This Will Make You Rethink Your Product and Career in 2025 | Sachin Rekhi

I had Direct p& l responsibility for this business that was now 200 million in revenue and I was doing this at a publicly traded company and so on paper I was doing really well and my boss was telling me what other products could we have you take over since you've done such a great job of this and there's a clear path to becoming a VP and what's interesting about it was while I was doing well on paper I found so much of it draining in terms of the work that I was doing and what do I mean by that look I got into product to talk to customers design world class features I didn't really talk to customers as much I had a whole team of PMS that did that the extent at which I was designing features was product reviews My PMS would present to me various Concepts and I'd provide a little bit of feedback and sure I own the highle vision and strategy but that day-to-day fun that I loved about product I actually did little of I was a p of a product managing and leading more so than I was creating and building and I realized that kind of work didn't sort of energize me and I love the way Justin Khan puts this he talks about this idea of a zone of Excellence versus a zone of Genius he says there's this zone of Excellence that some of us fall into this is work that we're really good at but is actually very draining to us and that's where I was at and what he encourages you to do is find this zone of Genius the zone of Genius is the work that energize IES you that you love and so I realized that while I was doing well if I continued on that path I was just going to move further and further away from the parts of product that I actually love and so I thought about you know is this really the path I want to keep going down but I'm not sure it would really be my zone of Genius all right welcome every one my guest today is Sachin recky Sachin was L things head of product for a sales Navigator he scaled it to $200 million in annual revenue and over 500 employees he then left it all behind to start no jooy a no taking app for teams so really excited to talk to Sachin about his approach to fighting PR Market fit the Dark Side of PR leadership roles and how to design work to suit your life not VI ver welcome s thank you Peter I'm excited to be here today all right so let's talk

about finding PR Market fit first most people start by just like building MVP and then try to get customer feedback as quickly as possible Right but I think you have some pretty hot takes about this topic totally you know my take is that MVPs are largely debt this idea of a minimum viable product where we just ship something as quickly as possible for customers and get it out there had its time in place but these days isn't very effective you have to keep in mind when we came up with this concept of MVPs and The Lean Startup back in 2008 there wasn't that much software out there and so putting something out in the market and testing whether people would use it was very effective because people were hungry for Solutions and options to go use now what's interesting is MVPs are great for New Market opportunities to see if there's any demand but for existing Market opportunities they could actually point you in the wrong direction and the reason is today people just expect so much from their software so if you launch an MVP and people don't retain on the product is it because you had a bad idea or is it just because you launched too lightweight enough of functionality that people expect a lot more and so for example let's say You're Building in an existing category your MVP might be so lightweight that people liked some of the interesting Concepts you're doing but they couldn't abandon their existing tool because you didn't solve for enough of the core functionality that they need and so you look at software like notion like air table these companies took years before they got a product to Market very much not an MVP and so I think that's why I believe that MVPs in fact are not the default way to go when you're building a startup it really depends on what Market you're attacking and how you're thinking about going after that market so how do you make sure you don't spend a year building something that nobody wants it like how do you do customer Discovery yeah customer Discovery is incredibly important right and the key is that we can let leverage customer feedback customer interviews conversations with customers to make sure we're headed in the right direction but here's the interesting thing I think a lot of people even do that wrong and I think the challenge people have with customer Discovery is this whole idea of confirmation bias right that I'm going in kind of wanting you to like my product and when I'm interviewing and asking you questions about my product I'm ask you things like do you have this problem that my product attempts to solve and the reality is most people can be like yeah sure I have the problem but what you really want to know is it an acute problem is it a top concern of them that they're willing to sort of adopt a new product for it and just asking that question isn't very useful similarly asking a question like oh if I built this would you use it people like to be nice and they're generally going to be like yeah sure I'll use it but there's no commitment there that's really going to drive D them to using it so I think we have to be smarter about how we're doing customer Discovery to really drive real insights so let me give you an example of doing it better so let's say for example I want to ask someone in a B2B setting about sort of how acute the problem is that I'm trying to solve for them what I do is I'd start by saying okay in your role whatever that role is tell me the top five problems or challenges you face on a regular basis and so they might list off the top five then I'll come in and say hey here's the problem we're thinking about solving for the customer and then I'll ask them can you rank globally the