Sachin Rekhi

Video: The Hunt for Product/Market Fit
Slides: The Hunt for Product/Market Fit

Last month I was asked to come by Pivotal Labs to share my learnings on finding product/market fit. The team recorded the video and I wanted to share that here for those interested.

The hunt for finding product/market fit in an early-stage startup is an elusive one, often fraught with chaos, and certainly never easy. However learning to leverage a cycle of defining, validating, and iterating on each of your most critical product/market fit hypotheses is a sure-fire way to bring some predictability to the process and provide guidance on whether your team is getting closer or farther from the ultimate goal.

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

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. Look out for links in the footer of slides for further reading from my blog on each topic that wouldn't conveniently fit in the slides. I hope this helps fellow product managers accelerate their own learning on mastering this craft.

One of the challenges we've long acknowledged in the tech industry is how difficult the transition can be from a software engineer to an engineering manager due to the vast distinction in the skill set to be great at the new role. Equally challenging but less talked about is how much this same challenge exists when transitioning from a product manager to a manager of product managers, ie. a product leader.

I wanted to share some of the best practices I learned along the way making my own transition from a product manager to a product leader.

I've found across the many products I've managed that I ultimately end up developing at least three key dashboards that I review in detail every week. They help me have a constant pulse on how well the product is performing against our objectives and reviewing them on an ongoing basis helps to build my own intuition for what's ultimately going to move the needle in the right direction.

Those three dashboards are acquisition, engagement, and monetization.

One aspect of startups that the ecosystem is getting better at is designing our startups for learning from our customers to find product/market fit. Steve Blank and Eric Ries helped popularize these notions and the ecosystem has embraced them.

But what I've found surprising is that these learnings haven't been readily applied to the development process and they definitely should be. From the earliest stages of a startup, the R&D team should be designed in such a way to maximize learning for improving the R&D process itself.