The Craft PM in a World Full of Process PMs
There's a type of person who looks at a product with zero revenue and sees a billion dollars. Not wishful thinking. A system. Sachin Rekhi is that person.
When LinkedIn acquired his contact management startup Connected in 2011, he didn't cash out and disappear. He stayed. And when the company needed someone to figure out Sales Navigator - a product that didn't exist yet, in a market that was barely defined - Rekhi raised his hand. Eighteen months later, he had taken it from zero to $200M in annual recurring revenue. The product would eventually clear one billion.
That kind of velocity doesn't happen by accident. It happens when a product manager has what Rekhi calls genuine product taste - an almost sensory ability to detect the difference between what users say they want and what they'll actually pay for. It's the rarest quality in tech. Most companies spend years looking for it.
Rekhi spent decades building it.
The best product managers are truth seekers.
- Sachin RekhiThe origin story matters here, because it explains everything. Rekhi came out of the University of Pennsylvania with two degrees - computer science from the engineering school, finance from Wharton - the kind of combination that looks excellent on a resume and is completely useless until you have a real problem to solve. Then it becomes a superpower.
His early roles at Goldman Sachs, Paetec Communications, and Microsoft were good training. Microsoft in particular: as a PM on Visual Studio Team System, he got to lead a net-new product from scratch. That experience of building for developers who had strong opinions and zero patience for mediocrity shaped his entire approach to the craft. The lesson? Real products are built for real people with real constraints. Everything else is theater.
Y Combinator, 2007: The Lab Where the Habit Formed
In the summer of 2007, Sachin Rekhi walked into Y Combinator with an idea about music. Anywhere.FM was a web-based music player that brought an iTunes-like experience to the browser - a genuinely ambitious thing to build in 2007, when the browser was still considered a second-class citizen for heavy applications.
The product reached 100,000 users. Then imeem acquired it. Rekhi joined imeem as Senior PM, leading international revenue, audio advertising, and premium subscriptions. He had learned, in the most direct way possible, what it meant to ship something people actually used.
The next startup was different. Connected - co-founded with his wife Ada Chen Rekhi - was a professional contact manager that synced email, calendar, and social networks. The idea: your address book shouldn't be a graveyard of people you've lost track of. It should be alive. LinkedIn saw the vision and acquired the company in October 2011.
Sachin and Ada Chen Rekhi have co-founded three companies together and worked at the same company (LinkedIn) simultaneously. Ada went on to become SVP Marketing at SurveyMonkey. They are one of Silicon Valley's genuinely rare husband-wife serial co-founding teams - not because it's trendy, but because it actually works for them. Sachin once published an essay called "Startup Lessons Learned from My Recent Wedding" - because of course he did.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator: How You Go From Zero to $200M
The professional networking platform had 300 million members and a problem: it wasn't making nearly enough money from enterprise sales. The idea of building a dedicated tool for salespeople - letting them use LinkedIn's social graph for prospecting, relationship tracking, and warm introductions - was elegant. Executing it was another matter.
Rekhi became Head of Product and co-GM for Sales Navigator. What followed was a clinic in product-led growth before the term existed. He understood that salespeople needed a tool that fit into their existing workflow, not a new workflow to learn. He understood that the value proposition had to be measurable - closed deals, not vague "connections." And he understood that the pricing had to reflect value delivered, not features shipped.
Eighteen months. $0 to $200M ARR. A team that grew from a handful of people to 500. The product would later cross $1 billion in annual revenue - a number that most enterprise SaaS companies never reach.
Zone of Excellence vs. Zone of Genius
At the peak of his LinkedIn success, Rekhi made an unusual diagnosis. He was in his "zone of excellence" - genuinely excellent at what he was doing, respected, and well-compensated. But he wasn't in his "zone of genius" - the place where you lose track of time because the work itself is the reward. So he left. Not to fail upward. To find the thing that would energize him the way an early-stage product does. That company became Notejoy.
This distinction - excellence versus genius - runs through everything Rekhi writes and teaches. It's the kind of framework that only makes sense once you've been excellent at something and realized it wasn't enough. Most people never get there. Rekhi wrote about it publicly and turned it into one of his most-shared essays.
How Rekhi Thinks: Three Frameworks Worth Knowing
Three Types of PMs
Innovators build net-new products. Builders execute roadmaps and ship features. Tuners optimize growth and metrics. Most PMs think they're Innovators. Most hiring managers need Tuners. The mismatch is where careers stall.
The Deliberate Startup
His evolved take on lean startup. MVPs are largely obsolete for modern users who expect polished experiences. Instead: documented PMF narratives, varied validation methods, retention curves as the real fit metric, and early investment in traction channels before you think you need them.
The Truth Seeker
The best PMs have one dominant trait: they're obsessively motivated to discover what is actually true. Not to confirm their assumptions. Not to win arguments. To find truth. This requires intellectual humility, customer empathy, and a willingness to be wrong publicly.
The 9 PM Deliverables
Product vision, strategy, customer insights, data insights, roadmap, specifications, team OKRs, decision frameworks, and stakeholder alignment. These are the specific outputs a PM is uniquely responsible for - not the processes, the deliverables. Rekhi built an entire course around this list.