initial list of problems you gave me plus the problem I said we're solving now what's interesting is if they're like oh great two of my problems i' put higher but I put your problem third okay great you've identified a top three problem but if they keep putting the problem that you've identified on the bottom of the list let me tell you have a nice to have you have a vitamin you don't have a painkiller and so that gets them to really make tradeoffs which is how you get to True customer Insight on what in fact is actually going to move the needle on a product and service that they might actually adopt versus simply being nice and telling you yeah sure I'll use it yeah like I get so many DMS every day from Star Founders who like you know here's my product do you want to use it or not you want to give it a try and yeah I think that's like nobody has actually asked me hey what problems you struggle with during the day or try to do your job nobody has ask me that pass so it's definitely a very interesting frame rate right yeah um totally and you know we both worked at big companies so you know personally I'm like pretty allergic to writing 50-page business plans before building anything but maybe the pedum has swung too much in the MVP Direction Where do you fall on this debate you know it's one of these fascinating things when you look at the history of it Lean Startup basically convinced us writing a 50 page you know business plan and then ultimately spending a couple years building the product and then finding out whether people care after launching it was a terrible idea and it's true that is a terrible idea we that takes years before you get something in Market but I do think that the pendulum has swung way too far and today we talk about this as like execution is the only thing that matters all we need to do is execute put stuff out there and see what

sticks but I believe actually we should be more strategic about that and actually some upfront thoughtful planning is critically important and here's what we're all navigating this idea Maze of the space that we're trying to build a product in right we're trying to decide what problem in particular do we solve or trying to decide what target audience we go after and when you look at that idea maze you're like there's so many Dimensions that you can pivot on and if you're just experimenting and executing you're trying lots of things but that idea maze is huge you're never going to get a chance to test through all of it and being thoughtful about your point of entry about the target audience you're going after which problem you're solving is going to help narrow that search pit space so execution still matters but we want to be reducing the amount of experiments we have to run to actually figure out where the actual opportunity might be because we're all sort of limited on Runway and so I like to think about this is actually strategy matters a ton yes we need to execute but in fact we had to be strategic about what problems we're solving what target audience we're going after what's our unique value proposition and in doing so we reduce the amount of experiments we need to run and hopefully find Park parket fit before we run out of Runway yeah I mean it's still much cheaper to think than to actually try to ship some something especially since the quality bar for MVP has gone by a lot from consumers right that's exactly right and you have this really awesome you teach this course about pro market fit you have this deliberate PR Market fit Loop can you walk through the steps

at a high level first yeah so the idea is that I think we've learned so much since the days of the Lean Startup on how to build a product right and how to find product Market fit for a new product and so this deliberate startup methodology that I teach in my course really tries to give you that more rigorous approach a more modern approach on how we've learned to really go through this hunt for product Market fit and the idea we talk about is this there's this core Loop that you're constantly going through to find product Market fit it starts by defining a pmf narrative which is really just a fancy way of saying your initial strategy for how you're going to win in the market you're going after and taking some time to be thoughtful about that as opposed to rushing to just build the second part of the loop is actually validating your risk assumptions now this is the idea that we want to be aware of all the validation techniques we could potentially leverage and pick the one that's most appropriate for what is the riskiest Dimension third we want to constantly be measuring do we have product Market fit or not and we can do that in a very concrete way and finally we need to be thoughtful about how we're getting traction how we're growing users both manually and scalably and so those are the four steps of the loop that we're constantly going through until we find prod good fit okay so let's walk through it step by step so the initial problem Mar The Narrative right like when you use the big term like strategy people are like oh like this serious like I got to think through this 10 hours but like what are some key questions that people should answer to should write this narrative yeah I totally agree with you that often times the strategy word is this very amorphous thing but I try to make it extremely concrete that a strategy means answering six questions for the product that you're the first is what's the problem you're solving for the customer everything we build is solving some problem even entertainment products like Netflix are you know helping solving boredom so you want to identify what that problem is second who's the target audience who you building this for we could be building for lots of different audiences but we want to be thoughtful about which audience is going to resonate most with our product and service the third is the value proposition this idea of what is your solution what is your unique way of solving this problem the