Insights from Google PM and Entrepreneur Alex Rechevskiy | Remote Students
Members of the Remote Students Community had the opportunity to meet Alex Rechevskiy this week and ask him questions about his experiences in product management and entrepreneurship. Apply here to join our community and meet our amazing lineup of guest speakers, including people like Alex!
Alex is a Senior Product Manager at Google on the Google Play Trust & Safety team. He has had over 10 years of experience in product and is a career coach on the side. Alex is currently growing his YouTube channel where he makes content about landing a role as a product manager and offers more tips and insights through his newsletter.
How has being an entrepreneur shaped who you are as a product manager today?
I’ve always been interested in business since I was a kid, and I feel that business can be seen through two different viewpoints.
1) The first one looks at how you can move goods and services in a way that you extract an extra surplus as profit.
2) The second looks at how you can provide value to others so that you create a surplus of value. And it’s the second one that I am excited about. That is, the obsession with users — finding out what customers really want, the value that they’re getting, and how to give it to them better. It’s this obsession with customer service that got me excited about entrepreneurship and has led me into product management today.
What inspired you to start a YouTube channel about product management?
There’s this concept that when you really want to learn something, teach it. I have found that to be true in many, many situations. And that’s certainly the case here as well. So for instance, I have done many interviews, both as an interviewer and as an interviewee. Through these many interviews, I was able to see all various types of questions asked, the ways that people answer them, and the common mistakes people make.
When you really want to learn something, teach it.
I found that by practicing I became very, very good at it, and only by practicing is this possible. It’s very difficult to walk into an interview after just reading the concepts without practice, because doing well in interviews requires an internalization that you can get only by practicing with different people, situations, and environments.
The idea to start a YouTube channel really came from wanting to help people, and that’s just been a constant theme throughout my life. I enjoy when people are getting value out of me speaking. As for YouTube specifically, I like YouTube because it is a way to get scale and to quickly engage people.
Advice for students: If you enjoy a certain topic, learn the concepts, but then teach it! Teach people what you have learned and you’ll see that you are going to get a deeper understanding of it. There’s a lot of nuances that you discover only through teaching.
What are the differences between working in a big company and founding a startup?
I actually have a video about what it’s like working as a product manager in a top tech company versus a startup, which you can check out here.
In summary, the main differences are:
1. Speed at which things happen: In startups you can do whatever you want, and you can do it much faster. In a big company you can’t do whatever you want to do, and everything takes longer.
2. Velocity of decision making: In startups, there’s much fewer people involved in decision making — sometimes it’s just a single individual. Oftentimes, as a startup founder, you want to make quick decisions, and your company’s fate could very well be decided by the decisions you make or don’t make. For a large company, decision-making is done through a committee. Sometimes, you as an individual don’t even need to make decisions.
In big companies, there’s also a requirement to do things that have worked in the past. For instance, if a company got big because they did X, Y, and Z, then in order for it to get even bigger, it needs to continue to do X, Y, and Z bigger and better. But a startup must figure out another thing, say, A, B, and C, which is a completely different set of things that the incumbents are not looking at or even recognizing its potential value.
3. Scale: Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, has once said, “Do things that don’t scale.” That is how you win as a startup. You need to do stuff that doesn’t scale, such as one-on-one conversations with customers, order processing, delivery, customer service, and so on. But for a big company, you need to figure out how to scale everything. How can I make this work for a million people? A billion people? These are the biggest questions a large company tackles.
To win as a startup, do things that don’t scale.
For those with a non-technical background, what areas should we cover if we want to break into product management?
A lot of people ask me this question of “if I don’t come from a technical background can I be product manager” and the answer is yes, you can.
First of all, don’t worry about your liabilities; rather, turn what you think is a liability into an asset. All kinds of backgrounds can be leveraged successfully in product management.
Turn what you think is a liability into an asset.
What is important to know is a basic understanding of math and statistics, because you’ll often be running experiments, and you need to be able to understand how experiments work, how to set up an experiment, and how to interpret results. On the technical side, learn data analysis and how to work with it. Sequel is especially useful as an early stage PM, because oftentimes there aren’t data analysts or engineers dedicated to such work.
You don’t have to know how to code, but it definitely helps to just understand the basic concepts. You could just read one book or watch a couple YouTube videos. Learning how programming works is important when interacting with engineers. As a PM, it’s important to know how to speak their language and understand what’s important when you put your product together on a technical level.
The final piece I would recommend is to learn systems thinking and processes. That is, how to architect a product: what kind of data you need to collect, and what operation you need to perform with that data in order to produce whatever result you want.
For those with a technical background, what business topics should we cover?
There’s two types of business backgrounds: the education business background and the School of Hard Knocks business background, and I generally prefer the latter. Although the former gives you a lot of skills and the context, it’s very difficult to internalize that context unless you actually live there and see what it’s like to run a business.
Be sure to stay up to date on business happenings. Learn about business fundamentals and see if you can gain some hands-on experience by interacting with some sort of business, either by joining a team or running a business yourself. Once you experience it, you start to realize that it’s not black and white, and it can get hectic. So if you just have a tech background and don’t know business and finance, definitely invest some time to pick up those skills.
What’s your general approach when building a new product?
A lot of the stuff that you do for interviews, such as ‘design this’ or ‘why should we get into this business or that business’ is actually very similar to real life. That’s exactly what you do when you’re thinking about a new product. You’re going to ask the same questions. Who is the product for? Who’s going to use it? Why would they use it? What do they really want? What problem do they have and how would this help solve their problem?
Starting from the user and the problem, think of the solution and the core thing that you’re trying to offer them. What is it going to look like? If I deliver just this, would they be happy? If the answer is yes, then if I take something away, would they be equally happy? Keep reducing until you have the raw thing.
Afterwards, think about how you could develop it. What should it look like? Here I think about the user flow journey. How does the user find out about the product? How do they start using the product? For mobile or web, what’s the first thing they see on the site? What do they do after that? What are the different paths? Get everything down and organize your thoughts.
That’s why it is very similar to the way that the interviews are conducted, because that’s the stuff you have to do on the job.
When building a new product, always ask why, build for people, and think about the MVP.
For more tips and advice on breaking into product management, check out Alex’s YouTube channel and newsletter!
About Remote Students
Remote Students is an online professional community made for college students, by college students. We provide mentorship, networking, access to opportunities/jobs/internships, and provide all the help you need to grow your career. Learn more about us on our website and apply to join!
