Product Management Best Practices with Rob Rekrutiak

Sure, well let's start with what I do today. For the last three years or so, I've been based in Southeast Asia running product, and more recently product and business, sort of like a GM type role for a company called Gojek. Think of it as a collection of on-demand services — three years ago we called them super apps, and somehow that fell out of favor. But think of it as Lyft plus DoorDash plus Venmo plus a bunch of other things all pulled together into one app. So for the last three years I've been based in Indonesia leading that role. Previously before that I was at Lyft for a couple of years, and for six years at Google, a lot of that was working on Google Shopping. That's how I actually know Holly — we partnered on a couple things. Then that sort of brings me to the third chapter of my career, where I've been a PM first and foremost, working in and around products that characterize scaled tech — millions or billions of users, similar numbers in transactions and dollars, global or multicountry footprints, often with a big ecosystem component where you have lots of different actors to bring together. That's been the last 10-plus years. Two chapters before that fed into this. Chapter one was what brought me to San Francisco in the first place — the dot-com boom bubble burst. Figuring out what web tech was and how to make it work, starting with large companies, then transitioning into startups around e-commerce, IoT, etc. Chapter two was China when it was going through massive growth from about 2005 to 2013-2014. I think of that as my China hustle — setting up companies, some tech but more tech-enabled, in retail, green and clean energy, media, branding, advertising. So that's how it all built up. I've been lucky enough to live and work in a lot of different markets and contexts, and that has informed a lot of where I've gotten to today, like why I'm doing something as crazy as in the middle of COVID picking up my life and moving to Indonesia.

That's a very good question. I mean, I think the last 12 months have been hard, there's no way around that. Companies of all sorts, mine included, have really had to look hard at how to rationalize costs and do more with less. Even ones that haven't been in that situation have pressed pause. This is not just my observations but talking with recruiters and headhunters all over the globe — things have been really slow all the way up until now, and I'm seeing that thaw a little bit. I had lunch and coffee earlier today with a couple headhunters and they're starting to see things open up. So globally that's how I'd think about it. In terms of regions, I think there's absolutely a ton of value in looking at other areas. You can learn a lot about yourself and the practice you bring. Working in different contexts has always been super rewarding. Now in terms of opportunity, it feels like Europe is doing fairly well — Berlin, Amsterdam, London seem to be hiring pretty aggressively right now. Asia is a bit mixed. Fintech in Singapore and Hong Kong seem to be doing well, other verticals not so much. So when you look outside the US, you have to think about whether the destination is a good match with your skill set. For example, Hong Kong is really deep in fintech right now and a little bit of web3 on the early stage side. If you want to work on consumer products, you're not going to go there. Even in Singapore, the strength and bulk of hiring is in financial and banking.

Yeah, I mean if you want to go into product, the first thing I look at is understanding why you want to make the shift. There's sometimes a notion, and I saw this at Google, that the PM role was the thing to aspire to. There are good reasons for that, but make sure you're really looking at the fundamentals: is it because it looks shiny, because comp is better, or because you think it will be more fulfilling? Understand the good and bad about product. Also, if you're mid-career, there might be a step back. The second piece is understanding the skills you bring to the table. Look at how you've been customer focused, understanding customer needs and turning them into solutions. Also, data fluency — how you structure metrics from your other work. Those are your assets to play up. The last piece is understanding your gaps. Often it can be around working with specific functions like design, research, or engineering. That could be a weak spot. One way to navigate that is to take a signature initiative and walk through it with a PM mentor, almost like a retro, to identify your strengths and blind spots.

I'm laughing because I didn't go to school for this. That's common — you wind your way into it. That's not to diminish the value of specific programs like General Assembly, which I recall from a few years ago. Those programs give you tools, frameworks, and a realistic context to practice. But really it's more about developing and demonstrating core skills: customer understanding — what problems are being faced, why someone needs this solved, how to translate that into value and first principles. Another area is understanding how to work with product development teams — engineering, design, and data. If you have no idea, that's a good area for self-study or a course. And then being very fluent with metrics — not studying how to write good metrics, but learning from trying things and failing. That's the other core skill to build.

Yeah, I don't know — blood, sweat, and tears. I think I can answer by talking about things I thought about or wish I had thought about. First, be clear on your motivation for making that step. It needs to be more than just a better title or comp. Ground it in what skills you'll grow and what new levels of impact you'll achieve. If your intent isn't right, it sets you up for a tough road. Second, the big gap between exec and non-exec is your ability to dive deep into business financials. Invest in sharpening that — not necessarily an MBA, but fluency in understanding financial statements and how they map to your products. Third, how you work with your team. Be clear about your strengths and blind spots, and be open about them with your peers. It builds trust and helps collaboration. Expectation setting is super important — understand what's expected of you and what you need from your CEO or board. Finally, team management: find simple, repeatable processes for performance management, feedback, one-on-ones, and communications. The more complex, the less likely you'll execute consistently. And as an exec, you still need to dive in and problem-solve more than you think.

