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Interview: Sachin Rekhi
Sachin is the CEO and co-founder of Notejoy, a collaborative notes platform for teams. Previously, he was a product lead at LinkedIn. In this interview, Sachin describes his journey to PM, his product planning process, and his advice for influencing people without authority.
Journey to Product Management
What made you want to be a product manager?
Early in my career, I worked at a telecom company called Paetec Communications as a software engineer. My job was to create an online billing tool that made it easy for the company’s employees to process bills using PDFs.
I remember talking to an employee who used to have to print out bills manually to process them. With my tool, she could do all her work on the computer. She told me she almost cried when she found out that my software had saved her 18 hours of manual work each week.
This was my first experience delivering delight through software. I realized then that what I enjoyed was less about building the software itself but more about figuring out what to build in order to deliver delight. In other words, I realized that I wanted to be a product manager.
That’s awesome. I think another interesting moment in your career was leaving LinkedIn to start your own company. What made you decide to do that?
Good question! At LinkedIn I was on track to become a general manager. We were working on Sales Navigator, which was a product for sales professionals, one of the main customer segments that LinkedIn serves.
I left because I felt that I was making incremental improvements to the product and I missed the day-to-day activity of talking to customers and crafting products based on their needs. I really wanted to go back to finding product-market fit for something new.
Specifically, I had experienced the pain and lack of delight in using existing collaboration tools to get a team of 500 people to work together on Sales Navigator. So, I saw collaboration software as an area of opportunity.
How does someone break into product if they have no product management experience?
There isn’t really a degree you can get in product management and there isn’t a single tried-and-true path. I think there are four common paths:
  1. From college, the classic way is to get a computer science degree. That helps you better understand how technology works. Then look for an associate product manager role at a large company. These programs are great training for understanding the customer problem and working with other people to build delightful products.
  2. If you’re in a role where you work with product managers, you can try to transition to product in your current company. The key is to work closely with your PM to find time to work on more product-oriented projects. For example, as a marketer, you could try doing some inbound product research. Make it clear to your PM that you’d love to help on the product side and it’s likely that he or she will value your thinking.
  3. If you’re a domain expert, you can leverage your knowledge to transition to product manager. I had a MD friend who joined a healthcare startup as a PM and another friend who had a masters of education that she leveraged to become a PM at an EdTech company.
  4. Finally, if you’re an entrepreneur, you’re already exposed to many functions from engineering to sales to finance. Being able to wear multiple hats is a great skill set to have for a product manager.
Product Development at Notejoy
What’s your vision for Notejoy?
Notejoy today is a collaborative notes app for any team. However, my vision for Notejoy is much broader.
I want Notejoy to be a product that helps unlock human potential by activating the world’s collective wisdom. Let’s break down what that means:
  1. Unlock human potential : Notejoy is a tool that helps make humans more productive.
  2. Collective wisdom : I think all of us have experienced how hard it is to ramp after joining a new company. It takes weeks and sometimes months to find out what’s going on. Therefore, I think there’s a lot of potential in activating the collective wisdom of teams and companies. I want Notejoy to be a place where you can search for and find the collective wisdom of a company or a group of people.
Remember, in The Matrix when Neo plugged into the system and downloaded new knowledge in an instant? That’s what I want Notejoy to be.
I love that movie and that’s a big vision. What’s your strategy to make it a reality?
Thank you! Yes, well, Notejoy today plays in multiple markets:
I think our strategy is to deliver a minimum set of requirements across all three markets. We started with personal notetaking before expanding into document collaboration and we’re just starting to tackle being a one-stop shop to search for content.
How do you decide what to build?
There’s no formula to help me prioritize features, but I consider three different lenses:
The first lens is customer obsession. At Notejoy, I use a feedback tool that not only lets customers submit feedback but also lets them vote for features that they really want. This way, I’m keeping a constant pulse on what customers are asking for.
The second lens is the vision. Customers typically give tactical feedback but will not dream for you. I always keep Notejoy’s vision—unlock human potential by activating the world’s collective wisdom—in mind when I’m prioritizing features.
The final lens is business. At Notejoy, we need to continue to grow our business. This typically breaks down into acquisition, engagement, and monetization. I monitor metrics on each pillar and decide what metric we want to focus on improving next quarter.
There’s a constant tension between all three lenses. For example, if I only listened to customers, I’ll likely work on engagement features instead of monetization. And, product managers need to balance all three lenses to put together a product mix that makes sense.
What are some tools and processes that you use to help your team execute on the roadmap?
We make plans every year, every quarter, and every other week.
Every year, we do a post-mortem over what we accomplished in the previous year, whether that’s growing a metric or building something that our customers have been asking for. The goal of this post-mortem is to understand what worked or didn’t work. Using the insights from the post-mortem, I then put together a high-level annual plan for the year. At Notejoy, this annual planning process could take a few days but at a large company like LinkedIn, it could take a few weeks.
Every quarter, we produce a roadmap with OKRs (objective and key results). We usually have at least one OKR each for acquisition, engagement, and monetization that’s tied to growing a metric. For example, acquisition might be new sign-ups, engagement might be 7-day retention, and monetization might be recurring revenue. I base these OKRs on our annual plan, which I also adjust based on what I learn each quarter.
Finally, every other week we do a sprint and try to ship something. Even at a start-up like Notejoy, I think having sprints gives us the rigor and cadence that we need to ensure that we’re always shipping.
Since Notejoy is a collaboration tool, we use our own product to write our annual and quarterly plans .
Product Management Principles
How do you influence people without authority?
As a product manager, none of the people you need to build a great product report to you (e.g. executives, marketing, design), yet you’re responsible for driving product results. Here are a three best practices that I follow to convince stakeholders:
  1. Explain the vision. Always look for opportunities to share the goal that we’re trying to solve for. Once people align to the goal, it becomes a lot easier to convince them to follow the tactics. For example, when walking through a feature in the roadmap, always explain why we’re building it and how it helps our vision.
  2. Understand people’s goals and try to find a win-win. Make other people’s problems your own. If you spend the time to deeply understand their goals upfront, they’re much more likely to help you meet your goals.
  3. Invest in relationships. I didn’t appreciate this early in my career and I used to think company morale events were a waste of time. But now I realize how important it is to build genuine relationships with the people you work with. You need to understand where they’re coming from and build rapport. It’ll make resolving conflicts and driving results much easier.
How do you balance between presenting a compelling argument as a PM and being ready to admit when you're going the wrong direction with a product?
Product managers early in their career have a belief that they need to constantly defend their ideas. A better mentality is to be a truth seeker.
Truth seekers use every opportunity to find out what the truth is. They listen carefully to other people’s viewpoints instead of quickly trying to defend their own. They realize that listening to others will help them refine their ideas and get closer to the truth.
Truth seekers are a sponge for new ideas. I think new PMs are often fearful of having to manage too many ideas. But it’s best to make people feel like you have truly heard them while helping them understand why you’re not prioritizing their ideas right now. Sometimes you might be in the ninth inning of execution and you need to shut down an idea to execute and get something out there. That’s ok, but use this hammer rarely.