Sachin Rekhi

Listen: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Breaker

I had a really fun chat with Gaurav Khanna last week, who was interested in learning more about the rather unique approach we have taken to building Notejoy, our collaborative notes app. We thought it would be fun to record that conversation and share it broadly as a podcast.

We hit on quite a range of topics, including:

• bootstrapping vs raising VC funding
  
• emerging alternative funding models
  
• the echo chamber in Silicon Valley
  
• the design tools war
  
• the problem we are solving with Notejoy
  
• where we are headed next with Notejoy
  

Listen: Lean B2B Blog | YouTube | iTunes | Google Play | Stitcher | Transcript

I joined Etienne Garbugli on his Lean B2B Podcast a few weeks back to share my best practices on getting actionable user feedback for your product.

We covered a wide-range of customer feedback topics, including: developing and validating your product's initial product/market fit hypotheses, assessing whether you are building a vitamin or a painkiller, the benefits of conducting waves of customer discovery interviews, the 3 top dashboards you need for understanding how you are doing post-launch, and developing a continuous feedback loop for your product, complete with a feedback river and feedback system of record.

Positioning, while classically considered part of the marketing world, is absolutely essential for every product manager to understand. Positioning refers to the place that a brand occupies in the minds of customers and its perceived differentiation from its competitors. Positioning ultimately dictates the frame of reference that your customers leverage when evaluating your product. Positioning is in reality a business strategy exercise and thus product managers need to be deeply involved as effective positioning ultimately defines critical elements of your entire product strategy.

The most classic literature on positioning comes from Jack Trout's book, Differentiate or Die. Jack Trout clearly conveys why positioning is so important in a world continuously filed with more and more product options in every category and less and less attention available from customers to spend time deeply understanding your individual product offering. As a way to cope with this reality, customers quickly develop a position for your product and make their product decisions based on it. Given this, it is incredibly important for brands to strive for their desired position to be created in the minds of their customers. While back in the day you could get away with simply using brand advertising as the primary way you conveyed your product positioning, today every touch point your customer has with your brand has become a critical element of conveying your positioning, including your marketing website, customer service experience, and what your existing customers are saying about you across the web.

I was first introduced to Annie Duke's concepts in a recent podcast with Stewart Butterfield interviewing Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen on the 10th anniversary of A16Z. In the interview Stewart asks Marc about any mistakes he believed he had made building A16Z. Marc starts off by referring to Annie Duke's work and the concept of resulting, which is the tendency to equate the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome, which is a risky and incorrect thing to do with any decision that has a probabilistic outcome. And he shares how A16Z has significantly improved the quality of their decision making over the years by focusing on the very process by which they make their investment decisions in the first place.

As someone who deeply values being an infinite learner, I saw an opportunity to improve the quality of my learning cycles from decision making so decided to take Marc's recommendation and read Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke. Annie brings such a fascinating perspective to decision making based on her 20 years as a professional poker player. As someone who has had to make thousands of split-second decisions whose quality determined whether she immediately won or lost tens of thousands of dollars at a time, she's had the opportunity to refine her decision-making approach. And ultimately to apply it to the world of business in her more recent consulting work.

Listen: ProductCraft | SoundCloud | iTunes

I recently had the opportunity to join the Product Love podcast to talk about all things product management with Eric Boduch. I spent a fair amount of time detailing my framework for the 3 types of product management roles that exist in the industry, which I affectionately call builders, tuners, and innovators. The builder is probably the most classic product manager. They’re focused on driving the roadmap and building features to serve user needs. They understand how to prioritize feedback, solve real user problems, and deliver delight. On the other hand, tuners try to optimize existing experiences such as monetization or growth flows. Tuners can be likened to growth hackers who focus on metrics and want to move the needle. And finally, when you are bringing a brand new product to market, regardless of whether you are at a startup or at an established tech company, the task requires a unique set of skills as an innovator to discover and reach product/market fit.