fourth is competitive Advantage why are people going to pick your product relative to everything else that exists in the market and I think that's an interesting one because oftentimes there might be competitors that are doing more interesting things and people adopt that solution instead of yours then we need to figure out the growth strategy which is how are we going to acquire users and finally what's our business model how are we going to actually make money from our product now the question I of get is why these six well it turns out these six are the most common reasons that startups fail when they get it wrong they either didn't identify a problem that was accute enough they didn't find a target audience that resonated with it they built a product but they couldn't grow or they couldn't make money from their product so those are all examples of failure due to not getting one of these six right so the idea is that you start with a perspective on all six and you don't need a lot of detail right you can write this up in a one pager or two-pager that's all you need initially but you're starting with a hypothesis a set of guesses for where you think the opportunity is for your product and is there a reason why the problem question comes before the who is the customer question or can be any switched yeah do you have thought that it's a great question you know I actually go back and forth on this what do you start with the target audience or the problem and the reality is I've seen different startups do different ways sometimes they start with a problem to solve But ultimately they end up pivoting to a different audience that feels the problem more acutely other times they start with a very specific audience that they're passionate about and then they figure out which problem they want to tackle and so you can go either way with these things and so I don't think there's a right answer about which one you start with got it I guess one shortcut is like you know a lot of Founders build for themselves like they are the customer so then they think about okay what are some problems that I actually pay for or like that I actually want to solve right I I'm a huge fan of that approach I done that for a lot of my own startups my current startup no choice exactly that solving my own pain I think the thing to be careful of you got to make sure you can find an audience that's large enough that resonates with that same problem that you personally have but as long as you can do that building for yourself is a great way to go okay so now let's talk about the validating the riskiest assumption step you know we talk about

how just shipping crappy MVP is maybe not the right way to valida stuff but like what are some other ways we can use to validate our risk assumptions yeah so what I talk about is there's so many ways to validate many of which are cheaper than building an nvp right so anything from customer interviews to surveys to smoke tests to pre-sales to prototypes to grows tests and product tests and so the key thing is we want to think about what are in fact our riskiest assumptions with our product strategy and so what I encourage folks to do is start with broad-based validation things like customer interviews that help you to assess across all of these six dimensions of your product strategy which ones might be the riskiest and then to start picking the right validation technique depending on what's your riskiest assumption so for example when I was building a connected a contact management tool back in the day what we realized was our riskiest assumption was willingness to pay it turns out there's plenty of people who had launched products like flao and zne that had gotten millions of users but no one was willing to pay and so because we knew that a willingness to pay was a riskiest assumption we could then decide what test to go do to so for it and so in our case for example at the time what everyone was doing was MVPs Just Launch a free version of your product and you'll worry about the business model later we took a different approach we actually launched the product with a price tag from day one and we actually made our free trial very short 14 days and that's because we wanted to figure out very quickly was there anyone willing to pay for this stuff now I'm so glad we did this because when we launched connected this is back in the day where Tech crunch was the main way you launched we launched and connected was featured in Tech crunch but man in the comments on the first day we had so many haters they're like who would ever pay for this why are they charging for this thing this should be free and we were really nervous maybe we made the wrong decision and so we actually were really glad we only set our free tra for 14 days because on the 15th day we got a bunch of paid subscribers and that was incredibly clarifying to us on who our target audience was because there was a bunch of free users that were playing around with it but the ones that were paying we quickly discovered were up on professionals people who are in the business of managing relationships and so that became a clear customer segment for us to go after and so it was a great way for us to validate this uh Assumption of would people being willing to pay and it turns out they would but a very specific audience that was in the business of relationships we then were able to tailor all the features we were building specifically around that yeah that's a great example uh a lot of people will use a Prof for free but when you ask them to pay they they're like no I don't want to pay for this and that that's a great way to answer the who is the customer like you just like you know like you said just like make them pay and people will self filter themselves into the segment right I interviewed no Kagan the guy who runs appsumo and he has this really great challenge it's called the 48 hour challenge and it's kind of like pre-sales he basically pitches his ideas to his friends and he just makes them like prepay