Video: Product Strategy, Getting Buy-In, and Startup Ideas | Sachin Rekhi

Video: Product Strategy, Systems, and Frameworks with Sachin Rekhi
Slides: LinkedIn Learning: Product Strategy, Systems, and Frameworks

I was recently invited to speak as part of the Product Management Learning Series hosted by LinkedIn Learning. We covered a variety of my favorite product frameworks.

We started our discussion with some of the most effective ways to make a career transition into product management. The first approach is leveraging an adjacent role, like business operations, marketing, design, and engineering, to work with and impress your product partner and parlaying that experience into a product role. We also talked about how domain experts are often recruited to become product managers even without functional product experience. For example, I've had a friend with a masters degree in education become a product manager at an edtech startup, a sales operations professional become a PM at a sales tech startup, and an MD become a PM at a health care startup.

We then moved the discussion on to how to come up with a compelling product strategy. We covered the 6 dimensions that every product strategy needs to address, including the problem you're solving, target audience, value proposition, competitive advantage, growth strategy, and business model. And we discussed how you need to have strong interplay or coherence amongst the dimensions for your strategy to be compelling.

A product manager inevitably spends significant time needing to convince various executive stakeholders and leaders of their ideas in order to greenlight projects, get resources, and more. While most product managers spend significant time thinking about the substance of their argument, they rarely spend time thinking about the style, or how they are going to convey that argument to be the most convincing to their target audience. So we went on to discuss my framework for thinking about the 6 elements of style that you can leverage to make a compelling argument.

We ended our discussion with covering where great startup ideas come from. I shared the story of my product Notejoy and how I came up with the idea. But more importantly, I shared how the best product ideas start with an earned secret, which is an insight that you gained from your own lived experiences that is non-obvious to others.

If any of these topics interest you, I'd encourage you to check out the video.

Jul 16, 2022