Why tackle document collaboration?

It’s amazing how in our personal lives we can easily search the world’s information in a split second yet we transition back to a world of tribal knowledge when we enter the workplace. We are far more likely to ask our boss or a tenured employee for information than we are to be able to successfully search our team’s docs, wikis, email, or any other archive. When a new team member joins the team, instead of sending them to a rich repository of resources to help them get started, we waste countless hours of other people’s valuable time in meetings getting them up-to-speed. And then when a team member decides to move on, we end up equally worrying about the un-captured knowledge that walks out the door with them as much as their lost future productivity. We rely so heavily on the oral tradition to get everyone on the same page: meetings, All Hands, stand-ups, and so much more. A recent study from McKinsey found that information workers spend about 20% of their workday searching for and retrieving information. That’s an entire day of the week lost to such unproductive tasks.

I felt this pain of team collaboration first-hand most recently leading the LinkedIn Sales Navigator team. As we quickly scaled the organization to nearly 500 folks, I found myself spending an increasing part of my day focused on team collaboration, communication, and alignment. I worked incredibly hard at keeping the entire team on the same page, whether it was developing detailed onboarding guides for new team members, painstakingly keeping our Sales Navigator wiki up-to-date, or the extensive preparation I put into our monthly All Hands. And despite all of these efforts, I found that when I chatted with various members of the team, they never felt they had all the information they needed to be most successful in their role.

We ultimately came to the realization that our document collaboration tools were largely failing us. And it’s not surprising, given how old these tools are: Microsoft Word was launched in 1983 — 34 years ago! — and even Google Docs is 11 years old this February. Even more archaic is the folder system, a metaphor stolen from the physical way we used to organize files in folders and cabinets, which is still the primary way we organize all of our digital documents today.

We thought there had to be a better way.

Notejoy moves beyond the folder with Team Libraries

Notejoy rethinks document collaboration from the ground up to fit the needs of the modern workplace. It starts with moving beyond the folder metaphor with team libraries. A team library is a shared space for any size team. They are like Slack channels for documents. Each team library is shared with a specific set of people: say the entire company, a specific team, or a project. When you add a new note to a team library, it is automatically shared with the entire team. No wasting time on setting permissions. Or worrying about having to give access to everyone on the team. Just create and it’s automatically shared.

In addition, instead of just seeing the contents of team libraries alphabetically or chronologically, team libraries enable a variety of smarter views to help you find the most relevant notes quickly.

• Library overviews: When you first enter a library, we take you to the overview, which shows you the most popular notes, recently edited notes, and allows curators to pin the notes that they deem are most important to the top. This works great for both new team members looking to get the gist of a library and existing team members looking to catch up on the latest.

• Author profiles: We also allow you to go to an author’s profile to see all their most popular work as well as what they have been recently working on. I would have loved to be able to tell new team members to check out all the profiles of their colleagues when they first joined my team at LinkedIn, helping to contextualize captured knowledge around specific team members.

• Recent view: To help you be as productive as possible, we always start your session in the Recent view, enabling you to quickly return to what you were most recently working on.

Notejoy’s lightning fast search helps you find exactly what you need

Search is at the heart of finding information in Notejoy. Type in your search term and you’ll get lightning fast search results, complete with a preview pane to quickly scroll through results and your search term highlighted throughout each note.

Compare this to your prior search experience in say Google Docs. You type your search team, see a list of document titles, start slowly loading each of the documents in separate tabs. And even when you get into the doc, your search term isn’t highlighted. It’s no wonder that people rarely attempt to use Google Docs to search for anything other than the documents they already know exist. In contrast, our beta users have called searching in Notejoy “a real pleasure.”

Notejoy unifies the conversation around a document with Chatter

It turns out most of the work in this day and age is no longer in the original authoring of a document, but instead in the socializing, iterating, and feedback process from various stakeholders. To date this process has been a mess, since we rely on so many tools beyond document collaboration to facilitate this, including email, Slack, and in-person meetings. This results in the entire conversation around a document being bifurcated and painful to follow.

Notejoy enables you to unify the entire conversation around a note with Chatter. You can bring people into a note by simply @mentioning them. They’ll receive a notification across their desired channels (email, mobile, or Slack). You’ll also be notified whenever anyone views your note, so you know exactly who’s engaged with it. Chatter also enables people to leave light-weight feedback through reactions, giving you a quick thumbs up, for example, if they are onboard. Reviewers can also provide specific feedback on parts of your note with highlight comments. It even enables full note-level threaded discussions, enabling people to contribute overall thoughts on the note. With Notejoy, the conversation is no longer in multiple places. It can happen all inside Chatter, speeding up the process of getting everyone on the same page as well as providing a historical archive of the decision-making behind the final work.

Notejoy is already making a difference

Our dream for Notejoy is not just to help you save that 20% of time wasted today on finding and retrieving information. But we fundamentally believe that significantly reducing the friction to sharing, organizing, and finding information in the workplace can enable entirely new scenarios for sharing knowledge and ultimately unlocking organizational potential. What can we enable when we move well beyond the current state of tribal knowledge to a future with open access to the collective working memory of colleagues?

What’s been amazing is starting to see this vision already taking shape amongst the hundreds of beta users who’ve been using Notejoy over the last 9 months. Take Kinnek, a NYC startup focused on simplifying B2B purchasing. They have hundreds of notes in Notejoy spanning all of their departments. But one of the scenarios that emerged specifically in Notejoy is the sharing of SQL queries. Kinnek aims to empower anyone in the organization to discover their own data insights. Yet the level of SQL skills around the organization vary. So they started sharing their SQL queries with each other in a Notejoy library. People would share queries and what they did and others would thumbs up them, give them feedback, and contribute their own. The library has become a popular way to learn SQL within the organization. Could they have done this is any other tool? Maybe. But the reduction in friction to sharing made it finally easy enough to be worth doing. Karthik Sridharan, the CEO of Kinnek, put it best: “Every time I see people contributing to Notejoy, I get the feeling that we’re building our company’s long-term strategic assets.”

Or take Alan Wang Realty, a top Bay Area realty firm. Notejoy has become a repository of their best performing email templates for engaging with clients at every step of the client relationship process, giving their team of five real estate agents an edge over typical brokers.

Or Avalow, a fully-managed organic garden service in Sonoma County. They are using Notejoy to document key decisions at every turn in scaling their business, enabling them to quickly revisit decisions or allowing new team members to have context on the company’s strategy. Jeremy Nusser, co-founder of Avalow, describes it best: “Notejoy is the only tool I’ve seen that allows us to capture a strategic discussion quickly, easily, and be able to find it later. It’s no longer a lost hallway conversation or Slack message.”

None of these docs existed before in Google Docs, wikis, or anywhere else, making us hopeful of what we can unlock with frictionless sharing.

Try Notejoy today

There is so much more we could tell you about Notejoy. For example, the rich integrations with Slack, Google Drive, and Microsoft Office, enabling a seamless workflow with your existing tools. Or our apps that help you take Notejoy wherever you go, including Web, Mac, Windows, and iOS. Even drag & drop image galleries, to do lists, and keyboard shortcuts to give you that extra bit of productivity. But instead of going on, we’d encourage you to see for yourself:

• Sign up for free
• Or learn more on Product Hunt

Meet Notejoy, a better way to organize team docs was originally published in Notejoy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As product designers we spend a lot of time trying to understand user friction and solve for it in the products we build. Doing so is absolutely critical to delivering delightful experiences for our users. I find though that sometimes teams are only perceiving and solving the most basic forms of user friction and aren’t taking on some of the harder to perceive yet incredibly important higher level forms of friction that users are experiencing. So I wanted to share how I think about the hierarchy of user friction and provide examples and best practices for solving for each.

User friction is really anything that prevents a user from accomplishing a goal in your product. I categorize user friction into a hierarchy of three levels: interaction friction, cognitive friction, and emotional friction. Interaction friction is what I hear talked about most often amongst product designers, but the higher levels of cognitive friction and emotional friction are equally important to solve for to build a great user experience.

Interaction Friction
Interaction friction refers to friction a user experiences when interacting with your product’s interface. It covers all aspects of the UI that may be hindering your users from accomplishing their goal. We strive to build intuitive and consistent interfaces to prevent interaction friction. We ensure our call-to-actions are prominent, we reduce the number of steps or fields in our forms, we leverage style guide lines to ensure we have a consistent UX across all of our experiences, and we try to do the work for the user so they don’t have to whenever we can. These are just a few of the techniques that are commonly used to address interaction friction.

The canonical example of significantly reducing interaction friction remains the iPhone. Everyone knows that smartphones existed before the iPhone. We remember the days of the Blackberry or Windows Mobile devices that were technically email and web capable devices with a keyboard. And yet the iPhone changed everything. It was the first device to have a highly accurate on-screen keyboard thanks to their innovation in capacitive multi-touch screens. This freed up significant real estate on the screen when you weren’t typing. They packed enough CPU power on the device to support a full web browser instead of the extremely limited web experiences that existed on smart phones before it. And most importantly, they made the entire software experience extremely intuitive, beautiful, and fast. And these improvements to the overall UX significantly reduced the interaction friction of every prior generation of smartphones and laid the groundwork for this new class of smartphone to become the predominant mobile device that everyone now carries around in their pockets.

While the iPhone example illustrates how an entire industry can be redefined by solving for interaction friction, Amazon provides an example of how even the simplest of interaction friction can be a huge detriment to user experience. Amazon illustrates the incredible importance of site speed to online experiences. They found that they could increase revenue by 1% for every 100 ms of load time improvement. Think about that for a minute: such a small change in load time, 100 ms, could have such a dramatic impact on revenue for Amazon. It’s a strong reminder that any type of interaction friction, especially page load time time, is important to address.