for it like you know here's my idea are you putting 100 bucks for me to build this and give it to you if I never build it I'll give it back to I'll give the 100 bucks back to you and that is like a really great way to just like validate your idea as soon as possible I haven't done it yet because it's little bit like asking your friends to pay feels kind of weird to me but it seems like a great way like a great hack you know I've actually done that on the B2B side with pre-sales with LinkedIn sales Navigator we were working on this new premium subscription for sales professionals called LinkedIn sales Navigator and we actually leverage pre-sales to solve for a bunch of issues What minimum feature set needs to be in the we V1 and are people going to be willing to pay for it at the premium price point we wanted to charge them and so what we did was we created a sales deck and we actually went to potential customers pitched it the sales deck had our value proposition it had screenshots of what the product was going to look like it had a price tag associated with it and so we'd go pitch it and say hey look here's the product we're planning on building are you willing to commit to join our pilot program now the commitment wasn't money we were going to give it to them for free but we did ask them as part of the contract they had to sign was you're going to deploy this to 15 salespeople you allow all of them to go through training and a subset of them will join us every week for feedback and so everyone knows a sales team dedicating time from the sales team is the same as money this if they're not uh selling they're not making money and so it was a real commitment for them to go do that and so we'd go do this and the goal was if we got 40% of people to say yes we felt like the product was validated and it was time to go build it now initially we didn't get anywhere near that we had a ton of folks that were just like no not interested we have other priorities so we had to keep adding features and uh iterating our value prop until we got there but we eventually did and at that point when we were just building it we knew we were building something that was prevalidated both from a willingness to pay as well as our V1 feature set yeah that's great that kind of brings to the third part of this about like you know how do you know if you have I guess you know a bunch of you prepaid for it and hopefully you ship a good product that maybe you have PR Market it what are some other ways to measure if you actually have prodct Market fit yeah so

I think we've gone through this evolution of how do you measure product Market fit we started with you know Mark and dreon back in the day even saying you can always feel when you have product Market fit because the products flying off the shelves you know it's really hard to measure a feeling so you know we've moved on beyond that approach we then moved to a world of surveys people talk about using NPS survey or product Market fit surveys asking things like how disappointed would you be if this product no longer existed for example now here's the problem with surveys you have huge response bias the people who tend to respond to your survey are the ones that are still engaged right so the set of users that abandoned you months ago aren't filling out your survey and telling you whether they'd be disappointed or not whether your product exists and so these surveys always over represent your engaged users and end up not being a great way to understand whether you have product Market fit we we've now moved to a world where it's all about using metrics to assess whether you have product marget fit or not and really it's around two metrics the first is retention and then the second is growth and so with retention the idea is you figure out the core action in your product you then map a retention curve and you look at does that retention curve flatten over time because if it flattens over time it means there's a subset of users that are staying retained and are going to keep using your product in the long term that's what you need um to have product Market fit now what ends up happening when you first launch a product is that trend line always Trends to zero you have to work at improving your product either new functionality or optimizing the experience to get it to the point where it flattens but when it does you have some semblance of product Market fit now the second measure is growth are you growing the reason this is important is you know some people leave it at the retention metric but it ever feels like you have product Market fit if your product's not growing so for example AOL has product Market fit on the retention piece right but no one wouldn't consider that a product that has product Market fit because it's not growing and so for the growth piece what we want to test is are you growing your month-over-month users do you have more users in the next month than you did in the previous month so that's the first part and the second part is are you doing that sustainably we can always throw money at the problem to grow our user base but we want to make sure it's sustainable this idea for example that let's say we're using paid ad spend that we're recovering that paid ad spend in a decent payback period against the customer revenue and so there's a test that you can go run to like see if that's the case and we're trying to make sure our new user growth is sustainable but if we have both we have retention a flatten retention curve and we have month over month growth you certainly have product Market fit got it yeah I think number one is it's actually very hard for the potential curve to flatten up right I think people don't realize how hard it is but even like you said that's a good point because even if it flattens out you might only have problem I can fit for like a very specific Niche and if you want to do like a big business or just like pay yourself that might not be enough right so yeah that's exactly right and that's where I think