Sachin Rekhi

So many of my colleagues have recently been introduced to working from home for the first time and will likely have to for the foreseeable future. But many are finding their home environment to be far less productive than their traditional office. I, on the other hand, have now been working from home for over four years. Each year I've found a variety of ways to optimize my home office setup to maximize productivity. And I can now safely say that I'm far more productive in my home office than I've ever been in a traditional office setting. So I thought I'd share all the gear that has contributed to my productivity.

Given all the recent interest in remote work, I spent the weekend reading Remote: Office Not Required by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. As the founders of Basecamp, they have been practicing remote work for over a decade now, well before the present-day excitement around it. In the book, they cover everything they have learned from their experience, including why remote work is good for a company, how to hire for remote work, collaborating effectively, managing remote workers, and more. However, what I found most interesting were the tips for how individuals could cope and ultimately thrive in a remote work setting. I wanted to share five such tips I took away from the book.

When I started writing 11 years ago, I did so the same way most people do: by opening a blank document and typing my thoughts on the page. But each year since then I've subtly refined and evolved my process in an attempt to improve the quality of my writing and its impact. Now with 150+ essays published with over 1.5 million views, I wanted to share every detail of my writing process for fellow or aspiring writers who might benefit from it.

This weekend I had the opportunity to read Ashlee Vance's Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. I've been a huge fan of Elon Musk since the early days of SpaceX and knew I wanted to dive deeper into the story of both SpaceX and Tesla. The book did not disappoint: it was a fascinating history starting from his childhood, to his early startup adventures with Zip2 and PayPal, to a deep dive into how he willed SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity into existence and ultimately to success despite the odds being continually stacked against him.

We often paint the picture of Elon Musk as a superhuman who has a boundless work ethic, willingness to take massive personal risk, and an incredible mind to make it all happen. All of this is certainly true and contributed meaningfully to his success. But as I read his story I came across so many examples of skills that Elon had mastered that any of us could also master to enable us to achieve our goals. I wanted to highlight five of those skills that are particularly relevant for product managers that can help them reach new heights in their own craft.

Mastering the craft of product management is no easy task. Much of the literature that defines the role as the intersection of business, technology, and user experience isn't particularly helpful for practitioners who are left wondering what skills they need to learn versus the fine people they work closely with in actual business, technology, and user experience roles.

I instead define the role of a product manager as driving the vision, strategy, design, and execution of their product. Each of these four dimensions has specific responsibilities as well as skills needed to be great at it.

It's equally important for product managers to think about each of these four dimensions as having a concrete set of deliverables. Too often product managers perform the activities associated with each of these deliverables, but may not do so as rigorously as they could to maximize value. When you instead think of them as concrete deliverables you then can look for exemplars of greatness for each as well as hone your craft around each of them.

I wanted to share what I believe are the most important deliverables for product managers across each of the four dimensions of product management. In doing so I hope to help demystify what you actually do in the role, provide a framework for assessing what dimensions of the role you are already good at delivering against, and opportunities for improvement on each. While I could easily write an entire essay for each deliverable, I'll instead focus on introducing each of them and providing a perspective on why they are critical for PMs.