The rise of messaging apps like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp as well as Slack and HipChat in the enterprise can also be attributed to a significant reduction in interaction friction compared to the alternatives at the time, including email and text messaging. You no longer had to worry about whether you had someone’s most recent email address or phone number. You didn’t have to think about coming up with a subject line. You didn’t need to use many of the formalities that people had become accustomed to with email, including greetings and signatures. All of that was taken away and reduced to the simplest form a communication: find the person you want to message and simply start typing a message to them. We’ve taken this even further now with the use of emoji, which communicate far more in a single image than the alternative of having to type it all out.

Usability testing remains one of the most important techniques for identifying sources of interaction friction in your product and addressing it. When you watch end users using your product you’ll undoubtedly discover friction points that you hadn’t anticipated yourself. It’s important to continue to leverage this technique not just the first time you launch a product, but continually as you iterate as well.

Cognitive Friction
Cognitive load refers to the total amount of mental effort being used in working memory. When cognitive load is high when performing a task, it means there is significant cognitive friction. The product designers goal then becomes minimizing cognitive friction. Cognitive friction is broader than just interaction friction as it encompasses all aspects of the experience that result in mental effort. This is best illustrated through a set of examples.

Uber has been incredibly successful not only because it delivers rides at a lower price, but it significantly reduces the cognitive friction previously associated with taking a taxi, bus, or really any form of public transportation. Previously when you wanted to take a taxi, for example, you’d have to find a cab company and their phone number. Then you’d call to schedule a ride and often be stuck calling a few times until the dispatcher took your call. Then they’d tell you they are sending someone but you could never really trust their time estimate, so you’d often call the dispatcher back just to make sure the taxi driver is coming. This resulted in significant anxiety around whether you would get to your destination on time. You’d then get in the taxi and be wondering how much the ride was even going to cost you and at the end of the ride have to deal with paying with either cash or credit and tipping the driver. Uber solved all of the cognitive friction throughout this user experience by creating an incredibly simple app to request a ride, get an accurate estimate and real-time details of how far your driver was, provide a detailed price quote, and make payment completely frictionless so you can just walk out of the car.

Nuzzel is another great example of an app that has removed significant cognitive friction from my use of Twitter. Twitter can be an incredible resource for professionals to stay on top of recent news & articles around their specific industry. You can accomplish this by following a set of thought leaders and peers in your industry and then read your feed to come across such industry news. However the Twitter experience has significant cognitive friction in accomplishing this goal. Since Twitter provides a real-time feed, you need to either check it constantly or spend a lot of time reading through older tweets to stay on top of it. And then you have to remember if you’ve seen a previous article several times to get a sense of popularity. The whole experience is pretty painful if your goal is staying on top of industry news. That’s where Nuzzel comes in. It reads your Twitter feed for you and provides you an always up-to-date summary of your Twitter feed, showcasing all the articles that have been shared on Twitter sorted by the number of people who shared the articles and what each of the people you are following said about the article. Now I can spend just 5 minutes reading Nuzzel instead of tons of wasted time on Twitter to accomplish my goal. Nuzzel saw all the cognitive friction that existed to accomplish the goal and created a solution specifically around it.

Wealthfront has done the same in terms of reducing cognitive friction when it comes to investing. Investing can be an incredibly daunting task. Even if you decide on a passive index fund approach, you still need to decide which indexes to invest in. S&P 500? Total market? Emerging markets? Bonds? Once you decide on the specific funds, you need to pick your actual allocation across asset classes. How much exposure do you want to domestic vs international stocks? What percentage equity vs bonds do you want to have? And ideally you should be thinking about adjusting this allocation based on your appropriate level of risk, which may change over time as your circumstances change. And you know your supposed to rebalance these allocations as your exposure to each asset class changes with actual returns, but you always forget to. Wealthfront solves for every part of this cognitive friction, reducing it to a simple questionnaire to understand your risk tolerance and then taking care of absolutely everything else: index selection, asset allocation, rebalancing, and more, automatically for you. This not only makes it so investing is easier for those participating, but frankly gets more people to invest in the first place instead of just leaving their money in cash because it’s become so much more accessible with all of the usual cognitive friction removed.

An effective tool for thinking through cognitive friction is building detailed user journeys of the entire current experience the user goes through to accomplish their goal, including all aspects of that journey, regardless of whether it’s currently serviced by your product or not. When you are able to detail each and every step and understand what’s painful, frustrating, or just time-consuming about it, then you can start to brainstorm opportunities for your product to directly address the cognitive friction you have now identified.

Emotional Friction
The final category of user friction is emotional friction, which refers to emotions your users feel that prevent them from accomplishing their goal. These are often the most difficult to perceive and equally the most difficult to address. Let’s take a look at a few of these in practice and how product designers ultimately solved them.

Patreon is a platform that enables creators of anything (music, blog posts, journalists, comics, etc) to run a membership business for their fans. They have now reached over 1 million monthly active Patrons and pay over $150 million per year to creators. When they were optimizing their overall on-boarding experience for creators, they initially solved for much of the typical interaction friction in the flow, simplifying the on-boarding, providing more detailed explanations, making their pricing far clearer, and more. But when they really dug into understanding their customers, they finally uncovered that one of the main reasons creators don’t actually go on to create a page is they are hesitant to look like they are begging their fans for money. They absolutely love what they do and they love their fans and it’s a very real emotional fear they have that they will alienate their audience by simply asking them for money. Once Patreon realized this emotional friction, they were able to get to work on solving it. And the tactic that worked best for them was showing the user other respected creators in their field who are successfully using Patreon with their fans. Once they see others asking for money and getting their fans to do it successfully, they usually lose their hangup over it.

Tinder is another great example of an app that solved for emotional friction in the world of online dating. With the previous generation of online dating experiences like Match.com, it was an incredibly intimidating experience that required you to put a ton of effort into an online profile, spend significant time searching for potential matches based on pics, interests, age, location, and more, and finally reach out to them. Reaching out to someone when you have no idea whether they have any mutual interest is as nerve-wracking of an experience as it gets. And the constant rejection can be incredibly discouraging. Tinder simplified the whole experience by reducing it to a series of profile cards that you simply swiped right if you were interested. If two people swiped right on each other, then their is mutual interest and then you have the ability to start a conversation. Tinder co-founder Sean Rad’s core insight was that no matter who you are, you feel more comfortable approaching somebody if you know they want you to approach them. Tinder took on the emotional friction of online dating head on and made it far more approachable by developing a light-weight mechanic for quickly determining mutual interest.

Over the last few years Facebook has struggled with it’s own challenges of emotional friction resulting in the percentage of unique sharers on it’s platform declining over time, especially amongst younger audiences, including teens and college students. These folks started sharing less for a variety of reasons, but largely because the bar for sharing on Facebook felt to them like it had gotten so much higher. They needed to showcase the very best of themselves to their friends and family. They were far more self-conscious about their sharing, especially since they had more and more friends on Facebook, including family, and the ability for anyone to easily find their profile. This emotional friction to sharing became a core focus for the team to solve. They launched a ton of new experiences attempting to address this, including Poke, Slingshot, Camera, Moments, and more. But none of them got any meaningful traction. All the while Snapchat grew its traction amongst the specific users Facebook was losing with a new core mechanic around Stories, which were short ephemeral photos and videos that you could share with your friends. And the crucial aspect was that they were self-deleting, which significantly reduced the bar to share and solved for the emotional friction associated with Facebook sharing. Ultimately Facebook realized that this was a far better approach to solve for their own emotional friction and adopted the same Stories mechanic across many of their apps.

Truly understanding the emotions of your users takes in-depth user interviews often out in the field where your users are and spending time getting to really know them, their aspirations, their goals, their frustrations, and encouraging them to share their emotions associated with your product experience. This is not a simple user research task. But necessary if your ultimately going to solve for the emotional friction that might ultimately be holding your product back from it’s full potential.

I hope this provides you an overview of the hierarchy of user friction across interaction friction, cognitive friction, and emotional friction, and gives you the tools to understand and solve for each type of user friction in your own product experience.

Sachin Rekhi is the Founder & CEO of Notejoy, a collaborative notes app for your entire team. It helps you get your most important work out of the noise of email & Slack and into a fast and focused workspace. He’s also written over 125+ essays on product management and entrepreneurship. Subscribe to new essays at sachinrekhi.com.

The Hierarchy of User Friction was originally published in UsabilityGeek on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking through how to optimize my personal productivity to drive the greatest effectiveness. In doing so I’ve reflected upon how there have been specific times in my life where I’m completely in the state of flow, accomplishing far more than I’ve ever accomplished, and absolutely loving every minute of it. And at the same time there have been days where it just feels like I’m doing sloppy work and can’t seem to get my ideas to click. And I’ve thought about what was so special about the former days and what could I do to have far more of them. I call this unlocking my inner beast mode and I’ve been experimenting with a variety of practices as I pursue my latest startup to drive maximum productivity. Here are five best practices that I’ve discovered so far that work well for me and hopefully may be helpful for you as well.

Manage your body to enhance your mind

While many people have talked endlessly about the importance of diet, exercise, and sleep to improving creative work and productivity, I honestly have never taken this advice very seriously until now. And I know so many of my peers here in the valley that have fallen trap to ignoring this as well. It’s not a surprise as the endless work hard mentality of Silicon Valley leaves little room for such things when your so focused on “changing the world”. But I finally stopped ignoring this advice and the benefits are real and so critical to unlocking my inner beast mode.