Having kids actually helps because it forces you to prioritize and focus. I like to see them, though it's been challenging with travel. Really try to be clear about what you are and aren't doing. That goes back to expectation setting. With clear expectations, it's easier to define the scope of what needs to get done and prioritize accordingly. That's served me best from a high-level framework perspective.

That's a great question. I think it's most important to have clarity around what your structure is and why you're doing it, less about one being better than the other. Then, is it working effectively? If not, how do you identify that and fix it? In my current role, it's both a product and business role combined over a very large footprint. Were I to do it again, I might consider either focusing functionally for that size, or taking a smaller footprint with a single-threaded leader model. Both have pluses and minuses; it's about effectiveness. Also, a good measure is if your structure has a hard time making and implementing decisions, that's a sign something is off. That was a sign of challenges we faced at Lyft, for example.

I've bounced industry a fair bit — small, medium, large companies. I don't think it's hard per se for the individual; there's always a learning curve. The harder part can be convincing your would-be employer of your applicability. In some cases, they're seeking a new perspective. For example, in fintech in Southeast Asia, there are open roles where they want to hire outside of financial background. I see less back and forth between enterprise SaaS and consumer — that's a big stretch. I'd encourage people to look at what they've worked on and understand the types of problems solved that are similar to a different domain. For instance, my background with Google Shopping is a product for the retail ecosystem with consumer-facing and advertiser-facing components. If you work in an ecosystem with multiple stakeholders, you can weave that story to show you've worked on a product where the demand side is consumer but provides services back to a business. That's the narrative for jumping from consumer to enterprise.

That's totally true. I've been doing that in my own org. Flattening is something I started to realize the value of when I was at Lyft. It's not so much about flattening in the context of PMs, but refining what it means to be a manager as a PM and when that's appropriate. I think the path forward is a lot more push toward staying in IC longer. Google did this around the time I joined in 2013 — they pushed to remove PM managers from below SPM. The thesis is that as a PM, you help facilitate across functions, and you should get good at that over larger scopes, operating autonomously. You do need to roll up to an individual eventually, but that scope needs to be huge. That ethos is being implemented more. The challenge is creating a clear IC path for PMs. A lot of this is unwinding from the zero interest rate era where headcount was bloated and people managers weren't driving commensurate impact. Expectation should be that you'll be an IC longer than you might have five years ago. And really understand what drives you to want to manage people — it's a different form of impact than building and launching a product.

I think there are a couple of things. One, almost every Google PM has worked at a scale that is second to none. Particularly on primary products, you're dealing with billions across all metrics at a global scale. That's not a common experience. When you get out of the Google context, you realize you have a very unique experience. So that's one piece. The second piece is that, up until I left in 2019, there was still a bit of a generalist mindset in the PM role. That shifted a bit between 2013 and 2019, but the combination of scale and a generalist approach is highly valued.

I left six years later, but there was still this notion that it was less about what your concrete background was in terms of working on problem spaces or specific tech, and more about the mechanics of how to do the job. I think if you look at the people who have gone off to do well elsewhere, they've landed on one of two vectors: either they took something from zero and scaled it to a billion, or they took something big and scaled it even further, or they did this across a bunch of different thorny problem areas and showed well-roundedness. So I think those are the two things I would anchor on from a Google standpoint.

No, well, while I am hiring, my startup is hiring and we're based in Singapore too. But to answer your question: ex-Googlers are more affordable when you're a Series B company. That is a problem, actually. Speaking frankly, if you're based in the Bay Area and want to move to Southeast Asia, the number of roles that pay a global pay scale is pretty small. I tried to convince my friend to apply for a job in Singapore — he was a PM here at Google and went somewhere else — but he said the pay in Southeast Asia is too low for him to make the move. Only finance can make that move. It's not to say there aren't those roles, but they're pretty select, and Singapore is not the cheapest place to live. It's getting more expensive by the day, but it's expensive for a reason — it's a premium product. So let me think about answering your question about where I would hire from. I try to look at whether the company or the area of product the person has worked on has gone through some challenge in order to get to the point where it actually landed. I think that's one of the challenges with a lot of companies in Southeast Asia. Many were funded quite well and drove growth through spending — incentives, promos, covering customer acquisition costs with whatever they had raised — and it blurred the degree to which they had achieved product-market fit. So I would look for individuals who within their scope of influence were able to push beyond that. Sorry, that's maybe more a set of concepts than where to hire from.

I think this is asking about product focused on an end user — consumer or business — versus foundational tech or a platform product. I've worked on both. It's really about who the user is. Are they an end user — an individual, a small or large business — where there are problems intrinsic to their life, well-being, enjoyment, or success? Or are they a technical user, where it's about enabling them to get a job done more efficiently or with lower cost? So it's about how the product is consumed. The biggest thing from a product perspective is that if you're working on something more tech, you probably have to go deeper into the tech. Sometimes the PM ends up in a bridging role, bringing it to market and partnering with customers to jointly develop something. It's a bit different in that context.