Infinite Learner
The PMs Rekhi prizes most constantly expand their expertise into adjacent domains - growth, engineering, design, sales. The shallow generalist is a liability. The deep specialist who keeps expanding is a force multiplier. Domain hopping with intentionality, not restlessness.
Relationship as Infrastructure
Five minutes every morning. One person in your network you don't interact with daily. A simple, absurdly practical routine that compounds over years into a social graph that opens doors you didn't know existed. Rekhi has been doing this long enough to have built genuine professional infrastructure.
48,000 PMs and a Newsletter That Actually Teaches Something
Most PM newsletters are content marketing dressed up as education. Rekhi's newsletter is different - not because he says so, but because 3 million people have read his essays and a meaningful portion of them changed how they work afterward.
The newsletter has been running long enough to have documented the full arc of the PM profession: from the "PM as mini-CEO" era, through the data-obsessed optimization phase, into the current moment where AI is collapsing the time between idea and working prototype from months to hours.
His most recent work reflects this shift. "Claude Code for Product Managers." "The AI Prototyping Mastery Ladder." "AI-Powered Customer Discovery." These aren't trend-chasing pieces. They're frameworks for a world where the PM who can prototype their own ideas has a structural advantage over the PM who can only write PRDs.
The subscription model is simple: free essays, paid deep-dives at $15/month or $150/year. The courses - built on the Reforge platform - go deeper still, covering his full PM deliverables framework, product innovation strategy, and AI productivity workflows.
When you have a good idea and an itch to work on it, it's important to just do it - and to release early and often.
- Sachin RekhiNotejoy: Building in Public While Teaching in Public
Notejoy is a fast, focused collaborative notes app for teams. In a world where Notion has become a universe and Evernote became a cautionary tale, Notejoy occupies a deliberate position: speed and focus over infinite flexibility.
The product reflects Rekhi's own philosophy. He doesn't want a tool that can do everything. He wants a tool that does the specific thing - capturing and sharing ideas quickly with your team - without friction. The constraint is the product.
He runs Notejoy with Ada, making it the third company they've built together. This time there's no acquisition pressure, no LinkedIn-sized platform to integrate into. Just the product and its users and the slow, compounding work of making something good.
Meanwhile, the newsletter, the courses, the podcast - all of these are running simultaneously. Rekhi has built what is effectively a one-person (plus Ada) product studio and a media company in parallel. The two things feed each other: what he learns building Notejoy goes into the newsletter, and the newsletter creates the credibility that makes people pay for the courses.
- Drinks approximately 3 pots of tea and multiple Coke Zeros daily - a combination that should alarm a cardiologist
- Reads Techmeme every morning as his primary tech news source - old-school aggregation in an algorithmic age
- Once encountered Spotify early in Sweden and underestimated them - a lesson that permanently changed how he thinks about market assumptions
- His newsletter essay "Startup Lessons Learned from My Recent Wedding" is exactly what it sounds like and apparently worth reading
- Has spoken and taught at Wharton, Stanford, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, and P&G - basically the canonical list of places where smart people congregate
- Launched his podcast "The Sachin Rekhi Show" in April 2024 - sharing wisdom from 20+ years in product
AI and the PM: Why Rekhi Thinks the Role Is About to Bifurcate
Rekhi's current thesis is that AI is creating a divide in the PM profession. On one side: PMs who use AI to augment the existing job - faster research, cleaner specs, better synthesis. Useful. On the other side: PMs who use AI to collapse the distance between idea and artifact - prototyping in code, validating with real users before a single engineer touches the project. Transformative.
He's betting on the second group. His AI Productivity course teaches PMs to use tools like Claude Code to build functional prototypes from scratch - not to replace engineering, but to validate faster. His newsletters on AI prototyping and AI-powered customer discovery are practical, specific, and built on his own experimentation.
This matters because Rekhi is not a pundit predicting what AI will do. He's a practitioner figuring out what AI can do right now, documenting it in real time, and teaching it to tens of thousands of people. The feedback loop is fast. The learning compounds.
His stated mission: "Helping product managers master their craft in the age of AI." That's not a tagline. It's a direction-of-travel for the entire platform he's built over the past decade.
The best leaders don't simply delegate and get out of the way. At the same time, they also don't micro-manage and make every decision. Instead, they develop a strong system of accountability as well as a system of inspection.
- Sachin RekhiWhat makes Rekhi's perspective valuable is the density of his experience. He's been a technical founder (Anywhere.FM), an operator at scale (LinkedIn Sales Navigator), an early-stage builder (Connected, Notejoy), and a media operator (newsletter, courses, podcast). He's not talking about product management from a single vantage point. He's synthesizing two decades of vantage points into frameworks that hold across contexts.
The PM who reads his newsletter for a year comes away with something different from a methodology. They come away with a way of seeing - a diagnostic lens for distinguishing between problems worth solving and problems that only feel important. That's the harder thing to teach. Rekhi has figured out how to teach it anyway.
In His Own Words
"You should spend five minutes every morning reaching out to one person in your network whom you don't normally interact with on a daily basis."
On Relationship Building"The best product managers are truth seekers - their primary motivation is discovering what is actually true, not confirming what they already believe."
On PM Excellence"Release early and often. The itch to work on a good idea is valuable - don't overthink it until the idea has had a chance to meet reality."
On Shipping