The negative effects of diet are easily recognizable across the Silicon Valley workforce as post lunch food coma. We all know that familiar slump that sets in that causes the early afternoon to sometimes feel like a wash. It shouldn’t be so surprising then that the opposite can be such an enhancement to performance. For me the secret has been finding consistent small healthy meals and snacks that I eat throughout the day that never leave me feeling hungry nor super full. And developing such a routine also removes temptation and time spent even thinking about food. My typical day starts with coffee and greek yogurt with raspberries, a huge salad for lunch, clementines as my afternoon snack, and then a more traditional dinner. When I can stick to this, I feel great throughout the day and never have any periods of sluggishness. When I started as an entrepreneur, I thought the skill to master was to learn to be effective with minimal sleep. I certainly now take the exact opposite approach. I’ve learned 8 hours is ideal for me. While I feel fine with 7 hours, I do find my idea generation, creativity, and synthesis of ideas is best with a full 8. So I consistently try to get to bed by midnight and wake at 8 am every day to ensure my full eight hours of sleep.

Exercise has become an equally important part of driving productivity. After I’ve had a great workout, I undoubtedly feel both physically and mentally awake and it’s a huge performance driver. My favorite activity is swimming because I always feel incredible afterwards, but it’s much harder to sustain a regular swimming regimen. I find though that any amount of physical activity is an accelerant. So I take daily walks in the afternoon to clear my mind and ensure continued performance when I get back to my desk. What’s great about it is I often stumble upon great ideas for the problem at hand on these walks when away from my desk. I personally like using Runkeeper and the Withings app for tracking workouts, steps, and weight.

It’s so easy not to invest any time in diet, exercise, and sleep when it feels like you have a million things to do to move your work forward, but I’m here to tell you it’s a mistake and a crucial step to optimizing performance.

Embrace single-tasking

I’ve also ultimately learned that multi-tasking is a mistake and significantly decelerates performance and reduces quality of my work. I’ve thus embraced a variety of tactics that enable me to single-task effectively.

Minimizing distractions is tantamount to effective deep work. It’s way too easy in this day and age to get distracted and you need to be very proactive to solve for this. I limit checking email to only morning, around lunch, and evening. I also have turned off all push notifications on my iPhone outside of messaging to ensure social media doesn’t distract me either. While quickly checking up on email and social media might feel light-weight, context switching and interruptions are so expensive as it takes material time to switch back to the primary task at hand. As they say it’s hard to fix what you don’t measure, so I measure how I’m doing by using RescueTime, a great time tracking app that automatically tracks what apps and websites I use on my desktop. It generates a weekly report showing me how I spent time across both productive and unproductive apps and sites. I look at the report each week and think through how I can further reduce time spent throughout the day on communication, social media, entertainment categories and increase the time spent in productive work-related apps.

Equally important is minimizing distractions in the form of meetings. If your heavily scheduled and only have an hour here and there to get work done, those few hours are almost impossible to make highly productive. I try my best to schedule my day in morning/afternoon chunks, ensuring that I have 3+ hour interrupted chunks of time to focus on a set of tasks. This might result in me scheduling all my meetings in the morning and then having the afternoon completely free, or scheduling a mid-day meeting to allow me to have both a long morning work session and then another long afternoon session. Or I sometimes have a full meeting day followed by several days completely meeting free. At the end of the week I look at my Google Calendar and reflect on how productive it’s been and if there are any adjustments I want to make going forward on how I’m allocating my time.

Optimize mood & motivation

Creative work is such that being in the optimal state of mind is so important for bringing out my inner beast mode. There are multiple aspects that go into achieving this, largely focused on improving my mood and motivation.

One of the mistakes I think folks make when prioritizing tasks is simply prioritizing based on importance and urgency. While that does get you to a list of work that optimizes for the priority of the business, it doesn’t appropriately take into account accelerants inherent to mood and motivation. For example, I’ve found task variety is important to keep me motivated and engaged. If I’m doing the same thing for too long, I get unengaged and it’s certainly not my best work. So I incorporate task variety into the way I schedule the tasks I’m going to do to ensure that I’m never stuck in a lull just doing the same kind of work.

In addition, while I set overall priorities for the week of tasks that need to get done, I allow myself to each day decide what task I’m going to focus on based on what I feel like doing. I find that when I add this level of flexibility into my workload, I get way better quality output, even if the tasks are done out of the natural priority order. At the same time I embrace my fits of inspiration when they come to me for certain task types. Blogging is definitely this way for me. While I have a long list of blog posts I’ve been meaning to write, the best blog posts are ones that come to me with a fit of inspiration and that I immediately decide to just author right there and then. Those post are written the fastest and often the most well received. While it causes me to derail my initial plans for the day, it’s worth it for the improvement in quality of output.

I also think through how I can optimize my mood and mental state while performing each task. Music is such an important part of my work. When I’m coding or designing, I’m always listening to music. Oftentimes a single song on repeat played 20–30 times on YouTube. This really gets me in the zone and is a big boost to my productivity. However, it’s definitely task type dependent. For example, I can’t write and listen to music. Instead I need complete silence during these tasks.

Finding your muse is so important for creative work, so take the time to be thoughtful about what that might be for you.

Conduct personal daily standups

Daily standups have become a common practice amongst product teams as a quick way to get the team together, discuss progress and upcoming tasks, and resolve any bottlenecks in the process. I find it an equally important process that I adopt personally each morning at the start of my day.

Each day I update my list in Asana with the set of tasks I plan on accomplishing today, both based on the overall week’s priorities as well as what I feel like tackling today. I re-order it based on the order I’m going to execute against them and come up with ballpark estimates of how long each task will take. I also review my calendar for today’s meetings, time I need to prep them, and also mentally determine when I’m going to do each task on my list. After this is done, then I embark on actually tackling each task.

Most importantly though, I start each day with a post mortem on yesterday. I look at how many of the tasks that I set out to complete were actually completed. I compare my time estimate for the task to how long it actually took me. Doing this is important to reflect on how productive I was and if there were any issues that were preventing me from being productive and learning from them. Similarly it helps me tune my own intuition on estimating how long a task is going to take which helps prioritize for the next day. I find committing to this process every morning helps me to avoid distractions and avoid finding myself asking where the day went.

Recommit to your mission

Last, but certainly not least, I find it incredibly important to ensure that I’m regularly recommitting to my mission. It’s so important to really believe in why you are doing the work you’re doing and understanding why that work is so important to you personally. Only when you are doing work that will ultimately leave you fulfilled will you be able to bring your A-game to it.

If you don’t understand the personal why behind your work, I highly encourage you to spend time finding it. And if you can’t, frankly it may be worth exploring other opportunities where that personal why is clearer.

I’ve ultimately found my career mission to be to unlock human potential through software. It’s what motivates me every morning to do the work that I do, to dream about the changes I can bring to the world, and to have fun doing it along the way. I remind myself of this mission often and how the tasks I’m doing each day get me one step closer to trying to achieve it.

I hope this gives you some food for thought on how I’ve been able to unlock my own inner beast mode and how you might be able to do so as well.

Sachin Rekhi is the Founder & CEO of Notejoy, a collaborative notes app for your entire team. It helps you get your most important work out of the noise of email & Slack and into a fast and focused workspace. He’s also written over 125+ essays on product management and entrepreneurship. Subscribe to new essays at sachinrekhi.com.

I’m a firm believer in needing to find your personal passion/skill/opportunity fit as the ultimate path to career fulfillment. Only when you find a career that you’re passionate about, that you can also be skilled at, and one that has sufficient market opportunity will you achieve ultimate career satisfaction. And it takes a careful balance of all three dimensions because simply finding fit along one dimension unfortunately won’t result in success nor fulfillment.

While most folks found value in this framework when thinking about career fulfillment, some wondered what was a viable process by which they could actually get there. They knew that the role they were in wasn’t it, but also didn’t know how to find their personal passion/skill/opportunity fit nor how to start heading in the right direction.

To provide my perspective on this, I wanted to share my own career journey and how I specifically leveraged an explore & exploit algorithm at every turn of my career to ultimately find my dream job.

Bear with me for a minute here, because I’m going to start by taking a detour and explaining a much researched problem in probability theory: the multi-armed bandit problem. So let’s say you’re a gambler that just walked into a casino to play the slots. When you get to a row of slot machines, you need to decide which machines to play, how many times to play them, and in which order. Each machine delivers a random reward from a probability distribution unique to each machine. However you don’t know which machines have the best reward distribution up-front. So how would you go about playing the slot machines to maximize your reward?

The fundamental challenge is that you initially have no information on how well each machine does. And you only get that information when you actually play the machine. So the essential trade-off at every turn for the gambler is whether to focus on exploitation, or reaping the reward of the highest known expected payout, or exploration, getting more information on the the expected payout of other machines. There are a variety of theoretical approaches to solving the problem, but all of them take some form of focusing early on exploration to gather information on expected payouts and over time biasing towards exploitation to reap the best rewards with the information you have. Yet many of the best algorithms also focus on continually exploring even in the later stages to ensure you are continuing to gather information on what will ultimately deliver the highest rewards.

