Sachin Rekhi

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.

Video: Sachin Rekhi on Product Management & Innovation | Behind the Roadmap

I recently joined Productboard in my home for a conversation about all things product management and innovation.

We covered so many topics in this 15 minute video, including:

• My favorite books on product management, including The Creative Act by Rick Rubin, Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda, and The Everything Store by Brad Stone
• The 3 types of product managers: builders, tuners, and innovators
• Limitations of the lean startup for bringing a new product to market
• How to pick the next company to join on your career journey
• How to take advantage of the recent technology waves of crypto and generative AI
• A tour of my home office, the places I do my most creative work, and plenty of cameos from my dog Dexter!

I've always felt that product design was a creative endeavor and the work that most moves our industry forward stems from practitioners who could easily be described as artists. Given this, I've often wondered whether one of the best ways to improve our craft as product designers would be to immerse ourselves in the best practices of artists at large. I got the chance to explore exactly that when legendary producer Rick Rubin, behind iconic artists like Adele, Linkin Park, and Red Hot Chili Peppers, published his new book. In The Creative Act, Rubin shares everything he has learned about harnessing your creativity from his decades working with some of the most successful recording artists of our time.