Sachin Rekhi

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.

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.

I've been spending a lot of time lately thinking through how to optimize my personal productivity to drive the greatest effectiveness. In doing so I've reflected upon how there have been specific times in my life where I'm completely in the state of flow, accomplishing far more than I've ever accomplished, and absolutely loving every minute of it. And at the same time there have been days where it just feels like I'm doing sloppy work and can't seem to get my ideas to click. And I've thought about what was so special about the former days and what could I do to have far more of them. I call this unlocking my inner beast mode and I've been experimenting with a variety of practices as I pursue my latest startup to drive maximum productivity. Here are five best practices that I've discovered so far that work well for me and hopefully may be helpful for you as well.

I'm a firm believer in needing to find your personal passion/skill/opportunity fit as the ultimate path to career fulfillment. Only when you find a career that you're passionate about, that you can also be skilled at, and one that has sufficient market opportunity will you achieve ultimate career satisfaction. And it takes a careful balance of all three dimensions because simply finding fit along one dimension unfortunately won't result in success nor fulfillment.

While most folks found value in this framework when thinking about career fulfillment, some wondered what was a viable process by which they could actually get there. They knew that the role they were in wasn't it, but also didn't know how to find their personal passion/skill/opportunity fit nor how to start heading in the right direction.

To provide my perspective on this, I wanted to share my own career journey and how I specifically leveraged an explore & exploit algorithm at every turn of my career to ultimately find my dream job.

The area I most often get asked to help product managers on is preparing them for their upcoming product management interviews. Given that I’ve evaluated hundreds of product management candidates, I wanted to share a set of sample interview questions I've kept in Notejoy that I might ask and what I’m specifically evaluating on to discern whether they are a great product management candidate.

Keep in mind that while these were common questions I personally asked product managers that I interviewed at LinkedIn, there is no standard set of questions nor interview template at LinkedIn. Every interviewer is encouraged to ask whatever set of questions they felt appropriate to help them evaluate the core competencies they were testing for. So don’t expect to receive these specific questions, but instead this should help you understand the competencies that are typically being tested for in product management interviews.

2015 was the year I returned to writing. It's reminded me just how much fun it is to reflect on what I've learned over the years and try to distill those lessons into repeatable practices for myself and others. I tried my best to keep a weekly cadence in the second half of the year and generally did with a few brief hiatuses.

I wanted to share the 10 most popular posts I published in 2015. While I wrote mostly on product management, design, and entrepreneurship, I had a few well-received posts on optimizing your career and life hacks in general. Take a look and I hope you enjoy any posts that you may have missed in the year.

I've noticed that those that ultimately find satisfaction from their careers end up optimized for passion/skill/opportunity fit. They've been lucky enough to find the intersection of work they are passionate about, work they are skilled at, and work that has ample market opportunity. For those early in their careers or who have not yet found such satisfaction, I wanted to share how optimizing for passion/skill/opportunity fit can help you to ultimately find your dream job.

One of the characteristics Reid Hoffman often mentions he values in great entrepreneurs is that they are infinite learners. Those who possess this quality are constantly expanding their expertise to new domains, regularly overcoming their own shortcomings, and their capacity for taking on new challenges seems limitless. Mark Zuckerberg is frequently cited as an infinite learner who has grown immensely in his ability to lead Facebook’s now 10,000 person organization and shape a product experience that touches over a billion people daily. In the world of technology where absolutely all the rules are constantly being re-invented, being an infinite learner has become a critical skill to the survival and longevity of great leaders and their organizations.

Throughout our careers, we are often lucky enough to work with a few individuals that far exceed our expectations, have the ability to move mountains, and inspire us to do our best work. These individuals are often directly responsible for our own success as well as the success of our projects and direct contributors to our proudest professional accomplishments.

I call these rock stars members of my draft pick. And after every job, I update my draft pick with individuals who fit the bill. I then ensure that I touch base with each of them at least once a year.

That way when it comes time for me to build an all star team, I can call upon the very best.

I recently went through the thought exercise of trying to define my professional identity on the web. When thinking about the various components that make up my professional identity, I thought about it in terms of what I’d like people to know about me and what best represents myself and my work.