Notejoy

Notejoy is a fast and focused notes app for you and your team.

Available for Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, and the web. Signup for free at Notejoy.com

Founder & CEO

Reforge

I developed the Mastering Product Management and Finding Product/Market Fit courses at Reforge. Join us for the upcoming cohort!

* Mastering Product Management - Level up your product management abilities by mastering critical product management deliverables.

* Finding Product/Market Fit - Getting to product/market fit isn’t a straight path. Learn a systematic approach to iteration and idea validation to realize your goal.

Course Creator

SachinRekhi.com

I've written 175+ essays with over 3 million views on product management and entrepreneurship. Check them out here: http://www.sachinrekhi.com

Writer

I'm frequently asked to be a keynote speaker on product management & entrepreneurship at universities like Wharton and Stanford as well as at companies like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Capital One, Cisco, and more.

Check out some of the talks I've previously given here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsPCoIQy_CmCyVcfReLOHxR4PE5XMlFJs

And feel free to reach out if you'd like to explore having me speak at your next event.

Speaker

LettersToZoe.com

As a new father, I'm eager to share every life lesson I've learned with my daughter, Zoe. In that vein, I've started LettersToZoe.com, where I share letters to my daughter on such lessons and the journey I went through to learn them.

Various Startups

I've advised 20+ startups on product strategy, including:

* Beeloo - a daily alternative to screen time for kids
* Accord - a customer collaboration platform
* Lyra Health - a smarter approach to mental health 
* People.ai - know what your sales team is up to
* Accompany.com - unleash every relationship's potential (acquired by Cisco)
* Hightail - collaborate on creative projects (acquired by OpenText)
* Kite - AI powered code completions
* DarwinAI - accelerate deep learning development with explainable AI
* Maker.me - share the stories behind your products
* Node.io - account based intelligence (acquired by SugarCRM)
* Pattern.ai - the intelligent sales workspace (acquired by Workday)
* Simppler.com - build teams collectively (acquired by Teamable)
* Zently.io - simplifying rental living (acquired by Uber)
* Weave.in - a personalized professional introduction every week
* Bonafide.co - unlock your team's entire network

Advisor & Consultant

LinkedIn

Incubated and launched the all-new LinkedIn Sales Navigator, a premium solution for turbo-charging social selling in B2B sales organizations by helping sales professionals gain insights into their prospects, expand their network within their company, and reduce their number of cold calls.

During my tenure, grew the Sales Solutions business to north of $200 million annual run-rate and established Sales Solutions as the third pillar in LinkedIn's Hire, Market, and Sell monetization strategy.

Head of Product, Sales Solutions

Led the team behind LinkedIn Contacts, a smarter way to stay in touch with your most important relationships, based on the acquisition of my startup Connected by LinkedIn.

Also led the integration of LinkedIn into OS X Mavericks, enabling members to connect, share, and be notified of their LinkedIn activity throughout the desktop OS and core applications.

Managed the Relationships team, comprised of 3 of LinkedIn's acquisitions, including Connected, Rapportive, and CardMunch.

Head of Product, Relationships

Connected

Connected enables contact management without the work. It pulls in data from your email, calendar, and social networks to bring all your contacts and conversations together in one place.

Connected raised seed funding from Trinity Ventures, 500 Startups, and Ignition Partners in June 2011.

Connected was acquired by LinkedIn in October 2011 and relaunched as the new LinkedIn Contacts in April 2013.

Feedera

Feedera is a personalized Twitter digest delivered to your inbox every morning. Experience the best of Twitter without the noise.

Content is ranked by the FeedScore algorithm, which finds the best content for you based both on friend relevance as well as popularity metrics from across the web.

Feedera was acquired by LinkedIn in October 2011.

Trinity Ventures

Explored what would eventually become my next big venture: Connected.

Entrepreneur in Residence

imeem

Led emerging monetization efforts, including international monetization, online audio advertising, and imeem VIP, a premium subscription service.

Drove the product development of the imeem Media Platform, allowing third party developers to build compelling media centric applications leveraging imeem's music streaming, playlisting, and recommendations infrastructure. Led platform design, product management, developer relations, business development, and platform evangelism, resulting in the platform reaching over 250 million daily API requests.