you need the growth measure equally as much as you need the retention metric yeah and I love the servy point too like we just got finished with the elections like all the servers were basically wrong right like people responded surveys were like biased totally and that's the great thing about data like when you think about it using something like retention you're serving 100% of your users because you're actually looking at every single data point you're not relying on this sub percentage of people that tend to respond yeah okay so basically you go through the Define the prit narrative your Val your assumptions and you try to measure progress and you define n you keep going back and forth right and at some point you actually have some single Pro can fit and then you want to scale and you want to get more attraction let's close with that like how do you go about scaling when you have problem so I think the thing that we've learned about getting Traction in this hunt for product Market fit is that we really need to take a two-prong approach the first prong is the idea of doing things that don't scale just do whatever you need to do to get call it your first hundred or first thousand users now this is everything from using your personal network using uh the audience you might have bu using influencers getting PR launching on product Hunt leveraging online and offline communities all of these things are strategies that are fantastic for getting that first set of users but is never going to scale to a scalable Channel now once we've gotten to that point of getting that initial traction we then want to start working on developing a growth Loop and the whole idea with growth Loops is that they are sustainable and scalable over time and these could be anything from viral Loops where you're trying to get your users to bring in other users into the product it could be content Loops where either you're generating content or your users are generating content that are bringing people back into the product or a variety of paid Loops things like advertising or having a sales team or paid Integrations all of these Loops are scalable because they're self-reinforcing that a set of users brings in the next set of users which so that's great for scalability but the reality is you can't get one of those fly wheels going in the early days that's why you need those their ways to manually get to that first thousand users so I think that's what we learned that we have to take this two prung approach to grow over time got it so yeah like even before Prim can fit like you need to do the M approach and at some point the med Pro probably becomes you know too overwhelmed woman you're having too many meetings in a day so you want to start thinking about raw Loops it's getting that way yeah exactly okay so now let's switch gears a little bit

let's talk about finding Prim Market fit for your career so back in 2015 you know you were leading sales navigator at LinkedIn right can you describe what the job was like what your love about it what is you not like about it yeah it was sort of this amazing time where everything was actually on paper going really well for my career I had pitched LinkedIn on this idea that we should build a sales tool that dedicated to sales professionals and they said great you go figure that out you go build it and initially I had a venture team of like 12 folks working on that but this eventually became a very strategic project for the company and we grew the team very quickly to almost 500 people and I became CGM of this with our head of sales and it was going great It ultimately became the fastest growing Revenue line for LinkedIn I had Direct p& l responsibility for this business that was now 200 million in revenue and I was doing this at a publicly traded company and so on paper I was doing really well and my boss was telling me what other products could we have you take over since you've done such a great job of this and there's a clear path to becoming a VP and what's interesting about it was while I was doing well on paper I found so much of it draining in terms of the work that I was doing and what do I mean by that look I got into product to talk to customers design world class features I didn't really talk to customers as much I had a whole team of PMS that did that the extent at which I was designing features was product reviews My PMS would present to me various Concepts and I'd provide a little bit of feedback and sure I own the highle vision and strategy but that day-to-day fun that I loved about product I actually did little of I was a head of a product managing and leading more so than I was creating and building and I realized that kind of work didn't sort of energize me and I love the way Justin Khan puts this he talks about this idea of a zone of Excellence versus a zone of Genius he says there's this zone of Excellence that some of us fall into this is work that we're really good at but is actually very draining to us and that's where I was at and what he encourages you to do is find this zone of Genius the zone of Genius is the work that energizes you that you love and so I realized that while I was doing well if I continued on that path I was just going to move further and further away from the parts of product that I actually love and so I thought about you know is this really the path I want to keep going down was I'm not sure it would really be my zone genius and how did you think about cuz you have this realization but at the same time you know you're rising up the career ladder you're getting pay more and like so how do you actually make the decision to like stop this path and do something else must have been tough it's super tough and I think that part is always hard I think for me I