This overall strategy of balancing exploration to gather new information and exploitation to reap the highest known rewards applies well beyond this theoretical gambler problem but also is the essence of the strategy I’ve employed to navigate my own career and find my passion/skill/opportunity fit. The approach is that early on in your career you should find as many opportunities as possible to explore potential roles and careers to start to learn information about what you might be passionate about, skilled at, and has ample market opportunity. As you progress in your career, you should continue to balance exploration of new roles, careers, and opportunities, with exploitation: spending the time to develop depth, skills, and expertise in a specific career. Yet you should never give up exploration even as you focus more and more of your energy building depth and expertise in your chosen career path.

This all sounds very theoretical, so the best way for me to illustrate is to walk you through my own career journey and the twists and turns of exploration and exploitation throughout.

I was lucky enough to find my passion early in life: in middle school my uncle gave me his old Apple IIc computer and I immediately fell in love. Not just with using the computer, but very quickly in high school learned how to program it to make initially games and then various apps and utilities. I remember being ecstatic when I learned that programming computers was a profession and I knew what my calling was: I wanted to develop software that improved people’s lives.

But that’s as specific as my passion was at the time. I knew nothing about technology companies, nothing about startups, nothing about the various role in the industry. And so I knew I had a lot to learn to figure it out and was eager to do so as quickly as possible. So I convinced a local telecom, PaeTec Communications, which I knew had software engineers, to let me do a 2 week shadowing in my junior year in high school, where I literally just sat next to various technical folks all day throughout the company, observed, and helped out where I could. Sometimes that meant literally fetching the coffee. Other times they let me help them generate reports, deliver new computers to new employees, and even answer a few IT calls. What was amazing about this opportunity is that I got to see lots of technical roles in that short time. Folks writing internal software, other folks generating reports for business reporting, as well as internal IT supporting the employees, all of which was completely new to me.

I worked hard to impress them and finally was able to convince them that I actually knew how to code. So my senior summer of high school, they hired me as their youngest software engineering intern to build a few internal utilities for their billing department. I actually ended up building their first “e-billing system”, which converted traditionally paper bills into PDFs and emailed them to their customers for review. I had my first exposure to gathering requirements, outlining them in a spec, writing and testing the software, as well as operationalizing the software and fixing bugs as they came up in use. It was all very much over my head but some of the most accelerated learning I’ve ever done. This early exploration through shadowing and interning convinced me even further that I was going to study computer science in college.

What excited me about the opportunity to study at the University of Pennsylvania was the ability to pursue a dual degree in computer science and business. I knew eventually I wanted to have my own software company and I thought the combination of business and computer science skills would enable me to do it. But along the way I ended up getting a concentration in finance at Wharton because it was what Wharton was most well known for. And my sophomore summer I decided to try out an internship at Goldman Sachs working on Banking Technology: writing software applications for investment bankers. At the time I thought this would be the perfect mix of my passion for finance and software engineering. So I felt absolutely ecstatic when I got the internship. Yet at the end of the summer I found myself feeling unfulfilled. While I got to combine my software and finance background, the apps I was building didn’t feel all that important and the bankers at Goldman Sachs were the folks who were most respected, not the rest of us in “IT”. So it ended up being a failure for me in finding what I ultimately wanted to do. But keep in mind: it was a cheap failure. A three month internship was by far the best possible way for me to explore whether this was for me. And it wasn’t. And that’s OK.

The subsequent summer I went on to intern at Microsoft. The twist was that the Microsoft recruiter encouraged me to apply for a role as a program manager given my business and computer science background. While I had never heard of the role, it sounded intriguing so I gave it a try. And that’s when I ultimately discovered product management and at the end of the summer realized that was exactly what I wanted to do with my career. It got at the core of what I loved about software: designing software to delight users and improve their lives. I didn’t feel a dying need to write the software myself so much as help shape what it would ultimately be. And thus began my career in product management.

Many would expect that the story would end there. I had explored a variety of roles and then found the role for me and now it was time to develop deep skills and advance in the career. But I’m here to say that the story certainly did not end there. I continued to explore & exploit throughout my career even up until today. A few examples to illustrate:

• While at Microsoft in the program management role, I knew I loved the job, but I was frustrated that the scope of each program manager was only a small set of features. I wanted my scope to be larger across an entire product. I had learned that product marketers had a focus of the entire product and were far more customer-facing. And I had always loved spending time with customers. So after a year and a half in product management, I asked if I could take a role in product marketing at Microsoft. And I did exactly that. While it fulfilled my desired to have a “broader scope” of the entire product, I now felt so disconnected from having a strong influence on what the ultimate product would be. And I deeply missed it. After six months I knew that product marketing wasn’t for me and I was done.
• Despite working at Microsoft, I always had an itch to try my hand at my own startup. So after 2 years at Microsoft, I left to startup a company with a couple of buddies. We knew we had no idea what we were doing, so we were excited to get into the Y Combinator accelerator program. It allowed us to work with experts to get our startup off the ground and to be in a strong community of fellow entrepreneurs going through the exact same experience. I had no idea whether startups were for me, but a 3-month accelerator program felt like an incredibly cheap way to try it out and see if maybe it was. And this exploration ultimately panned out to be an absolute hit. Once I scratched that itch of being an entrepreneur, I knew that bringing brand new products to market is exactly what I loved, whether at my own startup or at established tech firms.

• For my next startup, I took an opportunity to join Trinity Ventures as an Entrepreneur in Residence, which ended up being the perfect exploration phase for figuring out my next startup. I spent months investigating, researching, and doing due diligence on a variety of startup opportunities before I picked the one that I ultimately decided on. This ended up being an amazing way of exploring founder/market fit: finding the startup opportunity that exemplified passion/skill/opportunity not just for me individually, but for the business as well.
• While I’m now pursuing a new startup that I’m absolutely passionate about that fulfills all my requirements for passion/skill/opportunity fit, just the other week I went through a quick exercise because I found myself continually excited about many of the frontier tech opportunities that have recently emerged: whether it’s brain-computer interfaces, virtual reality, or the new space age. So I took a weekend to think through and explore what pursuing those spaces would actually look like. While the ultimate conclusion was exactly what I expected (that I’m already pursuing the opportunity that is the very best passion/skill/opportunity fit for me), I still believe that the time spent in the exploration was absolutely worth it.

Sachin Rekhi on Twitter

Was reflecting on the technologies I find most inspiring for our future: brain-computer interfaces, virtual reality, a renewed space age!

The reason I went through all the details of how I’ve continued the exploration phase even late in my career while continuing to exploit and build depth of skills and expertise as both a product manager and entrepreneur is that too often I find folks in the middle of their career feeling trapped: feeling that they are not in their ideal job but feeling like they would have to start all over to explore alternative career options that may ultimately not pan out. It often results in risk aversion with them “settling” for their career without necessarily finding fulfillment. My hope is to convince you that if you think creatively, there are many ways to explore alternative options in light and cheap ways that will ultimately help you get closer to your own passion/skill/opportunity fit. And that the exploration is always worth it, even when you think you are already pursuing your dream job and even when the fruits of that exploration don’t pan out.

I hope you take this opportunity to think about where you are in your own career’s explore & exploit cycle and how you can continually find ways to explore to ensure you ultimately find your own career fulfillment.

Sachin Rekhi is the Founder & CEO of Notejoy, a collaborative notes app for your entire team. It helps you get your most important work out of the noise of email & Slack and into a fast and focused workspace. He’s also written over 125+ essays on product management and entrepreneurship. Subscribe to new essays at sachinrekhi.com.

When I first started learning about product design, one of the most influential books I read was The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. In this classic work, Don Norman sheds light on the design of every day objects like doors, stoves, thermostats, and more. He then applies these universal design principles to designing technology products. Don Norman is one of the leading thinkers on human-centered design and the principles he writes about are required reading for every product designer. I still reference these principles daily in my work designing Notejoy. So I wanted to walk through each of Don Norman’s six principles of designing interactions and how they remain relevant to designing digital products today.

Visibility
Visibility is the basic principle that the more visible an element is, the more likely users will know about them and how to use them. Equally important is the opposite: when something is out of sight, it’s difficult to know about and use.

As simple as this principle is, designers still struggle with adopting it. The trade-off between hamburger side-bar menus and tab-bar menus in mobile applications is a very recent design debate centered around this very principle of visibility. While the hamburger menu provides a convenient place to store a variety of menu items in a mobile app, it comes at a huge disadvantage: the lack of visibility of the contained menu items. We’ve seen a shift in major apps like Facebook away from hamburger menus and back toward tab-bar menus to improve the visibility of their key experiences.

The skill in applying this principle is realizing that you can’t make everything visible, because it’ll ultimately clutter the interface but instead need to prioritize what interface elements are by far the most important for the user experience and prioritize their visibility.

Feedback
Feedback is the principle of making it clear to the user what action has been taken and what has been accomplished. Many forms of feedback exist in interaction design, including visual, tactile, audio, and more. The key is to design the experience to never leave the user guessing about what action they have taken and the consequence of doing so.

We’ve established a variety of design patterns for providing feedback to the user and these feedback patterns are constantly evolving as move interfaces emerge. Here’s a brief video showing the many ways that Google’s Material design pattern encourages you to provide feedback to the user on the actions they are taking in a mobile app.

Constraints
Constraints is about limiting the range of interaction possibilities for the user to simplify the interface and guide the user to the appropriate next action. This is a case where constraints are clarifying, since they make it clear what can be done. Limitless possibilities often leave the user confused.

Conversational interfaces are all the rage these days because they provide the opportunity to speak to a computer via our natural language, which feels far more natural than the traditional user interface methods. However, to-date these interfaces have struggled with a lack of constraints: with limitless possibilities of what you could potentially say to the conversational interface, it becomes impossible to know what kind of queries the interface actually supports. And given the technology today fails to be able to answer every possible query, the endless possibilities are frustrating to the user since it becomes difficult to even know how to use it.

