Sachin Rekhi

I've had the opportunity to mentor a breadth of product managers through the years as well as entrepreneurs through my work as an advisor to early-stage startups. And in doing so I've spent countless hours working through product challenges, startup challenges, and everything in between. As I work more closely with each individual, their guard starts to come down, they start to open up, and ultimately become willing to share some of their biggest challenges, uncertainties, and fears holding them back.

What's been fascinating to learn is just how many folks struggle with self-confidence. As well as how many suffer from deep-rooted imposter syndrome. This effects so many of us, including folks who are regularly perceived as successful. And this certainly isn't just a female issue. While it flies in the face of the Silicon Valley stereotype of founders having some of the biggest egos out there, I've seen the opposite to be true and think these issues are some of the most pernicious affecting folks from realizing their full potential.

Listen on: Growth Everywhere | iTunes | Google Play | Spotify

Ada and I recently sat down with Eric Siu for a discussion on the Growth Everywhere podcast, a podcast focused on sharing the stories of entrepreneurs to help the next generation of entrepreneurs thrive.

We talked about where the idea for Notejoy, our most recent startup, came from and how we set out to solve the problems that we experienced first hand as leaders at LinkedIn and SurveyMonkey. We talked about some of the initial challenges we've had along the way as well as some of the new customer segments we discovered have been great for Notejoy. We go on to cover some of the growth channels that have been successful for us.

We then dived into the more personal side of Notejoy, talking about what it's like to build Notejoy as a husband & wife team and how we manage to keep each other productive and sane, leveraging personal & professional OKRs as well as daily standups!

If any of this sounds interesting to you, do check out the podcast.

Product management is fundamentally a leadership role in that you are ultimately responsible for leading a product development team to deliver a compelling product that resonates with your customers. The vast majority of what I've personally learned about leadership comes from Jeff Weiner, who I watched lead LinkedIn as CEO over the 4 years I spent there. He singlehandedly transformed leadership in my mind from an amorphous set of soft skills to a specific set of tactics that you could execute to successfully lead an organization.

One of the most important lessons I took away from Jeff was the need to define your company's core, all the way from your vision to your values. It’s not enough to have an ambitious vision because unless that vision translates into how you manage your company on a day-to-day basis, that vision will never be realized. I saw Jeff operationalize this advice on a daily basis, whether it was repeating the mission, vision, and operating priorities every bi-weekly all hands, speaking to specific values in weekly leadership meeting discussions, and more.

I've found one of the best ways for product teams to make this advice actionable is by articulating your products design principles. Great product managers start by defining an ambitious vision of how the world will be a better place if they succeed. They then go on to develop a strategy by which their product will ultimately dominate the market. But then the team's real work begins: designing the actual product, validating your assumptions, executing to deliver the product, and rinsing and repeating to continue to validate and iterate on the offering. Too often the design/execution phases lose sight of the vision and strategy that was so painstakingly put together in the first place and they thus often lose their value. By translating your vision and strategy into a set of specific product design principles and then leveraging them throughout the design/execution phases, you can avoid this fate.

Video: Successfully Navigating Today's Career Maze
Slides: Successfully Navigating Today's Career Maze

In August I got invited back to LinkedIn to give a talk. But what was surprising is they were interested in me giving a very different type of talk than I've normally done. Instead of sharing best practices on product management or entrepreneurship, they were most interested in me sharing my career journey, the risks I took and trade-offs I made along the way, and the lessons I've learned in managing a career in today's day and age.

Not to disappoint them, I took up the challenge. I shared how I've used the framework of optimizing for passion/skill/opportunity fit throughout my career and the many trade-offs in my own journey where I picked passion over everything else, often against other people's sage advice, and how that ultimately enabled me to find my dream job.

As product managers we engage in product debates every day with our design and engineering partners, fellow product managers, cross-functional partners, managers, executive stakeholders, and more. The best product debates help refine our solution, make us better as product managers, and are intellectually stimulating. Yet so often they don't feel anything like that. It turns out expressing a dissenting opinion and constructively coalescing on a better solution requires the skillful practice of the art of discourse by all participants. So I wanted to share some of the best practices I've learned to make product debates constructive and valuable.

Probably the most frequent question I get from product managers is around how to successfully prioritize a product roadmap. I think when folks come to me with this question they are often looking for a formula they can apply or at least an algorithm they can go through to prioritize their roadmap. But the reality is crafting a successful product roadmap is far more art than science.

I instead wanted to share the three lenses we apply each time we put together a quarterly product roadmap at Notejoy. Each of these lenses looks at prioritizing a roadmap from an entirely different perspective. The art then comes in determining how to ultimately put together a roadmap balancing these often diverging priorities. Let's look at each of these lenses in turn.

Video: The Art of Being Compelling as a Product Manager
Slides: The Art of Being Compelling as a Product Manager
Essay: The Art of Being Compelling as a Product Manager

At the beginning of October, I got the chance to present my talk, The Art of Being Compelling, at INDUSTRY: The Product Conference, a premier product management conference that took place in Cleveland, Ohio. The 20-min video from this talk is now available online, so wanted to share it with all of you.

I've long believed that the most innovative products are built by teams who innovate on the very process by which they develop those products. And it's why I've always been a student of companies that consistently deliver innovation to the market. It's no wonder I loved reading The Everything Store sharing the story of Jeff Bezos growing Amazon to the e-commerce juggernaut that it is today. Or Creativity, Inc. that provided an inside look into Pixar's consistently creative hit machine. And that's precisely what excited me about diving in this weekend into Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda, a new book providing a detailed look inside the design process at Apple.

Creative Selection did not disappoint. While much has been written about Steve Jobs and Apple, I found Creative Selection particularly insightful because it provided a vignette into the development of the first iPhone, and in particular, one of it's most critical features - the keyboard - from the perspective of Ken Kocienda, the software engineer ultimately responsible for developing it. Ken goes through the many challenges and subsequent iterations to address those challenges with building the first keyboard to be presented only on a glass display. And in doing so, it showcased how Apple's design and development process was different from traditional Silicon Valley companies in subtle yet incredibly important ways.

I just finished reading The Messy Middle by Scott Belsky and highly recommend it for product managers at both startups and established tech firms. Scott Belsky shares his lessons learned optimizing and enduring the messy and unsexy middle every product goes through before (hopefully) thriving. He does a great job of sharing lessons from his own experience founding Behance and navigating Adobe post acquisition, as well from the many startups he has worked with as an investor or advisor, including Pinterest, Airbnb, Periscope, Square, and more.

It's a difficult book to summarize because it's organized as 100+ mini-essays that succinctly teach a specific best practice around optimizing your team, your product, and yourself. But what I loved most was that Scott brought a far more human lens to creating winning products than traditional product best practices. I wanted to share 5 such non-obvious lessons that really stem from Scott's deep understanding of human behavior, human psychology, and human intuition.

After spending over a decade in product management in organizations large and small, I've come to believe that great product management is 60% substance and 40% style.

The substance of product management is the hard skills you need to learn and excel at to build great products: customer discovery, prioritizing a roadmap, deriving insights from data, and so much more. But equally important is the soft skills needed to get things done: effective communication, influence without authority, executive management, and more. I call this the style of product management. I find that the best product managers spend about 60% of their time on the substance of product management, while the remaining 40% is spent on the style of product management.