often think about this idea that Jeff Bezos talks about this framework of regret minimization and this idea that you know what would you regret and how do you solve for minimizing those regrets and I think it's always easy to look at the career ladder the more status wealth money that you're making and keep climbing that but I was starting to feel this potential regret that maybe there's a more optimal career path I could be going down that was more aligned with what gave me energy that I might regret never pursuing that if I keep going down the path of the traditional career path and so that really was a guiding force for me and part of it was like I kind of felt like I can know let's go back if it didn't work out if I tried something else and it didn't work out that path was available to me but I would regret not trying to find something that was closer to my zone of Genius got it you know like I feel like corporations should like I'm very much similar to you I like to Craft products and go through that Innovation phase and I feel like corporations should rewards people more right like you know it it's takes a lot of work to craft a really great product it's not easy and why only reward in the ladder people who are good at like magic or like try to like manage up why not actually wor people actually shipping really good products I don't know if you seen some of that happen now it's more like a icy path but like what are your thoughts on this totally you know I think what was interesting is this was a real challenge doing Zer times right like when the economy was great everyone sort of wanted to be promoted and so the only path for that was this idea of you manage more people so you move into these leadership roles and that was the path to you know more wealth and money and status and everything now what I think is fascinating with sort of the flattening of organizations some people really are starting to embrace this idea of a dual track PM role where hey look if someone is independently sort of an icpm working on a big hairy problem and really delivering outcomes we should reward that as opposed to simply asking for them to become people managers and so I think we're finally starting to see a little bit of it I think engineering still is way better at this having a dual track career path where you could be a very senior IC engineer and do really well PMS it's still pretty rare but at least we're starting to see a beginning of that happening and I hope that only continues to happen yeah I know this technical director who on theine side who has probably the job just doesn't have any meetings he just comes in makes some architecture discussions you know he Dives deep try to fix some bugs and it's like a much better life from my perspective than just like being stuck in live in videos all day totally like we talk about the engineering like sometimes you have a separate CTO from a VP of engineering right the CTO is about the technical decisions the architecture the technical strategy versus the vpf engineering is the one who's actually managing all the people and you realize both of those people are doing exactly what they're great at working in their zone of genius and I do think there's an opportunity to do something similar on product and so I hope the trend continues just to go a little bit deeper on this like I think you and I both have friends who are like CPO then like you know who are in the senior leadership positions what does it take to actually like love this work or like are there people who are like really love it and miserable in it yeah you know I think you have both where people are doing it um because that always an natural career progression but then there's certainly people who this is the best role for them and I think what I realized when I was at linkon kind of leading sales Navigators ahead of product you have to reorient to the team is your product as opposed to the product that you're shipping and so you're much more obsessed about the team as the vehicle for delivery for products and how do you make that engine incredible right so like I spend a lot of time on for example my All Hands meetings because I knew I was going to bring 500 people together spend 500 people hours I better make it really useful to drive alignment and cohesion and strategic thinking amongst that entire group right and so the team was my product there's a whole set of people that I know who love that who Thrive after cultivating a team building that team seeing that team ultimately be successful and they tell you uh their ability to grow that team and I think that's the kind of person who really thrives in those kind of roles got it and and so like when you left your job at l d what kind of conversations we can share this like did your wife support you like did your manager think you were making a big mistake like what kind of conversation do you remember that you have yeah you know it was interesting I got a lot of discussions at LinkedIn with folks that were like hey look you're making a huge mistake you're actually doing really well here and we have lots of career growth opportunities for you that you can still have here and so to me though what was nice about that is that gave me assurance that hey look I can come back right whether it's at LinkedIn or a different company there were roles I could have if this other experiment doesn't work out now aah my wife has always been super supportive of trying to find the space where you're operating in your zone of genius and so she was actually very supportive of running the experiment wherever it might take us awesome and you actually run no jojoy with your wife right you guys work on it together that's right so what we ultimately decided to do I left LinkedIn she ultimately left her job at Survey Monkey and we decided to start a company together now this wasn't our first company together it's actually our second we had previously started connected a contact management tool together and that's the one that we actually sold to LinkedIn and so that's how we both endered up at LinkedIn for a while we loved it and so we decided do it again and so the thought was with this startup we want to build something that we felt like we could own the craft where we could be directly talking to customers directly Building Product and really maintain our own sort of bar on what we thought was great craft and great product and that felt like it would be far more energizing than being a people manager and in fact we went with an extreme focus of minimum viable team how do we make this team as small as possible literally just a and I and seeing how far we could take the Business Without sort of all the scaling of people and so that was really the thought on a path that we thought would be way better aligned with what we wanted to get in terms of our out of our careers yeah like I feel like you were