Mapping
Mapping is about having a clear relationship between controls and the effect they have on the world. You want this mapping to feel as natural as possible. Stove tops are a great example here. When you see the first image, the mapping is not very clear because it’s difficult to determine which control operates each burner. Versus the second image, it’s far clearer the control that controls each burner, which has a better mapping.

This slider also has a strong mapping, since it’s clear moving it to the right will increase it’s value versus moving it to the left will decrease it.

Apple shook up the world in 2011 when it introduced natural scrolling to Mac OS X Lion. This reversed the familiar pattern of scrolling a page down by holding your fingers on the trackpad and dragging them downward. Instead this was reversed such that you would drag your finger up on the trackpad to scroll the page down. This reversal more closely mapped with the way we used iPhones and iPads. The controversy here is really about a mapping. Was the new mapping too jarring because it changed the conventional mapping that had been used across Mac and Windows for decades? Or was it more natural because it mapped to how you would push a piece of paper up to move it down and also matched the new behavior created on mobile phones. There’s no easy answer here, though I’d say I myself turn off natural scrolling on my Mac because I, like many others, prefer the convention established decades ago.

Consistency
Consistency refers to having similar operations and similar elements for achieving similar tasks. By leveraging consistent elements throughout your entire experience, you make your experience far easier to use. This consistency is important not only within your interface, but across the many interfaces users are using across their devices.

This is a simple example of poor consistency when you are using so many different styles for actions within your interface.

One of the best ways to drive consistency across applications is to make ample use of Google’s Material Design Guidelines and iOS’s Human Interaction Guidelines when designing mobile applications.

Affordance
Affordance refers to an attribute of an object that allows people to know how to use it. Essentially to afford means to give a clue. The physical button on a mouse gives a clue that it can be clicked to perform an action. When an object has strong affordances, it’s very clear how to use it.

Don Norman talks at length about how doors often have poor affordances. When you come up to a door, it’s not always clear do you push or pull the door? One convention used is to put a sheet of metal at around arm height on the side of the door that needs to be pushed to make it clear that it must be pushed instead of being pulled. When you do this, you are giving the door a strong affordance to indicate it should be pushed instead of pulled.

As web and mobile design has been evolving to more modern interfaces, in some ways we have been removing many of the common affordances we have classically used. For example, the blue underlined link used to be the strongest affordance for knowing something was a clickable link on the web. Many web experiences have moved away from this in an attempt to allow link elements to better match with the overall design aesthetic they are trying to achieve across the interface. While that’s a helpful goal, we have to ensure that it’s still clear what in fact are clickable links on the page using alternative affordances, like showing the underline on hover. When we remove all such affordances, the interface becomes meaningfully harder to use.

As you can see, all six of Don Norman’s principles of interaction design remain as relevant today as they did when he originally authored his classic work, The Design of Everyday Things.

Sachin Rekhi is the Founder & CEO of Notejoy, a collaborative notes app for your entire team. It helps you get your most important work out of the noise of email & Slack and into a fast and focused workspace. He’s also written over 125+ essays on product management and entrepreneurship. Subscribe to new essays at sachinrekhi.com.

When I went to college I knew that my ultimate aspiration was to found my own tech startup and in order to prepare myself for that goal, I decided to pursue a dual-degree at the University of Pennsylvania from both the engineering and business schools. I studied computer science in the engineering school and ultimately settled on finance at Wharton. While I may have been better served studying marketing or management, I did learn some important finance principles that I still use day-to-day in my product management role. I wanted to share three such principles that I find incredibly relevant to product.

Finding the arbitrage opportunity
One concept that we often talked about with respect to trading was finding arbitrage opportunities. An arbitrage is basically buying low in one market and simultaneously selling higher in another, profiting from a temporary difference. For example, buying an antique in Florida and re-selling it for a higher price in California would be a simple arbitrage opportunity.

I find myself always evaluating every growth channel on it’s attractiveness as an arbitrage opportunity. We often talk about how in growth you can’t simply re-use a list of tactics for your own product because the channels are constantly becoming saturated, over-run, and thus less effective. And thus you need to be constantly scouring for new growth opportunities and determining whether an arbitrage opportunity continues to exist. For a SaaS business this may be specifically determining whether you can acquire a customer at a cost of acquisition (CAC) that is well below the customer’s ultimate lifetime value (LTV), thus re-creating the “buy low” and “sell high” opportunity. But more broadly, I think it’s important to leverage this mindset for all businesses. When evaluating a channel, how saturated is it? Are there many folks already exploiting the channel? Does the arbitrage opportunity remain? For example, Atlassian was successful early on in going directly after developers in driving their initial acquisition via free/cheap open source editions that could be installed on dev boxes. This was in stark contrast at the time to their competitors that were largely focused on getting tools into organizations via the IT organization. This helped them grow very fast initially. Many others copied this approach of marketing primarily to individual developers, like New Relic and Twilio, resulting in several companies going IPO via specifically exploiting the developer channel. Yet now, everyone is embracing developers as a key audience to go after, even coining it B2D (business-to-developer), and the arbitrage opportunity is not nearly as attractive as it used to be.

Leveraging modern portfolio theory
In investment management, we studied the idea of modern portfolio theory, which states that an investor can construct a diverse portfolio to maximize expected return based on a given level of acceptable market risk. The key was that while diversification could help mitigate risk, it came at the cost of expected return. Risk and return were directly correlated. While I leverage this theory as the basis for managing my personal finances (via Wealthfront), I find it also applicable to product.

I think about my product’s roadmap as a modern portfolio, where I’m constantly balancing risk/reward across a diverse portfolio of product initiatives. And at each stage of the product lifecycle, I’m re-assessing the acceptable level of risk to guide the portfolio of initiatives to include in each product cycle. As soon as you launch your product, prioritizing initiatives becomes far more challenging because it’s not as simple as doing the one most important thing because you’re constantly balancing bugs, performance/scale issues, poor performing functionality, customer feedback, brand new features, and entirely new products. There is no steadfast rule that can be applied to guide which items should be included in the upcoming sprint. That’s where I find portfolio theory helpful, thinking through the right allocation of resources across these various initiatives and what’s appropriate for where the product is at. Maybe you just launched and your pre-product/market fit. Then your portfolio may be heavily weighted towards improving the existing experiences to get them to resonate. Or maybe you’re further along your journey for product/market fit and can now think about allocating a meaningful portion of resources to new features/products to expand the market opportunity. While I’m not calculating expected returns during this process, thinking through initiative allocation across each category of investment is extremely helpful.

Assessing performance against stated strategy
Probably the most important finance principle I learned wasn’t from a class at Wharton, but from Andy Rachleff, the CEO of Wealthfront. One of the things we often talked about at Wharton was the difficulty of assessing an investment based on past performance. We’ve all seen the disclosures saying “past performance is not indicative of future performance” right before we evaluate an investment based on it’s historical returns. We often talk about the hot hand fallacy, which is the false belief that someone who has achieved success with a seemingly random event has a greater chance of future success. Yet this remains what we are effectively doing when judging future performance based on past performance. And while we’ve countlessly shown what’s wrong with this approach, we continue to leverage it as the main mechanism for evaluating fund performance.

But is there a better way? Andy Rachleff, based on his years as Vice Chairman of Penn’s university endowment, is convinced there is a better way. The approach is to evaluate fund performance on whether it outperformed based on executing faithfully on an a priori stated strategy and whether the outperformance was specifically driven by that stated strategy. If this is true, then those funds that do outperform in this way do most often see repeated success. As in then past performance does become indicative of future performance. The challenge from an investment perspective is its almost impossible to get this level of data and insight that you would need to evaluate based on this approach (unless, say, you are a prominent university endowment).

So what’s the application to product? Well, we are constantly looking for best practices to replicate when building our own products based on the success of other products, but we often conflate their success with the supposed best practice that they leveraged to achieve it. Sometimes a product’s success is not because of a specific tactic that they employed, but may in fact be in spite of it. So when trying to find repeatable best practices, I constantly look for lessons where I can determine that the team a priori had stated a specific strategy that they faithfully executed on and there success can in-fact be attributed to that very strategy. Only then do you have “outperformance against stated strategy” that can be used as a repeatable lesson for your own endeavors. As an example, I remember when the hamburger menu became a popular design choice for mobile apps. Apps started to incorporate it into their apps as a clean way to extend their navigation beyond the few items typically shown in tab bar navigation. The approach became especially popular when Facebook embraced it in their application. I saw so many more apps starting to adopt it after this point. And I imagine many product teams justified the approach based on Facebook’s usage of it. Yet recently we’ve seen so many applications move away from this approach, including Facebook, as A/B test after A/B test has shown that the hamburger menu reduces discoverability and engagement when used as a primary form of navigation. This was a case where folks were leveraging the best practice of using hamburger menus for primary navigation as exemplified by companies like Facebook without in-fact ensuring that this tactic itself was resulting in success for Facebook or not. Facebook wasn’t successful because of the hamburger menu. They were successful in spite of it.

I hope this gives you a few frameworks from the world of finance that might be as helpful to you as they are for me in product management.

Sachin Rekhi is the Founder & CEO of Notejoy, a collaborative notes app for your entire team. It helps you get your most important work out of the noise of email & Slack and into a fast and focused workspace. He’s also written over 125+ essays on product management and entrepreneurship. Subscribe to new essays at sachinrekhi.com.

