Sachin Rekhi
Sachin Rekhi, a product manager and startup founder with over a decade of experience in Silicon Valley, offers valuable insights into the evolving landscape of product management through his website and podcast, "The Sachin Rekhi Show." He emphasizes the specialization of the product manager role, highlighting four distinct types: builders, tuners, innovators, and enablers, each with unique responsibilities and required skills. Rekhi also delves into the essential deliverables of product managers, providing a framework for career acceleration by focusing on improving these critical areas. He further explores the multifaceted role of the product manager, referencing various definitions from prominent product leaders and offering his own interpretation: driving the vision, strategy, design, and execution of the product.
Rekhi further stresses the importance of building product intuition, a crucial skill for product leaders. He introduces a unique method called "Feedback Rivers" as a daily habit for developing this intuition, contrasting it with traditional customer research methods that often fail to provide meaningful insights. Additionally, he shares key takeaways from Rob Fitzpatrick's book, "The Mom Test," emphasizing the importance of asking the right questions in customer conversations to avoid misleading responses. He suggests following Fitzpatrick's approach to ensure honest and valuable feedback from potential customers, highlighting the power of strategic questioning in product development.
Hi, I'm Sachin.
I've written 175+ essays with over 3 million views sharing lessons learned from over a decade here in Silicon Valley as a product manager and startup founder.
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Video: The 4 Types of Product Managers
YouTube: The 4 Types of Product Managers
Spotify: The 4 Types of Product Managers
Apple Podcasts: The 4 Types of Product Managers
As the product management role has matured, specialization in the role has ultimately emerged. There is no longer a single product manager with generic responsibilities, but instead 4 distinct product roles with unique responsibilities. In this video, Sachin describes each of these roles, which he calls builders, tuners, innovators, and enablers. He shares the unique responsibilities of each role, the super powers needed to excel in the role, and real-world examples of PMs in them.
Video: The Top Deliverables of Product Managers
YouTube: The Top Deliverables of Product Managers
Spotify: The Top Deliverables of Product Managers
Apple Podcasts: The Top Deliverables of Product Managers
I've long believed that focusing on improving the deliverables that product managers are responsible for is a better way to accelerate your career than simply focusing on up-skilling.
In this video, I share the 9 essential product manager deliverables and for each, describe what it is and what great looks like for that deliverable. Finally, I cover how to best make use of the list of deliverables to accelerate your own product career.
Video: The Role of the Product Manager
YouTube: The Role of the Product Manager
Spotify: The Role of the Product Manager
Apple Podcasts: The Role of the Product Manager
Despite the product management role existing now for decades, there isn't a single well accepted definition for how to define the role of the product manager.
In this video I review the most popular definitions of the role from product luminaries like Martin Eriksson, Ben Horowitz, and Marty Cagan. I also share my own definition for the role: Product managers drive the vision, strategy, design, and execution of the product. I then dive into each of those four core responsibilities, share an exemplary product leader for each, and describe what each responsibility truly entails.
Video: Building Your Product Intuition with Feedback Rivers
Video: Building Your Product Intuition with Feedback Rivers
One of the hardest skills for product managers to master is product intuition. Too often we're told it just takes time & experience to build your intuition. But I've come to believe that we can in fact accelerate the process of building our own product intuition with a tool I call Feedback Rivers.
In this video, I cover:
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Why building your product intuition is so important for your success as a product leader
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Why traditional methods of customer research fail to help us build our product intuition quickly
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How you can leverage Feedback Rivers to create a daily habit for building your product intuition
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How to go about building your first Feedback River in less than an hour and how to continue to improve it from there
A Primer on Talking to Customers From Rob Fitzpatrick's The Mom Test
Everyone knows that a critical part of developing a new product is talking to potential customers. So most product managers and founders dutifully have customer conversations as part of their product development process. But what's insidious about the way that people talk to customers is that they often fail to glean any new insights or worse, get a false positive, causing them to over invest their cash, their time, and their team in an unvalidated product idea that ultimately doesn't sell.
This happens because our potential customers are unfortunately prone to lie to us. We are partly to blame for this, since we often lead the witness to a particular conclusion when we ask a question like "do you think it's a good product idea?" Our potential customers also tend to be overly optimistic people who want to make us happy when we pose hypothetical questions to them like "would you buy a product which did X?".
Rob Fitzpatrick has written the definitive playbook on how to ask questions in customer conversations to ensure they can't like to you. He calls these techniques The Mom Test, because if you follow his approach, even your loving mom can't lie to you. I wanted to share my three most actionable takeaways from the book which you can apply to your next customer conversation.