ahead of the time like because right now it's all about like keep the team small you know maybe like try to boost strap stuff it's taking a bunch of easy funding like all the stuff you did already right with with your startup yeah and I think it's interesting like you know our yard stick has never been what's our Topline revenue and how fast that's growing we're kind of more like what's our Revenue per employee because like we love this idea of Leverage like what can we do in a leveraged way uh because we find life is simpler with fewer employees there's less red tape there's less people to convince and in fact you can be more Nimble and you're right everyone's talking about this now we've seen the great flattening in all the big tech companies but that always seems so logical to me that I'm kind of more surprised that there was a period of time where we always felt like more employees is somehow going to result in more output which sounds kind of crazy these days yeah so let's say people want to follow your footsteps where they want to do a startup or just like you know go back to the craft in your job I I think you have this framework called passion skill and opportunity fit maybe it's kind of like someo genius but like can you talk a little bit more about that yeah you know I think um some people have this whole idea of Follow Your Passion and that's sort of the Mantra they talk about I honestly think that's too simplistic that simply following your passion isn't going to work like hey look I am super passionate about music but I suck at singing I'm not great at playing instruments like if I try to go after this in a big way I'm unlikely to be successful so I'm fine keeping music a hobby but it's probably not a great career and so instead I think the frame to think about is you really got to balance these three things passion is important of course but I think you got to be more nuanced about passion I realize with passion there's passion for the mission which is sort of the thing you're trying to accomplish but then there's passion for the day-to-day do you love what you have to do on a day-to-day basis to get to where you want to solve for and I think you need both and I think often times some people have one passion for the mission but not for the day-to-day and so they're in lacking alignment that they need to solve for now the second one is skill we obviously got to be good at what you're trying to accomplish to be successful now it doesn't mean you have to be good at it now you can have a path to be learning to be great at it but we all have proclivities where some things are going to be easier for us to master and other things are just not going to be great areas for us to master and so understanding where you have a likely path to skill development in the space you're in is super important and finally the last di mention is opportunity is there Market interest in the role that you're thinking about right there has to be Market opportunity and that's are there jobs are there roles for you are people willing to pay for this dream job that you have and so I often think about it is I'm trying to find this intersection of passion skill and opportunity and when you find that sweet spot then you're set up for Success because you're energized by the work you're doing every day you get to Mastery in terms of skill development which is also very fulfilling and by the way it's paying the bells right like you found a role that can actually enable you to be successful and so I think that's the Holy Grail now of course that's hard to do but I think that's a right framework to be striving for I do think maybe passion needs to come first like especially day-to-day passion like if you're inally motivated by whatever you're doing like for example I'm learing a piano I'm not very good but I just enjoy doing it so if you just do that enjoy doing it then the skill hopefully will come so yeah I think the dayto day is like very underr rated you got to enjoy doing it you got to find the torture that you love that other people might not like you know totally no I 100% agree with that I think that is a great way to think about what you're actually passionate about like what do you actually like that other people don't like as much is a great frame yeah and how do you go about figuring out what you're passionate about like you know how do you go about figure this out yeah it's a great question because so many people don't really know what it is yet especially early in their career and so