[This is the third post in my Understanding User Psychology series. If you haven’t already, make sure to check out Meet Your Happy Chemicals and The Psychology of Persuasion.]

When looking to understand user psychology to design better product experiences, one of the richest sources of knowledge exists within the game design world. Game designers have been refining their techniques for decades to build ever more engaging and enjoyable experiences that drive specific player behavior. Their techniques are rooted in a deep understanding of player psychology and have built an incredible set of mechanics that they repeatably leverage to design addicting games.

Today I wanted to provide an overview of some of the tenants of game design and particular game mechanics that can be leveraged to drive user behavior in any digital product.

Motivation
Game design always starts with an understanding of player motivation. Motivation ultimately breaks down into two categories: intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation drives someone to perform a task for the enjoyment of the task itself. Daniel Pink is the leading expert on intrinsic motivation, who breaks it down to autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Everyone agrees intrinsic motivation is the better kind of motivation and one needs to ensure that there is some intrinsic motivation in the first place for why someone is using your game or app.

Extrinsic motivation, on the other hand, drives someone to perform a task simply for an external reward or to avoid punishment. Extrinsic motivation is what game designers take advantage of to design enjoyable games and we’ll see exactly how they do so through a variety of game mechanics.

Player Types
Beyond simple motivation, game designers recognize that players come to a game with their own personality types seeking different kinds of enjoyment. It’s important to recognize this and creates experiences that allow each of the player types to thrive in the game. Player types are classically divided into four categories:

Achievers enjoy gaining points, levels, equipment and other concrete measurements of succeeding in a game. They will go to great lengths to achieve rewards that confer minimal gameplay benefit simply for the prestige of having it.

Explorers enjoy discovering areas, creating maps and learning about hidden places. They love to take their time to explore new areas and look around at their own pace.

Socializers enjoy interacting with other players, and on some occasions, computer-controlled characters with personality. The game is merely a tool they use to meet others in-game or outside of it.

Killers enjoy competition with other players and are there to win against their peers.

Game Mechanics
By understanding the different player types within your game, a game designer can build experiences that create extrinsic motivation for each of these player types. Game designers have established a set of best practices for doing so, which manifest in individual game mechanics they choose to leverage to drive enjoyment and desired behavior out of their users.

Let’s take a look at ten popular game mechanics:

Achievement
The achievement mechanic enables players to earn achievements, which are virtual or physical representations of having accomplished something. These are often viewed by players as rewards in and of themselves.

Games with badges, levels, rewards, and points are all examples of the achievement mechanic. We equally see such badges and levels used in apps like Foursquare, fitness apps, and more.

Envy
The envy mechanic creates an experience where a player desires to have something that another player already has. In order for this to be effective, a player needs to be able to see what other players have (voyeurism).

Allowing players to showcase their badges, levels to other players, allowing players to visit each other’s farms in FarmVille, and leaderboards in general are all examples of experiences that create envy. The reality is all social products with profile and status updates inevitably create some level of envy with others through voyeurism.

Ownership
The ownership mechanic allows players to control something or have it as their property, which they take pride in having.

Controlling parts of a game board or owning a vast army are game examples of this mechanic. Simply “owning” popularity by having a large digital representation of many friends is the equivalent of this on social products.

Progression
The progression mechanic displays success granularly and is measured through the process of completing itemized tasks.

Leveling up your player from 1 to 60 is the classic example of the progression mechanic. Any kind of progress bar you create in an product or service is how this often manifests outside of games.

Status
The status mechanic enables you to have a rank or level in a game that confers status in the eyes of the player and others.

Being able to brag to your friends about your white paladin level 20 in WOW is the status mechanic at play. Github conveys the status of developers on their developer profiles by visualizing and summarizing their contributions across various open-source projects.

Collection
The collection mechanic enables players to create a collection of items, whether they are achievements, resources, or anything else in the game.

Collecting resources and badges are the classic game examples of this. The central action on Pinterest of pinning various visuals into your pin-board is also a great example of the collection mechanic at work.

Blissful Productivity
The blissful productivity mechanic takes advantage of the idea that playing a game can make you happier working hard, than you would be relaxing. Essentially, we’re optimized as human beings by working hard, and doing meaningful and rewarding work.

Grinding in WoW is the classic example of blissful productivity. Oftentimes when we are building app experiences we try to make things as easy as possible to avoid our users having to do work. But what’s equally important is enabling experiences that get them in a state of blissful productivity, encouraging them to do work in our apps quite willingly. It still amazes me the relatively small set of contributors that maintain all of Wikipedia, a great example of blissful productivity.

Appointment
The appointment mechanic requires that to succeed, one must return at a predefined time to take some action. Appointment mechanics are often deeply related to interval based reward schedules.

Farmville requires you to come back to the game at a set time to water your plants or they will wither away. Happy Hours are a real-world example of the appointment mechanic at work.

Cascading Information
The cascading information mechanic releases information in the minimum possible snippets in order to allow players to gain the appropriate level of understanding at each point during a game narrative.

Games typically show basic actions first, unlocking more as you progress through levels. Well-designed app on-boarding experiences follow this same mechanic as opposed to putting all product education up-front.

Epic Meaning
The epic meaning mechanic takes advantage of the idea that players will be highly motivated if they believe they are working to achieve something great, something awe-inspiring, something bigger than themselves.

Warcraft’s ongoing story line has epic meaning to many of it’s players, creating such deep engagement with players both inside and outside of the game. When you can tie the usage of your product or service to such an epic meaning, you’ll find significantly higher motivation. May open source developers contribute to open-source projects for this very reason.

I hope this gives you a glimpse of how game designers think through driving extrinsic motivation for their various player types through a variety of established game mechanics. Next time you design a product experience, take a moment to think through whether there are applicable game mechanics that might enable you to accelerate your desired behavior from your user.

For those interested, I’d encourage you to read more from a thought leader and expert in game design, Amy Jo Kim.

Sachin Rekhi is the Founder & CEO of Notejoy, a collaborative notes app for your entire team. It helps you get your most important work out of the noise of email & Slack and into a fast and focused workspace. He’s also written over 125+ essays on product management and entrepreneurship. Subscribe to new essays at sachinrekhi.com.

One of the critical responsibilities of product managers is driving the overall execution of their product. Relentless execution will ultimately determine whether you’ll be able to make your product vision a reality. Driving the execution of your product not only means doing whatever it takes to make your product win, but it also encompasses a set of core project management responsibilities. While many product managers are familiar with agile methodologies for managing a development team, I don’t believe it provides a full view of how a product manager should be effectively managing their overall product process.

Today I wanted to provide a complete picture of a modern project management process for product managers. This covers a set of planning and project management activities that product managers should drive annually, quarterly, bi-weekly, and daily to effectively manage a product development process. It’s rooted in the agile movement, with a deep recognition that customer needs and product requirements are ever-evolving and agility is absolutely paramount to enable you to swiftly change plans as soon as it’s appropriate. At the same time, it recognizes that planning is absolutely necessary for enabling blue-sky thinking, thoughtful trade-offs of priorities, driving team alignment, and ultimately for enabling you to realize your product’s long-term vision.

Let’s walk through each planning activity, it’s purpose, and benefits.

Annual Planning
The annual planning process is an important opportunity to take a step-back from the day-to-day execution of your product. It often starts with a re-assessment of the market you play in, taking the time to look at the industry you operate in, think through emerging or waning technology trends, and taking an updated pulse on your standing in the market. It’s a good time to reflect on how well you are serving the needs of your customers and their overall satisfaction with your product offering.

It’s also a good time to ensure that the vision you’ve established for your product is still appropriate. While a vision should have long-term stability and should change rather infrequently, there do come occasions when it makes sense to revise it. Treat the annual planning process as a check-in to ensure your vision is still serving you well.

While the output of an annual planning process can take multiple forms, I’ve found 5-year roadmap themes to be a great aid in facilitating the right level of discussion. I’ve typically seen this done as a single slide or single-page document. While the upcoming year will have a great degree of specificity, the outer years will likely only have a few sentences or bullets associated with their themes. This exercise facilitates long-term thinking into where you ultimately aspire to go, but also forces a very real trade-off discussion of whether the next year is going to be the year that you start to take on some of these longer-term objectives or not.

For example, we are currently experiencing an explosion in artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities and for many consumer & B2B services, it’s important to understand this technology trend. After careful consideration you might decide that your product is a perfect fit for it, the time is right, and you have the right team capabilities to put machine learning related themes into next year’s roadmap. On the other hand you might decide that it’s not well-suited for your product, you have far lower-hanging customer challenges that need to be addressed, and the next 2 years are not the time for you to pivot away from your existing roadmap. This is exactly the kind of discussion you want to facilitate with your team’s stakeholders.

When it comes to costing & estimation, I find that roadmap themes are too high-level to be able to get granular costing of effort required. And since the actual implementation of features can be so far out, the effort required for granular costing is rarely worth it. Instead I find leveraging experienced product & engineering leads with a specific stated team size can usually provide t-shirt sizing (S, M, L) that can be used to have a high-level trade-off discussion of what can realistically fit in this upcoming year vs. not.

As an example, Facebook released a 10 year roadmap which mimics the later years of the 5-year roadmap themes that I mentioned in terms of just high-level bullets, though you’ll want to have more detail in the 1st and 2nd years than shown here:

Quarterly OKRs
Quarterly OKRs provide an opportunity to concretely define the product outcomes you plan on achieving in the next three months. I like using OKRs, or objectives & key results, because of their specific focus on measurable outcomes. The objective defines what you want to accomplish, usually covering the product functionality or improvements you plan on shipping. And the key results defines the measurable product outcome you expect to achieve, including specific metric lifts you expect to see as a direct result of the product initiatives. These tend to be acquisition, engagement, or monetization metric lifts. But it could be anything worth measuring (increase in net promoter score, reduction in customer support tickets, increase in sales velocity, etc).

