WHAT IS A PRODUCT?

- The product here really kinda depends on the scope. It could be a feature, it could be a set of
features, it could be an entire product, it could be a collection or portfolio of products and that
really depends on how you scale a product manager in that role.

WHAT DO PRODUCT MANAGERS DO?

- product managers drive the vision, strategy, design and execution of their product
- Dimensions of product management are really useful in any field of business.
- Being a product manager doesn't mean you do all the processes, it means you work with a whole
team of collaborators to be successful
- Delivering and securing products or services from the company to the customers.

SACHIN REKHI
- Product Manager
- started at Microsoft working on the visual studio, which is actually developer tools

FOUR DIMENSIONS OF PRODUCT MANAGEMENT

1. VISION “Humanity must become an interplanetary species'' - ELON MUSK, SpaceX
- Clear picture or image, a picture does not change. the same with your vision
- You need a vision for you to know where you are going.
- how the world will be a better place if you succeed articulates a compelling vision
- oftentimes, the thing you need to be careful about with the vision is you have to make sure it’s not too
lofty, but it’s credible.
- Compelling vision is all about changing the world in a meaningful way, just like how Elon Musk
did.
- vision should be stable
- Creating or writing a vision doesn’t have to be too long; what matters is that it is detailed enough.
- To have clear thinking, it is great to detail what’s going on to create a compelling vision.
- Innovation is a risk, but when it works, it is a 10x opportunity; you should be willing to take that
risk.
- Failure should be treated as part of the culture
- Bezos (Amazon) knew from that day one that he would build everything store, and you’re not coming
to Amazon just because it’s cheaper, but because of personalization. Because they’re gonna build an
entire discovery process to help you find the product you care about.
- A vision is valuable only if it inspires the entire team
- Just as it takes 7 impressions to garner a response to a marketing message, vision should be
constantly repeated to make sure the entire team is reminded of what their goal and vision is, and
to make sure they understand it.
 - Take a Litmus Test and see how often your team member will repeat your vision. In this way, you
can see if you’ve done a good job of articulating the vision, inspiring the team, and actually having
it sink in within the entire team.

2. STRATEGY “Your margin is my opportunity” - JEFF BEZOS, Amazon

- “Where are you now? Where do you like to go? How will you get there?”
- a compelling strategy that details exactly how you're gonna dominates your market.
- the strategy must constantly be iterated on and refined until you find the product or market fit.
- Constantly. Refining and iterating until you’ve found a market that absolutely loves your product,
then you have a winning strategy to dominate that market.
- When you already found a market, then you’re gonna ultimately decide that you wanna grow your
market. And you have to find again a product market fit with a larger audience.
- constantly iterating on the different dimensions of your strategy.
- The best way to detail your strategy is by documenting your product/market fit hypotheses.
- Ditch the business plan; it gives false precision, instead, focus on a few-page summary that
captures each of your critical product/markets for hypotheses
- Hypotheses is much helpful as it gives us the best guesses of what’s gonna work.
- A great way to get the entire team on the same page, determine which areas have the biggest
risk, and to also ultimately then continue refining it.

PRODUCT/MARKET FIT HYPOTHESES - may be the source of your strategy

1. Target Audience - target audience is all about who’s the ideal customer
- A much more beneficial one when you’re actually doing product development is to think of your
target market as a bull’s eye
- Who’s at the center of the bull’s eye? Who’s your ideal customer that is actually gonna be the
customer that absolutely loves your product and service?
- when you already know who’s at the center of the bull’s eye, your ideal customer, and when you look
down at them, it breaks down into more audience
- It is really important to understand the detail your target audience when you do it well

2. Problem-Solving - reason to build great products and services is to solve real problems for
customers
- Is this something that's nice to have for your customers or is this something that’s a need to
have?
- Is the problem you were solving for your customer?
- articulate the problem independent of the solution

3. Value Proposition - key thing here is not about the features you’re building but the promise to your
customer of the value you're gonna generate for them.
 4. Strategic Differentiation - most people think of it as a solution.
- differentiate your products or brand to other competitors.
- That will be your opportunity to make your product or your brand stand out and be unique from
your competitors.

5. Competition - how is your offering actually compared to both the direct and indirect competitors.
- How does your solution win against direct and indirect alternatives?
- How is your product actually improving upon those alternatives?

6. Acquisition Strategy - it is incredibly important to have a solid acquisition strategy.

- Trying to understand if your strategy is effective enough.
- How are you gonna find and attract uh, your best customers?
- How are you gonna do so, cost effectively?
- figuring out the channels you’re gonna be leveraging
- get into the widths of the details of greatness looks like in this dimension, but you start
figuring out what those channels are
- obviously in the end, all these businesses are after to make money

Ex. Jollibee Corp. bought Mang Inasal and Red Ribbon so that they can also get their target market as well.