If you look at product management as a function in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, it's earlier in its life cycle. I've seen a lot of energy and growth in the field. There's a lot of grassroots activity — everyone has a blog or a podcast about frameworks they've found successful, which is great. But where the challenges are: there's generally more depth in project delivery skills than product strategy. Understanding and anchoring on customer value and solving customer problems is key. Many PMs, especially junior ones, are more focused on Jira than on the customer. Working at scale is another unique thing — much less frequent. There seem to be fewer highly opinionated PMs who bring a strong point of view. We've tried to encourage that. There's also a lower bias toward making high-quality decisions; it's a skill and habit that becomes intrinsic with practice. In terms of products in Southeast Asia, the region has many countries. Unless you're truly launching just in Singapore, you have to be global from day one. That changes decisions around localization and internationalization. Regulatory and payments are also big — every country is different, and the payment rails vary in development.

That's a tough one. I've got a cheeky answer: good tacos — someone open a restaurant. But that's not fair. I think a lot of things have been tried. What's different about thinking about products in the region is that some monetization models that worked in North America, like subscriptions, aren't necessarily a good fit in Southeast Asia. It could be because it's not a consumer habit or the idea of a monthly outlay doesn't fit with someone's socioeconomic situation. It also pushes on unit economics — at Gojek we worry about pennies per transaction because it makes a difference. We ask whether we need an ML model to drive pricing when a simple grid system is two cents cheaper per transaction. So it forces you to think differently. In that context, I think a lot of things have been tried, and what's viable is certainly falling off.

This is a hot topic. I'd love to hear how it's impacting everyone on this call. One interesting part is seeing the use cases people discover — those are the things that will bubble up and be productized and monetized. In the context of my teams, I see it as an amplifier of effectiveness. The analogy is Google search: when it came out, it changed how I did work by allowing me to research effectively. Similarly, gen AI can be used to amplify your work. For PMs, don't just GPT your way to writing PRDs, but it can be a reasonable starting point for structuring principles or requirements. It's like an amplifier to speed you through the process. A lot of platforms now let you experiment without going deep into code or data, so you can play around and find out what works for you.

I look for two things from a character perspective. First, is the individual able to have an engaging, active conversation where they're actively listening, asking interesting questions, and displaying curiosity. There's a notion of trying to learn and be curious, but also the listening component. From a product standpoint, that's what you have to do to get inside the heads of customers. Second, the way you approach people — it's not about walking through your resume. It's about how you can engage me in a topic, any topic. It shows a core skill for PMs.

I've been fortunate at Gojek to have a large research team. The company started investing before I joined, partly because Gojek has a big tech footprint in Indonesia and an equally large one in India, but we don't operate in India. To bridge that gap, we needed to invest in research. I've seen better results from in-person, on-the-ground research than from focus groups. I think it's because taking people out of their day-to-day context biases their answers. Deep on the ground — sitting with a driver doing deliveries and spending the day with six of those folks — has been way more effective.

It depends, but the answer is the same. When I was at Google working on ads products, I learned most by actually talking to advertisers. Similarly, at Gojek, we have a big merchant ecosystem, and spending time with small, medium, and large merchants to understand their business and see their challenges in action has been the most impactful. So yes, pretty much the same for B2B.

The curiosity and listening component I mentioned is a big part. Also, driving to clarity and simplicity around principles and value that underlie your product, thinking about it as a simple system. The third piece is working with individuals of all functions, levels, and backgrounds, and having the ability to bring people together to get what needs to be done. Those three things.

On the Bali thing, it was amazing during COVID, no regrets. But it's been hard lately because the business of Gojek has a local component that requires being on the ground. I'm on the road 80% of the time. But what's exciting is the degree to which you can learn if you're willing to listen and be curious. You can learn about human and societal challenges and hopefully have a positive impact. I don't put that in a savior context, but there's a lot of growth in economies that are changing year by year. There's opportunity to be part of that story. Also, depending on where you live, you'll experience amazing culture, food, and friendships. But first and foremost, the pace of change and the rate at which fundamentals of society are changing — being able to shape that is a big thing.

They're all very different. Singapore is the easiest move for someone from San Francisco, given infrastructure, development, pace of life. It's hot but they have great air conditioning. Similar to Hong Kong five or six years ago. Ho Chi Minh City has a lot going on, with hiring of expat talent for senior roles, though language is more of a challenge in Vietnam. The economy is growing, benefiting from China's challenges — manufacturing moving there, rising middle class. Indonesia is fascinating: less developed in infrastructure, hugely diverse with 17,000 islands. Everything from Bali to Java to Jakarta. So it's a question of what fits you. But for an expat move, barring what I mentioned about fintech, Singapore is easiest.

I think the questions were fun to go through. I want to thank everyone for sharing what they're looking for. It's healthy for me to think about what I've been doing for the past three or four years. One thing I didn't mention about moving to the region: at a certain level, your peer group is different. You're not going to walk down the street and bump into another VP of Product. I realized that preparing for this. Working on product for me has been rewarding, fun, and a great way to evolve professionally. It's also spilled over into other aspects of my life.

I don't know. Things like this are helpful. I've been struck by the number of events. I have a hard time keeping track — that's what your company is trying to solve. Understanding ways to engage and contribute, like informal mentoring that I've been doing for a few years, has been great. Looking at different ways as a community we can create value and help each other grow.