Sachin Rekhi

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.

I’ve had the chance to work with a variety of product managers across tech giants and startups alike. While there are many critical skills for being a world class product manager, I’ve noticed one pattern amongst the very best: they fall deeply in love with the problem their product is solving.

I’m often asked how I think about coming up with the product roadmap for an upcoming release. To help answer this, I thought I’d share how my team recently went about thinking through the roadmap for an upcoming product we’re working on.

One lesson entrepreneurs often learn the hard way is that even if they build a product that is better than the established players in the space, it doesn’t always result in them winning the market. I wanted to highlight the three most common reasons I see this occur and ways to mitigate these challenges.