Senior Product Manager

Anywhere.FM is a web music player that allows you to experience music where you want it.

Championed the voice of the customer through customer feedback, led user acquisition, drove the investigation of the business model and associated financial projections, as well as analyzed business development opportunities.

Anywhere.FM reached over 15 million user uploaded tracks and over 100,000 registered users.

Anywhere.FM raised seed funding from Y Combinator, Paul Graham, Paul Buchheit, and Mixin Capital.

Anywhere.FM was acquired by imeem in December 2007 and relaunched as imeem VIP in 2008.

Founder, Anywhere.FM

Helping product managers master their craft through essays, videos, and courses.

✍️: SachinRekhi.com
📺: youtube.com/@TheSachinRekhi
🎓: Reforge.com

I also recently remastered my original essay on the 4 types of product managers that have emerged in the product space, including adding this new visualization of the 4 roles.

Check out the updated essay: https://lnkd.in/gPnHHJKG

Sachin Rekhi

Wow, 50,000 followers! 🔥

Thank you to all my new followers as well as those that have been on this journey with me for years now 🙏

I've never been more fired up to create more essays, more videos, and more courses to help product managers master their craft.

Here's to the next 50K! 🥂

The most successful career professionals don't "network" by going to conferences and events. They instead cultivate powerful networks of work colleagues. Just think of the famous tech mafias coming out of PayPal, Google, Uber, and more.

I use a technique I call Draft Pick for networking like these pros. Here's my step-by-step guide for doing so:

1️⃣ As you work in your role, you'll inevitably come across a select set of colleagues that far exceed your expectations, have the ability to move mountains, and inspire us to do our best work. This could be someone in your exact role, it could be someone in cross-functional roles you work with, or it could be inspiring executives within the broader organization. Whenever I come across these people, I immediately add them to a note I call Draft Pick.

2️⃣ While I'm in my role at that company, I try to find opportunities to interact with members of my Draft Pick. It might be as light-weight as trying to grab lunch with them or ultimately trying to work on a project with them or even trying to move orgs to work under them.

3️⃣ When I ultimately leave a company, I try to find ways to stay in touch with my Draft Pick on a regular basis. It could be reaching out to them with relevant industry news, inviting them and other colleagues to lunches, or interacting with them regularly across social media.

4️⃣ And ultimately I try to find ways to leverage my Draft Pick: maybe reaching out to get their perspective on a work issue, maybe trying to hire them to join my team, or maybe trying to join them in their next play.

I find the Draft Pick approach to be a far better use of my time than traditional networking approaches for building a powerful network of professional colleagues.

As product managers, we spend a lot of time trying to understand user friction and solve for it in the products we build.

But we often only perceive and solve for the most obvious form of friction when we in fact should be spending more of our time addressing the higher level forms of friction that our users regular experience.

Let's break down the three types of friction users experience in our products:

💻 Interaction Friction - Friction a user experiences when interacting with our product's interface. It covers all aspects of the UI that may be hindering our users from accomplish their goal. Most of the popular best practices revolve around solving this type of friction, including things like A/B testing, usability testing, consistent interfaces, etc.

🧠 Cognitive Friction - Cognitive load refers to the total amount of mental effort being used in working memory. Cognitive friction is anything that increases cognitive load for the user. This is a far broader though often overlooked form of friction.

Uber is a great example of an app that significantly reduced the cognitive friction compared to calling a taxi. Before you had to find the phone number for a local taxi company, call to schedule a ride, call back multiple times since no one picked up, get an untrustable estimate on when they will arrive, etc. Uber was able to remove nearly all of this cognitive friction from the ride hailing experience.

😩 Emotional Friction - Emotions a user feels that prevent them from accomplishing their goal. This is often the very hardest to perceive but by far the most impactful if you can resolve.

Tinder offers the perfect example of emotional friction. The previous generation of dating experiences were incredibly intimidating since they required you to put in a ton of effort creating a profile, searching for potential matches, reaching out to people of interest, and ultimately experiencing a ton of rejection. Tinder's swipe right innovation quickly helped you determine mutual interest between both parties, removing much of the emotional friction of the previous generation of online dating experiences, resulting in online dating ultimately becoming mainstream.

