Sachin Rekhi

Strategy is an integrated set of choices that uniquely positions the firm in its industry so as to create sustainable advantage and superior value relative to the competition.

Roger Martin knows strategy. Both from his experience as a strategic advisor at the Monitor Company to clients like Procter & Gamble, Lego, and Verizon as well as former business professor at the Rotman School of Management at University of Toronto. He ultimately captured his decades of lessons learned on strategy in his popular book, Playing to Win.

Martin's core thesis is that an effective strategy requires a coordinated and integrated set of five choices: a winning aspiration, where to play, how to win, core capabilities, and management systems.

Renowned UCLA strategy professor Richard Rumelt argues that many business leaders have a misguided understanding of what truly constitutes great strategy. In his widely acclaimed book Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, Rumelt explores the reasons behind the prevalence of poor strategies in the business world and provides a clear framework for developing effective ones.

Why there is so much bad strategy
In Rumelt's view, leaders have been led astray by the rising popularity of the transformational leadership movement. The movement suggests that leaders can simply focus on developing a vision, inspiring the team, setting high level goals, and empowering the team to accomplish them. However, Rumelt believes that this model of leadership is missing one of the most critical responsibilities of the role: developing an effective strategy.

When I mention Porter's Five Forces Analysis, which is one of Michael Porter's most famous strategy frameworks, some product managers remember learning about it during business school, but most haven't used it since. Given this, I wanted to provide a refresher on the framework and when its most useful, as I do think it continues to have application to today's product managers.

Porter's core thesis behind his Five Forces Analysis is that an industry's structure will determine how the economic value created by an industry is divided amongst the companies in the industry versus it's customers, suppliers, substitutes, and potential new entrants. Understanding an industry's structure will help you understand the average profitability of firm's in the industry and therefore its attractiveness.

Michael Porter, long-time professor at the Harvard Business School, is often considered the father of the modern strategy field. He published his groundbreaking classics, Competitive Strategy and Competitive Advantage, in 1980 and 1985, went on to publish 20 more books, and ultimately became the most cited author in business and economics. While product managers may have heard of Porter's popular frameworks like Porter's five forces, most don't know how to leverage his ideas in their day-to-day role. This essay on understanding Michael Porter will help product managers translate Porter's teachings into actionable insights for developing their own product strategies.

A strategy explains how an organization, faced with competition, will achieve sustainable superior performance

Product managers often end up calling their product roadmap, vision, or objectives a strategy, but to Porter, a strategy is something far more specific. Porter says a strategy explains how an organization, faced with competition, will achieve sustainable superior performance. The need for a strategy arises from the fact that every organization faces competition, either from direct competitors in your industry or from substitutes the customer can use in place of your product. This reality requires you to come up with a plan to outperform your rivals or end up outperformed by them. To Porter, superior performance doesn't refer to market share but instead to profits. Superior profits result from either being able to command a premium price point for your products & services, establishing a lower cost structure than your rivals, or some combination of the two. The final critical keyword in the definition of a strategy is that it is sustainable. A strategy is not sustainable if your rival can simply copy it and thus deteriorate your advantage. And so barriers need to exist in order to ensure you can maintain your superior performance in the face of competitive rivalry.

The reality is that simply having a strategy that meets Porter's definition doesn't necessarily make it an effective one. To help guide practitioners, Porter ultimately came up with 5 tests that he believes any strategy must pass in order to be compelling. These include a distinctive value proposition, a tailored value chain, trade-offs different from rivals, fit across value chain, and continuity over time. Understanding each of these is critical to developing your own compelling product strategy.

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.

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.

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

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:

• Why building your product intuition is so important for your success as a product leader
  
• Why traditional methods of customer research fail to help us build our product intuition quickly
  
• How you can leverage Feedback Rivers to create a daily habit for building your product intuition
  
• How to go about building your first Feedback River in less than an hour and how to continue to improve it from there

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.

Video: Annual Planning and the Art of Roadmapping with Sachin Rekhi

It's that time of year that product managers find themselves engrossed in annual planning. But the traditional frameworks PMs have come to rely on for roadmapping, like RICE, often are ill-suited for putting together a highly strategic product roadmap for the upcoming year.

I joined Reforge recently to give a talk about a new process I developed, called 4D Roadmaps, that leverages 4 distinct lenses to develop your roadmap, including a strategy lens, vision lens, customers lens, and business lens. In the talk, I share this actionable process for putting together a more strategic, aspirational, and well articulated roadmap for your product.