The Art of Product Management

About this video

Sachin Rekhi is a serial entrepreneur and product leader best known as the founder of Connected, a professional contact manager acquired by LinkedIn in 2011 and relaunched as LinkedIn Contacts, where he went on to lead product for Sales Navigator and the Relationships team.

The biggest product risk for a small company is often not too little innovation. It is trying to innovate everywhere at once.

Keep the ambition broad, but narrow the customer, problem and dimensions where you genuinely need to be different. Then put most of the organisation’s energy into a fast cycle of building, validating and correcting — because for an SME with limited capital, every untested assumption carried forward becomes more expensive.

Full Video at the end of page

Core Insight (Plain English)

Product discipline is mostly about deciding where not to be innovative.

A new product already contains uncertainty. If you simultaneously introduce a new product, target an unfamiliar customer, invent a new pricing model and rely on an unproven acquisition channel, you are no longer testing one business idea — you are testing several dependent assumptions at once.

That makes failure difficult to diagnose.

Instead, choose the one or two areas where differentiation genuinely matters and use established approaches elsewhere. Then narrow the initial customer enough that you can learn quickly whether the problem is painful, the value proposition matters and customers will actually pay.

Broad vision and narrow execution are not contradictory. Narrow execution is often how a broad vision becomes achievable.

7 Practical Lessons

• Replace false precision with explicit hypotheses. Before building a detailed business plan or product roadmap, write down what you currently believe about the customer, problem, value proposition, differentiation, alternatives, acquisition, monetisation and success metric. Mark what is evidence and what is still assumption. Update it as you learn.

• Define a bullseye customer, not an impressive market size. “SMEs in Southeast Asia” is not a useful product target. A narrower group with a common problem gives you clearer feedback and makes prioritisation easier. Expand after you have evidence that the first group genuinely values what you built.

• Limit the dimensions of innovation. If the product itself is technically novel, consider familiar pricing, onboarding or distribution. If the business model is unusual, the product experience may need to feel familiar. Every additional novelty creates another assumption that must be funded and validated.

• Test pain before polishing the solution. Customer interest is cheap. Ask whether the problem is important enough that someone would prioritise solving it now, allocate budget or change an existing behaviour. A “nice idea” is very different from a problem customers actively want removed.

• Give product and engineering direct customer exposure. Do not let all customer understanding pass through sales, management or research reports. Regular conversations and observation help teams understand not only what customers request, but where they hesitate, become confused, lose confidence or feel relief.

• Separate reversible decisions from expensive ones. Give clear decision rights and make reversible decisions quickly. Do not repeatedly reopen them unless new evidence appears. Save deeper debate for decisions that are genuinely difficult or costly to reverse.

• Measure learning velocity, not just shipping velocity. A fast team that repeatedly ships the wrong thing is simply wasting money faster. Use a tight define → validate → iterate loop and track a small set of metrics frequently enough to understand what “normal” looks like. Early-stage engineering elegance can wait when necessary — but security, safety, compliance and other difficult-to-reverse risks should not be treated as disposable prototype decisions.

Summary & Reflections

The strongest idea here is also the easiest to misuse: speed is valuable only when it reduces uncertainty.

“Move faster” can become an excuse for weak engineering, superficial customer research or constant product changes. Likewise, striving for dramatically better differentiation is useful as an ambition, but not every successful product needs to be literally “10x better.” Sometimes reliability, distribution, trust, integration or convenience is enough to make customers switch.

The guidance is also heavily shaped by software and venture-backed technology. Physical products, industrial systems, regulated businesses and products involving safety or significant capital expenditure cannot always run the same rapid experimentation cycle. The cost of a wrong decision may be considerably higher.

Regional Consideration — Southeast Asia: Product-market fit should not automatically be treated as regional. A proposition validated in Singapore may encounter different purchasing power, channels, regulations, payment habits and trust relationships in Indonesia, Vietnam or Thailand. Expansion may require reopening some of the original hypotheses rather than simply scaling the Singapore playbook.

Who should watch the full video

Most useful for founders, product leads, engineering leads and operators responsible for launching or repositioning products.

It is particularly worthwhile for teams that have accumulated too many features, serve an increasingly broad customer definition, are struggling to reach product-market fit, or repeatedly debate decisions without generating new evidence.

Less essential for operators looking for detailed guidance on pricing, market research methods or go-to-market execution; those areas are introduced but not developed deeply.

Decision Rating

Decision Usefulness — ★★★★★
The discussion provides a strong way to decide where limited product resources should go: narrow the target, expose assumptions and concentrate innovation. The value is less in individual product techniques than in the discipline it imposes on resource allocation.

Practical Applicability — ★★★★☆
The product-market-fit hypotheses, customer exposure, decision rights and define–validate–iterate loop can be applied immediately without major investment. Some heuristics — particularly around engineering speed and extreme differentiation — need adaptation outside software businesses.

Operational Relevance — ★★★★☆
The emphasis on decision speed, customer contact, prioritisation and execution is directly relevant to small teams where management attention is scarce. It becomes less transferable where regulation, physical production, safety or long development cycles make rapid reversibility unrealistic.

Until next time,
The SME Signal editorial Team

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