Sachin Rekhi

I'm a firm believer that the best product managers understand that mastering the discipline requires deeply excelling at both the art and science of product management. When you start your career in product management you tend to be largely focused on the science: how to effectively do customer research, run an A/B test, manage a sprint, write a spec, and so on. And while those are critically important to being a great product manager, they aren't sufficient. It's those that understand and appreciate the art of product management that do the best. They understand that certain aspects can't be learned by simply reading a set of best practices, taking a class, or applying a technique. They appreciate that certain innate skills and inordinate deliberate practice are necessary to truly excel. I'd put a bunch of aspects of product management into this category: prioritizing a roadmap, effective communication, formulating a vision, negotiating with stakeholders, and team leadership, to name a few. Over time I hope to dive deeper into each of these topics because I think they are so important and often not written about in-detail because the right approach is not easily picked up in a few hours, but instead requires years of focus and effort.

Today I wanted to dive into one such critical aspect of the art behind product management, which is developing user empathy. The reason this is so important is that I've seen product teams who faithfully have run a customer validation exercise and have executed incredibly well against the science of customer validation: identifying the specific target audience, recruiting a critical mass of folks to interview, developing a strong interview guide to answer their most burning questions, and synthesizing the feedback across interviews into a set of product requirements for their next iteration. And yet, the product plans that come out of this process can often be uninspired and little more than a regurgitation of the feedback customers directly gave them on what to develop and how to design their product. Worse, after developing the product directly based on the results of this customer validation process, I've seen products still struggle to find the elusive product/market fit. So what's going on here? To me this speaks to how the science of product management isn't enough to develop compelling products. Instead this is where the art is needed, and specifically in this case what's often missing is a strong dose of user empathy.

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. I like to call each of these roles: builders, tuners, innovators, and enablers.

As product managers, it's important to understand each of these roles, their core responsibilities, as well as what super powers are required to excel at the role. In doing so, PMs can discover their unique passion/skill/opportunity fit and find a role in which they can truly thrive.

We all woke up this morning to incredible news on Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn for $26.2B, or $196 per share, a 50% premium over the previous LinkedIn stock price. While many have already remarked on this bold move by Satya Nadella and what this could mean for both Microsoft and LinkedIn’s respective businesses, I wanted to share three observations on larger trends this embodies across our industry.

Slides: Product Management Career Ladders by Sachin Rekhi, Founder & CEO, Notejoy

One of the areas I often mentor product managers on are the career paths available to them within the profession. Since there isn’t a lot of discussion about this out there, I wanted to share what the career ladders look like for product managers at 8 top technology firms as well as some of the key dimensions upon which advancement in the profession occur.

Product organizations tend to be a small proportion of technology firm’s overall R&D teams, with ratios of up to 1 product manager to 10 engineers as common. Given this, companies tend not to focus on developing the same formalized career ladders compared to their engineering counterparts except at the largest tech firms who have achieved the scale of hundreds of product managers within their organization. The 8 technology firms whose career ladders I’ve showcased below have all achieved this scale and have thus invested in career ladders for their respective product organizations.

Video: The Art of Product Management
Slides: The Art of Product Management

Recently Professor Karl Ulrich asked me to give my talk on the Art of Product Management at The Wharton School. They recorded the video and I wanted to share it here as well.

Product managers drive the vision, strategy, design, and execution of their product. While one can often quickly comprehend the basic responsibilities of the role, mastering each of these dimensions is truly an art form that one is constantly honing.

In the last decade as a product manager here in Silicon Valley I've learned an incredible number of important lessons on how to be better at this role. In this presentation I share my lessons learned on the art behind each of these four dimensions of product management. I cover role models that exemplify each dimension, best practices on excelling at that dimension's discipline, and countless examples from Valley companies that exemplify these traits.