A Look Back at a Decade of SachinRekhi.com


I always cherish the holidays because it gives me the perfect opportunity to reflect on the past year from both a personal and professional perspective. This year, as we roll past the end of the decade, I've found myself taking it in as a whole. What I came to realize is that this blog had it's humble beginning in 2009, meaning I've now been writing for over a decade! In that past decade, I've authored 150 essays, mostly sharing everything I've learned about product management and entrepreneurship throughout my career in Silicon Valley. But I occasionally dabbled in other passion areas of mine, including career optimization, life hacks, and software engineering. Over the years, readers have pushed me to expand beyond just the written word to a variety of other preferred mediums. Not to disappoint, I ultimately published 12 talks, 10 podcasts, and 13 SlideShare decks as well. What has absolutely blown me away is that all of my content has now been viewed over 1.5 million times! I never set out to build this blog with a certain reach in mind, but even if I had, I certainly couldn't have imagined how many people would find their way to my little corner of the Internet.

I want to thank each and every one of you as you are my continued motivation to share everything I learn. I have saved every note you've sent me over the years as a rallying cry to keep on penning my thoughts. I always thought that if my career in technology didn't work out, I would have been a teacher. So I feel blessed that I've found a way to still do exactly that through my writing. 🙏

Today I thought it'd be fun to take a trip down memory lane and recap my 15 most viewed posts over the past decade.

Video: The Art of Product Management
In 2016, my alma mater, Wharton, asked me to come back and give a talk on product management as the role had ballooned in interest amongst the MBA class. I ended up putting together a deck with over 70 slides providing a comprehensive overview of each of the core dimensions of product management: vision, strategy, design, and execution. What I didn't expect was that this talk would go on to become the #1 hit for product management on YouTube for several years.

Product Management Career Ladders at 8 Top Technology Firms
Product management is still not nearly as mature of a role as other technology roles like software engineering. So many people are often bewildered by what career progression in the role actually looks like. To demystify this, I reached out to contacts at a variety of tech firms to put together a detailed look at specific career ladders at 8 top technology firms, including Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more, as well as synthesize the most common dimensions of advancement across them.

3 Types of Product Managers: Builders, Tuners, Innovators
Over time we've started to see specialization emerge in the product management role here in Silicon Valley. I detail the differences between the 3 high-level product management roles that now exist, which I affectionately call builders, tuners, and innovators.

The Art of Decision Making as a Product Manager
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. I share specific strategies to cultivate the former and avoid the latter.

The Most Underrated Product Management Skill: Influence Without Authority
Product managers have a unique challenge in that they own the product, yet do not manage any of the people who are directly responsible for executing on the product. While I agree with this organizational design, it leads to product managers needing the ability to influence others to help them achieve their objectives without the direct authority to do so. I share specific tactics to excel at influencing without authority.

How to Prioritize a Product Roadmap
Prioritizing a product roadmap is more art than science. But there is still a process you can follow to do it well. In this post, I share the three lenses from which you show develop your product roadmap, including customer obsession, business obsession, and vision obsession.

3 Essential Dashboards for Every Product
I've ultimately come to realize that every product requires at least these three dashboards to be managed well: acquisition, engagement, and monetization dashboards.

A Practitioner's Guide to Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Net promoter score has become a metric that people either love or love to hate. My perspective is that when it's executed well, NPS provides incredible insights that are hard to get any other way. I encourage every product team to leverage this technique and I share all my specific tactics for implementing a successful NPS program.

How to be a Great Product Leader
I still vividly remember the rather painful transition I went through from an individual contributor to becoming a manager of other product managers. I share everything I learned in the process so you can learn from the mistakes I made and what I ultimately learned were the keys to success.

How to Ace Your Product Management Interview
After interviewing hundreds of product management candidates, I share the philosophy I developed on interviewing product managers to help you ace your next product management interview.

A Lean Alternative to a Business Plan: Documenting Your Product/Market Fit Hypotheses
In 2015, I saw a disturbing trend where startups were shunning business plans and launching MVPs instead. While there is nothing wrong with that, so many of them launched their MVPs without any thought to the strategic direction of the business. I ultimately realized that there was a far more effective compromise: documenting your product/market fit hypothesis in a quick 2-page document that helped guide your MVP without the burden of a traditional business plan. I now encourage all product teams to use the same format when launching a new product.

How to Design Your Customer Validation to Maximize Product/Market Fit
Conducting customer validation takes far more rigor than most product teams give it. So I decided to share a detailed approach to how I have designed customer validation studies over the years to maximize your chance of finding product-market fit.

Top 75+ Resources for Product Managers
While I'm an avid writer on product management, I'm also an avid reader on product management. Given that, I've collected the very best content on product management I've discovered over the past decade into a single resource. I encourage every aspiring product manager as well as product managers seeking to up-level their skills to take the time to read through and reflect on each and every resource mentioned in the post. It's still far more effective than any formal education you can get today.

Don Norman's Principles of Interaction Design
Design is such an important aspect of any product that product managers need to deeply understand. And Don Norman is the quintessential resource on interaction design. I summarize his most famous work, The Design of Every Day Things, and provide modern-day examples to illustrate each of his core principles.

What Silicon Valley Can Learn from Bill Walsh's The Score Takes Care of Itself
This was the most impactful books I read this year because it opened my eyes to the importance of measuring inputs vs outputs. For anyone who has been trained in the now popular Objectives and Key Result (OKR) methodology, this is a strong read on some of the challenges of relying solely on OKRs as your management philosophy.

As you know, I've occasionally dabbled in topics beyond product management and entrepreneurship. I wanted to share the top three posts outside of these topics that resonated most with all of you.

My Daily Learning Ritual
I'm committed to being an infinite learner and have developed a specific process by which I spend an hour every morning learning. I share every detail of what that hour looks like and how I've optimized my process over time.

My Financial Stack as a Millennial
I love that innovative technology solutions now exist to help me manage my money. I've tried each and every one of the new apps and services that have come out to make money management easier. This post details the financial stack I ultimately landed on for creating my frictionless self-managing financial process.

How I Leveraged an Explore & Exploit Algorithm to Find My Dream Job
I'm a firm believer that one will ultimately find career fulfillment when they optimize for passion/skill/opportunity fit. While many understand this concept theoretically, they struggle with how to make it actionable as they consider specific career pivots. In a detailed post outlining each and every one of my career pivots, I provide a lens of how I've made this framework actionable for me.

A new writing project
I also wanted to let you know about a new writing project I've embarked on. Some of you may know that my wife and I are expecting baby Zoe, our first child, in January. I couldn't be more excited about this new chapter in my life and I'm equally excited to share everything I've learned about living a happy and meaningful life with Zoe. In that vein, I've started a new blog, Letters to Zoe, to share in writing all of these life lessons. And I hope many of those same lessons might be interesting to you as well. My first post, entitled Embrace your new reality, shares a powerful lesson I've learned in the past year as I've struggled to cope with a rare medical condition that I was recently diagnosed with that has completely changed the way I have to live my life. I share that journey and how I ultimately became a better person from it, in my inaugural post. I'd encourage you to check it out and subscribe if interested.
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