Sachin Rekhi

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 4-part series 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.