Sachin Rekhi

When LinkedIn acquired my startup Connected in 2011, Elliot Shmukler was the sponsor for the acquisition and I ended up reporting directly to him. At the time his team was not only responsible for the core experience at LinkedIn (profile, connections, pymk, search, and more), but he also led the LinkedIn growth team. It ended up being an incredibly fortuitous place for us to land in the organization, as both Ada Chen Rekhi and I learned an incredible amount on growth through working directly with Elliot. These invaluable lessons from such a growth expert who helped scale LinkedIn from 20M to over 200M+ members certainly shape how Ada and I think about driving growth in every future endeavor.

Over the past year at LinkedIn I developed a strong appreciation for using Net Promoter Score (NPS) as a key performance indicator (KPI) to understand customer loyalty. In addition to the standard repertoire of acquisition, engagement, and monetization KPIs, NPS has become a great additional measure for understanding customer loyalty and ultimately an actionable metric for enhancing your product experience to deliver delight.

One of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had at LinkedIn is the opportunity to see Jeff Weiner’s leadership in action. His disciplined approach to leadership has transformed the concept in my mind from an amorphous set of soft skills to a key competitive differentiator in scaling organizations.

Sample personas from MailChimp
Personas are an important design tool that should be in the toolset of any product manager or designer. Personas are fictional characters developed to represent the different archetypes of users of your product. A persona typically describes the goals, pain points, behaviors, and psychology associated with members of a particular segment. To bring them to life a name, a profile image, and sometimes even a background history are associated with them. A team usually develops one or more personas to represent the core audience of users they are optimizing their product for.

Throughout my career, I’ve had the opportunity to launch innovative new products not only as an entrepreneur at my own startups like Anywhere.FM and Connected, but also as an intrapreneur at Microsoft and LinkedIn, bringing brand new products to market at these established tech firms.

Every established tech firm aspires to bring the innovation culture that’s so native to startups to their own organization, but often struggles to do so. I wanted to share my perspective on what causes this inertia to innovation at scale and how to overcome it.