Sachin Rekhi

As it’s been over a year since the acquisition of Connected by LinkedIn, I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on the most important lessons I learned as a founder of Connected.

Connected has been by far the most rewarding, successful, and fun startup adventure I’ve had to date, full of experiences I hope to repeat as well as mistakes that I hope to avoid in the future.

I usually summarize the role of the product manager as the CEO of their product. But I had a great conversation with a fellow product manager a couple of weeks ago who was telling me what he loved most about being a product manager was being the quarterback of the team. That stuck with me and the more I thought about it I realized it was another great way to describe the role and the key attributes needed to be successful in it.

Product managers spend much of their time communicating ideas, plans, designs, and tasks to their teams. This includes everything from emails communicating decisions, to presentations communicating product roadmaps, to specs communicating product designs, to bug tickets communicating errors in the product.

Mastering effective communication is known to be an accelerant to the dissemination of ideas, to team cohesion, and to even the motivation and inspiration of team members. Given this, it’s worth spending time as a product manager thinking about how you can improve the various communications you have with your team.

I wanted to share some of the best practices I’ve observed on effective communication around the three high level responsibilities of product managers: vision, design, and execution.

Product managers have to make many decisions every day, including product prioritization decisions, product design decisions, bug triage decisions, and many more. And the process by which a product manager makes such decisions can result either in an extremely well functioning team dynamic or... quite the opposite.

The role of a product manager is a broad one and there are variety of tasks you could be involved with each day. You could be performing core product responsibilities including conducting a customer interview, triaging incoming bugs, reviewing a new design, authoring a feature spec, brainstorming improvements for your next release, testing the latest release, and more. Or you could be performing team activities including preparing a presentation on the updated roadmap or on-boarding new team members. Add to that the constant meetings and emails you have to attend and respond to each day. This doesn’t even include the many non-role related activities that end of filling your day.