7. Monetization Strategy - figuring out what your primary and secondary way to make money
- Is there a strong willingness to pay?
- What’s the comparables that they’re looking at?
- What sort of ability do they have to pay for your product and offering?
- importantly getting into the details of what’s the willingness to pay of this customer.
Ex. Charging another amount to services added inorder to have another income.

8. KPIs - important to define your key performance indicators

- which are really your north star metrics of what success looks like.
- Is it a certain number of customers? Is it a certain revenue?
- Because this allows you to calibrate all along how you are in fact doing as you’re actually
improving upon your product and service.

● Detailing these eight product/market fit hypotheses is my biggest advice to you is to minimize your
dimensions of innovation.
● key thing is to be selective about your dimension of innovation
● leveraging best practices for all these other dimensions is incredibly difficult. Instead pick a few
of these dimensions to avoid failure.
● And then leverage practices to other dimensions.

3. DESIGN
- "You have to work hard to get your thinking clean and make it simple" - STEVE JOBS, Apple
- It really takes real hard work to have a clean thinking to build a design that’s incredibly simple. And
this is when you realize that you actually have to spend a lot of effort to create that clean, simple
experience and a lot of iteration.
- A compelling design delivers a useful, usable, and delightful experience to your customers.
- What customer's want is a delightful experience.
 - Delightful customer experience = good customer experience
- "What does it take to build a delightful experience?" We actually build an emotional intelligence
- Delight is all about emotional intelligence
- Giving delight is about really owning and understanding the emotional state of your customer. What
they care about, their psychological profile and bringing that to bear as to designing your
products.

● How do we do this?
- fall in love with the problem you are solving for your entire customers. DON'T fall in love
with the solution, fall in love with the problem.
- Stepping yourself into the actual problems that your customers are facing everyday.
- Develop personas. Personas are these fictional characters that you create to represent
archetypes of your users of your product.
- Personas are whole level deeper, where you are getting beyond the role and
responsibilities and getting to their psychographic profile and psychographic character.
- understood the mentality and psychology of the people they are building and designing
products for, and that would make it so much easier to have a chance to build delightful
products.
- “DELIVER DELIGHT BY ADDING DESIRED EMOTION DIMENSION TO YOUR PRODUCT
DESIGN PROCESS.”
- build an experience that attempts to delight them, that is, basically building and
understanding the desire and emotions of customers.
- Another way to delight the attention to detail
● How do we measure delight?
- Measure delight through NET PROMOTER SCORE
- NPS is a fairly close predictor

4. EXECUTION We do it really, really fucking good" - STEWART BUTTERFIELD, Slack

- Execution will be thoroughly studied so that your vision, strategy, and design will all make sense.
- “if you're not spending 60% of your time on execution, you're doing it wrong. “ - Sachin Rekhi
- “Relentless execution ultimately determines whether you’ll make your vision a reality” - Sachin Rekhi
- Giving delight is about really owning and understanding the emotional state of your customer.
- DON'T fall in love with the solution; FALL IN LOVE with the problem.
- Stepping yourself into the actual problems that your customers are facing every day would really
help you understand how to solve these.
- It would much be easier for us to build a delightful product if we would have a better
understanding about the mentality and psychology of the people we are trying to build and design
products for, so that we can deliver delightful experiences to them.
- building and understanding the desire and emotions of customers will let us build an experience
that attempts to delight them
- “DELIVER DELIGHT BY ADDING DESIRED EMOTION DIMENSION TO YOUR PRODUCT DESIGN
PROCESS.”
SACHIN REKHI QUOTES:
- “It turns out no matter how compelling of a vision you have, no matter how good your strategy is, no
matter how good you've designed the product, if you're not relentlessly executing, it doesn't matter. “ -
Sachin Rekhi
- “Those are all ideas. But you need to be converting those ideas to actual ship products that you're
putting in front of your customers. And that's what execution is all about. “ - Sachin Rekhi
- Execution should be constantly moving forward and making progress against the stated goals. But at
the same time, learning.
- “If it's no one's problem, that's a problem. If it's everyone's problem, that's also a problem. “
- “ It is also important that you are pointing your team in the right direction.”
- “The biggest friction point I find in the process is the way you make decisions on the team. That is why
it is really important to have a clear delineation of decision rights. “ - Sachin Rekhi
- “When everyone understands who owns a decision versus who influences the decision, who approves
the decision and understands the process, things actually go faster.” - Sachin Rekhi
- “Instead of rewarding teams with elegant architectural solutions to yesterday’s problems, I need to
reward teams that are moving fast enough to solve today’s problems that turned out to be the elegant
architecture you’ve built.”
- “you're the curator of great ideas. You don't come up with the ideas, you're simply curating them.”

- “The soft skills are the thing that makes the biggest difference, and great verbal and written
communication, the ability to build rapport with absolutely anyone, the ability to inspire a team. These
are the qualities that end up being a huge difference” - Sachin Rekhi

Reference Video:
https://youtu.be/huTSPanUlQM

3 things why companies booming/ why they gain profits:

1. Advertisement
2. Data they get from you
3. In house purchases of app