👇 Read today's essay to learn more about each of these types of user friction and best practices for solving for them in your own product experience.

https://lnkd.in/gHWW_WJ

One of the most pernicious yet rampant issues I've come across in Silicon Valley is lack of self-confidence and imposter syndrome. This effects so many of us, including folks who are regularly perceived as successful.

It's a complex set of issues with no silver bullet solution because so many of these inner beliefs stem from pivotal experiences folks have had that have been memorialized into their self-image, whether they realize it or not.

I wanted to share a couple of techniques that I have used for years now as  ways that I try to control my own inner monologue instead of allowing it to control me.

The first technique I use is to judiciously capture every piece of praise anyone has ever bestowed upon me into a praise note. By forcing myself to capture it, it forces me to take a moment to really memorialize the praise and appreciate myself for whatever I'm being given praise on. When I'm struggling with confidence, when I'm feeling down, or whenever I'm having doubts, scrolling through my praise note serves as a strong reminder to myself of what I am capable of and just how much others value me.

Now the next technique I use is actually the polar opposite of the first. I also judiciously capture every rejection I've ever had in a rejections note. People are often surprised by this one as it's easy to see this as a potential downer. But I don't use it that way. The reason this is so important is because it helps you realize that being rejected is not the end of the world. That life goes on. And frankly in many cases, you go on to thrive in so many unexpected ways. The fear of rejection holds so many of us back. And the best thing you can do for yourself is remove that fear's power of you. So what that you are rejected! It's not the end of the world.

I share more about these practices for building self-confidence, including specific examples of praise & rejection from my own life, in today's essay

sachinrekhi.com

How to Build Your Self-Confidence by Memorializing Praise and Rejection

One lesson product builders often learn the hard way is that even if they build a product that is better than the established players in the space, it doesn’t always result in them winning the market.

Here are 3 common reasons why this happens:

1️⃣ Cost of Switching - It’s costly for users to switch from their existing solution to a new player’s product and I don’t mean just in terms of dollars spent. The cost also comes in learning how to use the new product, moving their data over to it, etc. Users often have little incentive nor desire to try the latest solution given all of these costs.

2️⃣ Distribution - Even if your product achieves a 10x improvement over the existing solutions, you still have the daunting task of ensuring existing users in the market find your product. Lack of a scaleable distribution strategy has resulted in many superior products never gaining meaningful market share.

3️⃣ Network Effects - Many social products are obviously better because their friends are there. And incumbents benefit the most from these product network efforts, thus making it difficult for competitor products to penetrate the market.

Remember that simply building a better product doesn’t always mean you’ll win the market. Therefore it's important to craft a comprehensive product strategy for how you'll actually win.

Learn potential solutions to each of these challenges in today's essay:

3 Reasons Better Products Don't Always Win

It's amazing that James Clear's Atomic Habits has now sold over 15 million copies!

I found the book to actually provide a compelling playbook for product managers looking to develop a whole host of skills, including honing your analytical rigor, to building your product intuition, or 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. 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

In this essay, I detail how you can leverage the Atomic Habit playbook to develop the skills you really need to be successful as a product manager.

Atomic Habits for Product Managers

Love this characterization of a new business archetype, the Silicon Valley Small Business, which combines the ethos of a traditional small business with that of a traditional startup.

I agree with Anu that this model is becoming far more attractive today.

workingtheorys.com

Rise of the Silicon Valley Small Business

I absolutely love the concept of shaping work from Basecamp:

Before considering a project for inclusion in an upcoming roadmap, a small group of senior members take each abstract project idea and make it more concrete by defining key elements of the solution.

They aren't putting together full product specs, but instead shape at a higher level of abstraction: concrete enough that the teams know what to do, yet abstract enough that they have room to work out the interesting details themselves. For example, you might put together a fat marker sketch of the ultimate solution, which keeps it at a fairly low-fidelity sketch. This then becomes a pitch that is considered for inclusion in the upcoming roadmap.

The benefit of this approach is that you remove significant uncertainties typically associated with approving high-level roadmap items like "redesign the homepage" or "add a calendar view". Since you have a good idea of what the solution will actually look like, you can make a far more informed decision on whether to include in the roadmap.

Interested in trying out this approach? I share more about Basecamp's shaping technique in this essay

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