop an effective OKR program.

James Clear's Atomic Habits provides a compelling rationale for why frequently practicing small and easy to do atomic habits consistently compounds in benefit to ultimately generate incredible results. It then goes on to provide a comprehensive guide for reliably forming such atomic habits, regardless of the level of self-discipline or willpower you may naturally have. While many of his ideas naturally appeal to those seeking to develop lifestyle habits like exercising, losing weight, or quitting smoking, I found his ideas to be equally relevant for product managers looking to accelerate their career.

There is a whole host of skills that product managers seek to develop that can only truly be built through deliberate practice. This includes everything from honing your analytical rigor, to building your product intuition, to becoming more strategic. You can't just attend a class or read a few blog posts and expect to become great at any of these. At the same time, simply doing your product role the same way you've always been doing it is also unlikely to help you develop the specific skills you're after.

Instead, the formula for mastering these types of skills requires first developing atomic habits to encourage daily or weekly practice and then performing the habit with deliberate practice. For example, building your analytical rigor requires setting aside time every day to critically review dashboards and form hypotheses from the trends that you see, running weekly ad-hoc queries to deep dive into specific user behavior, putting together metrics recaps a week after every feature launch, as well as spending time each month determining how to improve or augment the dashboards you currently have. Yet the daily demands of a product management role are already so taxing that if you aren't already performing these activities, you'll find it difficult to incorporate them into your weekly routine. That's why to successfully build any of these skills you'll need to first develop the right atomic habits to support them. I wanted to share three of my favorite strategies for doing just that from the book.

I always cherish the holidays because it gives me the perfect opportunity to reflect on the past year from both a personal and professional perspective. This year, as we roll past the end of the decade, I've found myself taking it in as a whole. What I came to realize is that this blog had it's humble beginning in 2009, meaning I've now been writing for over a decade! In that past decade, I've authored 150 essays, mostly sharing everything I've learned about product management and entrepreneurship throughout my career in Silicon Valley. But I occasionally dabbled in other passion areas of mine, including career optimization, life hacks, and software engineering. Over the years, readers have pushed me to expand beyond just the written word to a variety of other preferred mediums. Not to disappoint, I ultimately published 12 talks, 10 podcasts, and 13 SlideShare decks as well. What has absolutely blown me away is that all of my content has now been viewed over 1.5 million times! I never set out to build this blog with a certain reach in mind, but even if I had, I certainly couldn't have imagined how many people would find their way to my little corner of the Internet.

I want to thank each and every one of you as you are my continued motivation to share everything I learn. I have saved every note you've sent me over the years as a rallying cry to keep on penning my thoughts. I always thought that if my career in technology didn't work out, I would have been a teacher. So I feel blessed that I've found a way to still do exactly that through my writing. 🙏

Today I thought it'd be fun to take a trip down memory lane and recap my 15 most viewed posts over the past decade.

Listen: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Breaker

I had a really fun chat with Gaurav Khanna last week, who was interested in learning more about the rather unique approach we have taken to building Notejoy, our collaborative notes app. We thought it would be fun to record that conversation and share it broadly as a podcast.

We hit on quite a range of topics, including:

• bootstrapping vs raising VC funding
  
• emerging alternative funding models
  
• the echo chamber in Silicon Valley
  
• the design tools war
  
• the problem we are solving with Notejoy
  
• where we are headed next with Notejoy
  

Listen: Lean B2B Blog | YouTube | iTunes | Google Play | Stitcher | Transcript

I joined Etienne Garbugli on his Lean B2B Podcast a few weeks back to share my best practices on getting actionable user feedback for your product.

We covered a wide-range of customer feedback topics, including: developing and validating your product's initial product/market fit hypotheses, assessing whether you are building a vitamin or a painkiller, the benefits of conducting waves of customer discovery interviews, the 3 top dashboards you need for understanding how you are doing post-launch, and developing a continuous feedback loop for your product, complete with a feedback river and feedback system of record.

Positioning, while classically considered part of the marketing world, is absolutely essential for every product manager to understand. Positioning refers to the place that a brand occupies in the minds of customers and its perceived differentiation from its competitors. Positioning ultimately dictates the frame of reference that your customers leverage when evaluating your product. Positioning is in reality a business strategy exercise and thus product managers need to be deeply involved as effective positioning ultimately defines critical elements of your entire product strategy.

The most classic literature on positioning comes from Jack Trout's book, Differentiate or Die. Jack Trout clearly conveys why positioning is so important in a world continuously filed with more and more product options in every category and less and less attention available from customers to spend time deeply understanding your individual product offering. As a way to cope with this reality, customers quickly develop a position for your product and make their product decisions based on it. Given this, it is incredibly important for brands to strive for their desired position to be created in the minds of their customers. While back in the day you could get away with simply using brand advertising as the primary way you conveyed your product positioning, today every touch point your customer has with your brand has become a critical element of conveying your positioning, including your marketing website, customer service experience, and what your existing customers are saying about you across the web.