Taking the time to appropriately cost and estimate both the effort it will take to execute the desired product initiatives as well as appropriately forecast the metric lifts is a very important part of quarterly OKR planning. Here you do need enough specificity in the product initiatives including high-level scope in order for engineering to appropriately cost what they will be able to accomplish with a given set of resources assigned to it in the quarter. Similarly, product should develop as accurate of a forecast on the expected metric lift as they can. This is undoubtably a tough exercise, but putting a number out there is important. You should leverage as much past data on how your various initiatives have moved metrics in the past to come up with appropriate proxies. Even though you’re estimate will likely be off, having an estimate and seeing how you did against it at the end of the quarter is the only way to tune your product intuition on what kinds of initiatives are in-fact metric-moving initiatives. Without going through this exercise on a quarterly basis, you’ll never build this muscle.

Each quarter your product team should come up with 3–5 such OKRs and these should easily fit on a single slide or single-page document. Having any more than this is usually means a lack of focus for a product team. Of course this list will certainly not cover absolutely every product change you’ll end up making in the quarter and that’s fine, but this is an important prioritization exercise to rally the team behind the most important efforts as well as the priorities in terms of impact you’re team is hoping to have on the product’s success.

An equally important part of quarterly OKRs is the end-of-quarter post-mortem, when you go through the past quarters OKRs and score them each as either Green (met or exceeded the key results), Yellow (achieved ~70% of your stated key results), or Red (failed to meet the expected key results). As I mentioned, this is where the real learning happens to improve your team’s ability to cost and forecast initiatives. Oftentimes you’ll miss an initiative because it was delivered late. This serves as a great opportunity to discuss whether the issue was an inaccurate initial forecast or unforeseen challenges and what might you do in the future to improve your estimation. Similarly, you may fail to achieve the metric win you expected. And again, this is a great opportunity to discuss what could have been done differently for next time to try to find initiatives that will in-fact meet their metric expectations. The post-mortem is also a great opportunity to re-asses what you are hearing from customers and the market and ensure that your annual plan still makes sense in light of this. If not, you’re encouraged to change your plan for the upcoming quarter to address the new market realities. There is nothing sacred about your annual plan, it was just a guidepost that you should feel free to move from as new market dynamics become apparent.

As an example, here is potential OKR for an online consumer website:

Objective: Redesign the homepage to focus on driving social actions
- Key Result: Increase social actions (likes, comments, shares) per session by 20%
- Key Result: Increase homepage weekly active users by 15%

Bi-Weekly Sprints
Bi-weekly sprints are the core mechanism by which engineering teams are run. The sprint planning meeting takes the form of your classic agile notion of picking off items from your overall product backlog and adding them to the upcoming sprint’s backlog, with the engineer who is going to be responsible for the task directly costing the associated effort and committing to completing the tasks he takes on during the sprint planning process. This includes product features that are planned to be implemented, bugs that will be fixed, as well as any engineering tasks they are also taking on. It’s helpful to include all R&D functions in this process, so design also commits to what design deliverables they are going to finish in the upcoming sprint, as well as product committing to various requirement and spec deliverables as well. The output of sprint planning is a single list of prioritized tasks for the upcoming sprint with associated costs & owners. The goal here is to not change the sprint tasks during the sprint in order to allow the team to focus on effectively completing those tasks and avoid randomization and instead only consider changes in the next sprint. The 2-week sprint timeframe is short enough that you can still be very agile but provide enough predictability and focus to engineering teams to make meaningful progress.

At the end of the sprint, the team holds a sprint review to show off the shippable product functionality completed in the sprint as well as a sprint retrospective to look back on how the team faired in sticking to the sprint timeline. A sprint schedule is a probability. And what you want to be doing is always improving your team’s ability to accurately forecast to make the probability higher in the future.

Daily Scrum
It’s helpful as the first thing in the morning each day to have a quick 15-minute standup with the full R&D team where each individual briefly discusses what they accomplished yesterday, what they are planning on accomplishing today, and if there is anything blocking them from meeting their sprint goals. This allow the team to assess how they are doing against their sprint goals, resolve any bottlenecks, and potentially move around team resources to address those bottlenecks if needed. The goal here is to avoid issues festering for days, resulting in the project getting delayed and instead have an opportunity to address it every 24 hours to keep the team running as efficiently as possible. This in-person live format works better than issues lingering in long unresolved email threads. This is typically run by a scrum master (usually an engineering lead or delegate on the team) who goes around to each team member and ensures each bottleneck is addressed either during or immediately after the standup.

I’ve started to see some teams turn this into a Slack/HipChat channel discussion instead of an in-person session. While I like the daily ritual of getting the whole team together in-person, the chat version does work. It’s important though to make it a live session so issues can still be immediately addressed.

In addition to a daily scrum, it’s also helpful to have a daily bug triage process which reviews new bugs, appropriately sets the bug’s priority, and assigns the bug to the appropriate engineer. I also encourage you to establish bug SLAs (service level agreements) that define when a bug is expected to be fixed based on it’s priority. For example, P0 bugs that are incredibly severe are reason to stop everything else and get the bug fixed immediately. P1 could have an SLA of fixed in production within a week. P2 could be fixed in production within a month. It’s best if you can assign someone to go through this task for new bugs on a daily basis in case there are any new P0 bugs that need immediate attention. I’ve typically seen this done by either an engineering lead, a test lead, or product manager.

Project Management Tools
There are a variety of tools available which are typically used to streamline project management activities.

I’ve typically seen annual planning and quarterly OKRs published in a team wiki (like Confluence), in shared documents (like Google Docs), or shared slides (like Google Slides). Since each planning document is never more than a page each, it’s pretty easy to keep the full history of past and present versions altogether.

Sprints are most often managed in a full project management tool. Any of the popular project management tools work well, like Atlassian JIRA, Asana, Trello, Wrike, or Basecamp. Some specifically have support for sprint planning and daily standups, enabling you to run your daily standup more efficiently with a scrum board that everyone can see, including Atlassian JIRA and Trello. Pick a tool that your team is familiar with and comfortable using as they’ll ideally be in there frequently updating the status of tickets.

It’s important to remember that there is nothing sacred about the specific intervals references here (annually, quarterly, bi-weekly, daily). You can easily customize these to meet the cadence of your product development cycle and industry dynamics. These cadences though have worked well for me across a variety of desktop, internet, and mobile applications I’ve built throughout my career.

I hope this provides an overview of a modern project management process for product managers. While it may look like a lot of project management overhead, the reality is that each of the planning tasks is fairly quick and the output of each planning activity is never more than a single page of roadmap themes, OKRs, prioritized tasks, etc. The overall planning process not only facilitates long-term thinking, course correction, and learning, but is absolutely essential for enabling your team to achieve it’s ultimate product vision.

Sachin Rekhi is the Founder & CEO of Notejoy, a collaborative notes app for your entire team. It helps you get your most important work out of the noise of email & Slack and into a fast and focused workspace. He’s also written over 125+ essays on product management and entrepreneurship. Subscribe to new essays at sachinrekhi.com.

[This is the second post in my Understanding User Psychology series. If you haven’t already, make sure to check out the first post: Meet Your Happy Chemicals.]

When looking to understand user psychology in order to design better product experiences, Robert Cialdini’s seminal work, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, is a classic read. Robert Cialdini brings to bear his years of research on influence to detail the 6 weapons of influence leveraged by compliance practitioners (salesmen, car dealers, fund raisers) to get you to say yes to whatever they are selling. These same tactics can be leveraged in designing product experiences to help delight users as well as drive them to our desired product behaviors.

The reason the tactics are so effective is due to fixed action patterns, which are automatic responses in humans to certain behavior. These fixed action patterns exist because they are a very efficient form of behavior that allow us to act without thinking, thus minimizing brain strain. Many simple examples of this exist. For example, a mailed out coupon that provided no saving (due to a printing error) produced just as many customer responses as the one that actually provided the discount.

The 6 Weapons of Influence
Let’s walk through each of the 6 weapons of influence and how they can be leveraged in digital product design.

1. Recriprocation
Reciprocation recognizes that people feel indebted to those who do something for them or give them a gift. There is generally a distaste for those who make no effort to reciprocate and thus we will often reciprocate simply to avoid being seen as one of them. You’ll often see Hare Krishna society members give a free gift of a flower before asking for a donation, which helped them to effectively raise far more than other groups due to this principle of reciprocation.

Social apps regularly leverage this principle, encouraging you to like, favorite, or recommend the content of another user, which often elicits a subsequent reciprical response from the recipient to return the favor. This not only makes both users feel good, but drives further app engagement from both actors.

2. Commitment and Consistency
After making a choice or stating a commitment, either orally or in writing, both personal and interpersonal pressures drive us to behave consistently with it even after the initial motivation is no longer there. This is both due to our culture highly valuing personal consistency as well enabling us to avoid having to think after we’ve made a choice. For example, a group of folks were asked to wear a cancer awareness button for a week. Most thought it was a harmless request and complied. Some time later these same people were asked to donate to help fight cancer. And this group donated much more than the control group since it had become a small piece of their identity.