the framework I like to use is this explore and exploit algorithm idea so let me set this up so there's this famous problem in computer science where let's say you have three slot machines and you're trying to maximize your payout and so you can run a slot machine to see how successful that machine is for paying out some rewards has some probability of paying it out and so you have these three slot machines and so how do you maximize the amount of payout that you're going to get from these slot machines and what you realize in every possible solution you do this idea of explore and exploit explore is hey let's try all three of these to try to figure out which one is ultimately going to be the highest rewarding thing and so that's this idea of exploring and then we exploit once we figure out which slot machine is driving the most reward we double down on that one right and so the idea when applied to your own career is that we should be thinking about early on our career exploring everything how many different internships can we have how many different jobs can we do how many volunteer opportunities can we have to start to feel out what are we excited about what do we like about these things and some of this so much of this has to be tried firsthand you can't just think about whether you would enjoy and be passionate about something you have to try it and so early on it really behooves you to explore but then ultimately once you start to find areas that you're excited about you want to exploit you want to double down on them okay you think you have this passion for this Mission or this space go after it Go TR a roll deeping in that space and double down on and so that's the exploitation and over time you end up exploiting more than exploring but the key part is that at every stage you should keep exploring right like I remember even when I was working on no Choy I was like asking myself wow this like climate change Tech that everyone's working on seems very interesting and Mission driven maybe I should go in that direction and so I sort of tried that on for size and ultimately realized it wasn't for me but I'm constantly still trying to explore other opportunities that might more fulfilling beyond the path that I'm currently going down right I think it's very underrated to be a tinkerer and to always even if you're old like me to actually spend some time just play around with stuff for example this morning I was playing around with cursor to like build apps and it might seem like a waste of time but you might figure out oh this is actually really awesome I really love to do this and you might just kind of Follow Your curiosity it could actually lead you to some really amazing place play places right so yeah I guess the point I want make is you don't have to be a young person you can do it at any time in your life totally and I agree with that I think that often times as you get older you stop exploring and I think that is unfortunate because you might ultimately land on something that is more meaningful if you would continue exploring a variety of career paths awesome so s last question I think you being really intentional about your career your life you feel P Rec Fit for Your Life it seems like and how do you balance all these different parts of life right like there's like work there's your Health there's your relationships like how do you how does someone think about this holistic way on

this exact question you know if I already describ my 20s I was your typical Tech workaholic where there was really nothing to my life other than work and it was my source of meaning relationships all the co-workers and colleagues were my friends and I got so much out of it but then I began to realize wait a minute maybe there's a little bit more to life and I think for me it took a couple things part of it was having a daughter right you and I both have kids we know that really changes your perspective on life and I think ultimately I began to appreciate huh maybe there's more to life than work and one of my favorite books on this topic is a book called designing your life by Bill Bernett and he talks about what if we're intentional about designing our life in the same way we design products and what I found most helpful is he had sort of a framework of there's kind of four areas of life that we should all be thinking about one is career but second is Health third is love and relationships and fourth is this idea of play doing stuff for fun and joy and I have actually now used this framework to think about how I'm doing on all four categories I had a whole time in my life where I was 100% focused on health cleaned up my diet got to the point where I was exercising pretty much every day and now it's been hugely fruitful to have the time and space to focus on that I then have spent a bunch of time in relationships you know building better friends and really having meaning around them now the hardest one for me was Joy because it was sort of this thing where like most people I have a need to be productive that I was really struggling to think of what do I do for pure joy and so I really task myself to come up with something and as I mentioned I love music I love it to and so one of my goals was to listen to a 100 albums purely because it's sort of like a source of Joy there's no productivity in it but to give myself permission to do so and it's been so fascinating that now I've gotten to the point where I do my annual resolutions and I actually make sure I have resolutions in each of these categories career health love and play and so it sort of focuses me around having more going on in my life than just my career and now that I've developed things in these other categories man going back to my 20s when I was obsessed with work and it owned my life is something I'd never be willing to do now but I think it took developing those other categories and developing meaning and fulfillment in those other categories before I got to appreciating them I love that B I hope the young people listening to this can realize that earlier because if you have good health and you have good relationships and you make time to give joy to yourself like it will help your career too right so it's they all build on each other yeah totally yeah all right s where can people find you on like yeah so best place to find me is on LinkedIn on at saan Reiki and then I actually blog on product management entrepreneurship and life at s andy. com so I encourage you to check that out and I have a couple of courses on reforge around mastering product management and finding product Market fit so you can check those out as well awesome yeah like it's hard to not keep talking about product management because there's so much to rant about but yeah I'm glad we're both putting out conent out there yeah cool all right well thanks so much for your time man it was awesome sure this is fun