Habit building apps often drive you to share your goals with your friends, family, or co-workers to drive behavior through this exact principle of public commitment and consistency.

3. Social Proof
When someone is uncertain about a course of action, they tend to look at those around them to guide their decisions and actions. They want to know what everyone else is doing, especially their peers. For example, the canned laughter tracks you see on TV are very effective at causing viewers to laugh longer and more often. Bartenders similarly see they get more tips when they seed the tip jar with a few dollars.

Web services frequently use social proof to spur user action in their experiences. Whether it’s a warm invite from a friend encouraging you to join a service that they are already using, or an article with 50 likes from your friends encouraging you to check it out, social proof is a very compelling principle to take advantage of to give your users confidence in their next action.

4. Liking
People are easily persuaded by other people that they know and like. There are many dimensions that spur us liking others, including physical attractiveness, similarity, compliments from them, frequency of contact, and their association with other people we already like.

All forms of product advertising and imagery take advantage of this by trying to show both attractive people as well as people just like you using the service to drive you to want to do so as well.

5. Authority
People respect authority and want to follow the lead of real experts. Giving the appearance of authority increases the likelihood of compliance with requests even if the authority is illegitimate. Business titles, impressive clothing, and even fancy cars lend credibility to an individual’s authority.

Many business products today try to establish their brand as a thought leader and expert in their industry to build credibility and authority with their potential prospects to encourage them to try their product.

6. Scarcity
The thought of losing something motivates us more than the thought of gaining something of similar value. As such, perceived scarcity will generate demand. Frenzies over the latest holiday toy is a classic example of this.

Apps create scarcity in a variety of ways, whether it’s limited time promotions, the scarcity of rare virtual goods in games, or messaging oriented around losing an opportunity.

I hope this helps illustrate how understanding Robert Cialdini’s 6 weapons of influence are helpful for product designers to build better product experiences that ultimately encourage our desired user behavior.

For those interested, I encourage you to read more from Robert Cialdini in Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.

Sachin Rekhi is the Founder & CEO of Notejoy, a collaborative notes app for your entire team. It helps you get your most important work out of the noise of email & Slack and into a fast and focused workspace. He’s also written over 125+ essays on product management and entrepreneurship. Subscribe to new essays at sachinrekhi.com.

The most common question I get from aspiring product managers is how to land their first product manager role. Unfortunately it’s not an easy question to answer because there isn’t a single straightforward path into product management, but instead a variety of paths from which product managers typically come from. I wanted to share the five most common paths that I’ve observed for individuals landing their first product management role and how to increase your chances of landing the job through each path.

These are certainly not the only ways to get a product management role and I know product managers that don’t fit into these archetypes. But since they are the most common paths, it’s helpful to see if you can fit into one and leverage it to land your first role. This is also not a commentary on how an employer should hire PMs, but simply a reflection of how hiring in-fact happens for product roles in tech firms today. There is a separate post that could be written on the ideal hiring process for PMs, but we’ll save that for another day.

So let’s jump into each of the five common paths into product management.

The Computer Science Graduate
Large tech firms do hire entry-level product managers typically into a 1–2 year Associate Product Manager program, complete with training, mentorship, speakers, and often rotations across a few different product teams. Google popularized the program concept and it is now common across large tech firms like Microsoft, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo, Yelp, Uber, and more. It’s a great way to learn the ropes at an established tech firm with structured learning and mentorship. Additional tech firms hire entry-level Associate Product Managers leveraging similar criteria, but often into a far less structured program.

The challenge is landing one of these roles. Most employers are typically looking for recent computer science graduates with top grades from a top computer science university, like Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, etc. They typically streamline their university recruiting programs to specifically recruit from a dozen or so schools to fill their APM program pipeline.

Simply graduating from one of these top programs with good grades is not enough. They are specifically looking for a set of skills on top of those evidenced through computer science programs. Specifically, they want to ensure strong leadership, communication, and analytical skills. From a leadership perspective, they are typically looking for natural extraverts who can get along with just about anyone. They’ll be looking for evidence of leadership from, say, your college extracurricular activities. In terms of communication, they want to make sure you are clear, succinct, to the point, and can make strong compelling arguments. And finally, for analytical skills, they want to make sure you understand the math behind dashboards, A/B testing, etc. This is where your stats class is more interesting than the computer science math classes that you typically have in computer science programs. So make sure to brush up on these skills as well as find ways to evidence them in your interview.

The Engineering Undergrad + Recent MBA Graduate
Another common path to entry-level product manager roles is having an undergraduate degree in an engineering field (often computer science, but not always) as well as recently graduating from a top MBA program, like Harvard, Wharton, Kellogg, Stanford, Haas, etc. Folks from this background are often hired into large tech firms with a Product Manager title instead of an Associate Product Manager title, though I’ve seen both titles used. These students are attractive to employers because they not only have technical foundations from their engineering background, but have rounded out that experience with business fundamentals that are helpful when thinking through product and business strategy. Many MBA programs also are analytically rigorous, often through finance and stats classes, ensuring students come with those skills. Additionally, MBA students typically have a few years of work experience under their belt, ensuring they know how to get things done in a corporate setting.

The students that standout from this background are ones that can parlay their work experience between their undergrad and MBA into a strong narrative for their desire to move into product management as well as specific skills and experiences they have had that are relevant to a product role. Similarly they often leverage their time as an MBA to exhibit their entrepreneurial talents, either starting something on the side or working alongside others in internships, part-time, etc.

The Adjacent Role
One of the best ways to land your first product management role is to work with product managers inside of a tech firm in an adjacent role and then leverage that experience to parlay it into a product role at that firm. I’ve seen designers, engineers, marketers, customer support, sales, and business operations managers all leverage this as a path into product management. The goal here is to find an adjacent role that you are qualified for that works closely and regularly with a product manager. These are often roles that are part of the broader R&D team. They then knock the socks off the product team that they are working with and become an indispensable part of the product team.

To make this successful, you then have to find opportunities to take on more product-oriented tasks and responsibilities in your adjacent role. Maybe it’s writing a spec for a small feature related to your area. Or maybe it’s running point on a project. These experiences then create proof points for the product management leadership team that you could potentially take on the role and since you’ve been an absolute rockstar in your existing role, the willingness to give you a try as a product manager. The key here is parlaying that adjacent role experience into a product role at the same employer. It’s much easier to do this than seek a product role at another employer because the team knows you well and will leverage that trust to take a shot on you. This same trust and evidence doesn’t exist when going to another employer, though it’s certainly still possible to land a role that way.

This path works in both large and small tech firms. The large tech firms often have many different roles that work with product, creating lots of opportunities to work with product managers. They also often hire significant product managers so they have open roles available. Startups are another great path for this given how roles are more loosely defined and they are usually more willing to move people around with limited previous experience when needed to attack whatever is the most crucial project at the moment.

The Entrepreneur
You also see many previous startup founders ultimately in product management roles. Many tech startups have both technical and non-technical co-founders and I’ve seen both types of co-founders end up in product roles. As a startup co-founder, you either have direct responsibility for the product or indirect responsibility given that the team is so small. And this direct experience serving informally as the product lead for your startup ends up being highly relevant to the product management role. Entrepreneurs also typically have a broader view on products, since typically in a small team that are worried about all parts of the product’s success, including user acquisition, engagement, monetization, and so much more. They are also usually very familiar with making things happen and the details of execution because more often than not they are directly participating in many of the aspects of pulling the product together. They also typically have opportunities to showcase their creative thinking in the very fact that they are working on a startup that hopefully is differentiated from the status quo of the market’s offerings.

While these attributes reflect positively on why an entrepreneur could be a strong product manager, an entrepreneur has to combat some challenges of coming from this background. First, often startups are moving so quickly that they don’t typically leverage product management best practices in developing their products. Flying by the seat of your pants are not the attributes employers are looking for when hiring product managers, so they want evidence that you are familiar with and can leverage product management best practices in driving a product. As an entrepreneur you typically wear a hundred hats, so it’s also important to evidence that you have specifically worn the product hat with some rigor. Most startups also fail and that’s fine, but you need to have learned something from that startup experience and be able to tell a strong narrative around it to parlay it into a product role.

The Domain Expert
I’ve also seen domain experts in an industry or specific vertical be able to leverage that experience into a product management role at a tech firm that specifically specializes in the market of their expertise. For example, I know a sales operation manager who was able to leverage that experience to become a product manager at a sales-related software startup. I know an MD who was able to leverage that experience into a product management role at a health-care startup. Or someone with a Masters in Education that became a product manager at an EdTech startup. Employers are hungry for real experts to help take their product to the next level and thus are open to looking beyond those with typical experienced product backgrounds.

The key here is not only being an expert in the field but establishing your reputation as such an expert. Blogging, attending and speaking at relevant industry events, and knowing the other thought leaders in the space are all ways you can do this. The more niche the field is and the more relevant it is to your target tech firm, the better. You need to stay on top of the field and the application of technology to the field in order to keep that expertise relevant. And you want to leverage that thought leadership to create a network of connections and relationships with folks in the field and potential employers you want to join.

I hope this gives you a look into some of the most common paths into a product management role. While certainly not the only way into a product role, you do increase your chances of getting a role when you can align with and optimize a common path into it. And hopefully you can leverage some of these tips to help you land your own first product management role.

Sachin Rekhi is the Founder & CEO of Notejoy, a collaborative notes app for your entire team. It helps you get your most important work out of the noise of email & Slack and into a fast and focused workspace. He’s also written over 125+ essays on product management and entrepreneurship. Subscribe to new essays at sachinrekhi.com.