Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga)

Starting point is 00:00:00 I started noticing that there was a certain mystique and aura about product strategy. There was this perception that some people were intrinsically really good at strategy and others were not. It was almost as if there was a strategy gene. You needed to be born with to be good at it. Say someone's sitting down, okay, I'm going to start developing a strategy for our product. Where do you begin? What does this process look like? In terms of what product strategy is, there is a smallest flavor of it, which focuses on solving problems.

Starting point is 00:00:28 I call present forward. and it typically operates in a two-year horizon. We use a five-stage process to get there, and it takes about eight to 12 weeks. The reason I think this process works is there is a ton of alignment built-in. It goes back to human psychology of just something that comes from you feels a lot more familiar and easy to accept. Let's talk about Biggest strategy.

Starting point is 00:00:50 When should you approach strategy this way? There's this interesting quote by Elon Musk, which is... Life's got to be about more than just solving problems. I think this is true of every sort of company. There needs to be an aspirational and cool component to strategy. What does the product look like in sort of five to ten years? Why is the world better in 10 years? And what is the most exciting version of that view?

Starting point is 00:01:15 Today, my guest is Chandra Janak Rahman. Chandra is chief product officer and executive vice president at VR Chat. He was a product leader at META, chief product officer at Headspace, a GM at Zinga, and a senior PM at Amazon. And the way this podcast episode happened was an avid, podcast listener, Karthik Serash told me about Chandra at a community meetup. And when I connected with Chandra, it was clear that I needed to get him on the podcast. Chandra is a student of strategy and has spent his career developing what he calls an operator's guide to strategy, which

Starting point is 00:01:46 essentially pulls together the best ideas from good strategy, bad strategy, playing to win, Michael Porter, and others to create a very clear, reliable, and easy to follow five-step process to develop a great strategy and a set of next steps for your product and company. After hearing Chandra walk through this in our conversation, I'm basically going to now point everyone who wants to get better at strategy to this episode and Chandra's method. Strategy is at the heart of every great product and team and business, and it's also the source of so much pain if you do it badly. This episode is meant to help you avoid that. A big thank you to Carthick for making this connection. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to

Starting point is 00:02:27 subscribe and followed in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Chandra Jannik Raman. This episode is brought to you by Epo. Epo is a next generation A-B testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp, and Draft Kings rely on Epo to power their experiments. Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of new features. And Epo helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous, deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does. When I was at Airbnb, one of the

Starting point is 00:03:10 things that I loved most was our experimentation platform where I could set up experiments easily, troubleshoot issues, and analyze performance all on my own. Epo does all that and more, with advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks off experiment time, an accessible UI for diving deeper into performance, and out-of-the-box reporting that helps you avoid annoying, prolonged analytics cycles. Epo also makes it easy for you to share experiment insight with your team, sparking new ideas for the AB testing flywheel.

Starting point is 00:03:38 Epo powers experimentation across every use case, including product, growth, machine learning, monetization, and email marketing. Check out Epo at getepo.com.com slash Lenny and 10X your experiment velocity. That's get-eppo.com. slash Lenny. This episode is brought to you by Airtable Product Central, the unified system that brings your entire product org together in one place.

Starting point is 00:04:04 No more scattered tools, no more misaligned teams. If you're like most product leaders, you're tired of constant context switching between tools. That's why Airtable built Product Central after decades of working with world-class product companies. Think of it as mission control for your entire product organization. Unlike rigid point solutions, product central powers everything, from resourcing to voice of customer to road mapping to launch execution. And because it's built on Airtable's no-code platform,

Starting point is 00:04:33 you can customize every workflow to match exactly how your team works. No limitations, no compromises. Ready to see it in action, head to Airtable.com slash Lenny to book a demo. That's Airtable.com slash Lenny. Chandra, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast. Pleasure to be here, Lenny. I want to share actually the context and how this conversation happened.

Starting point is 00:05:00 I was at a meetup of my readership, my community, and someone came up to me and they're like, Lenny, you need to get this guy, Chandra on your podcast. He is the most amazing playbook for developing a strategy. He's gone through it with you at a company. He worked at with you once. And he's just like, people need to learn this because it's so good. And to me, if someone can get better at strategy, it feels like it just makes so much of the way the company operates and the way that people work better. So we chatted, we met. I was like,

Starting point is 00:05:28 I completely agree. We definitely need to get you on this podcast to share your approach to strategy. So we made this happen. And so we're here. So again, thank you for doing this and sharing. Thank you. Thank you, Lenny. First of all, I wanted to ask just, you're very passionate about strategy and developing a way to consistently create great strategies. What got you so interested in this stuff in the first place? what kind of sparked your interest in this area? Yeah, yeah. It's a very interesting story.

Starting point is 00:05:55 You know, it goes back all the way 10 years ago, but I remember it vividly like it happened yesterday. And I was a relatively new VP of product at Headspace, and we had this amazing company vision and mission that the founders had laid out. And I had come in and established sort of goals for the team, in terms of our sort of key metrics, and we had a very sort of buttoned up roadmap in my mind, you know, that sort of fed into that company mission and vision.

Starting point is 00:06:32 And I was feeling pretty good about sort of how things were sort of shaping up. And, you know, on a sort of a particular Monday, the founder's CEO pulled me aside. And in his usual disarming style, he sort of made. a short but profound statement. He said that, hey, CJ, I'm hearing that a lot of people don't really understand why we are working on what we are working on. And that was it. That was really sort of like the extent of what he shared. And it was a little bit of a bubble bursting moment for me, because, you know, we obviously had spent a lot of time building the plan and I was feeling relatively good about the plan.

Starting point is 00:07:20 And so, you know, I spoke to a few people. I sort of wanted to understand it a little bit deeper, like, hey, you know, what's happening? And he was right. He was right. A lot of people didn't really understand why we were working on the things we were working on. And it led to some soul searching.

Starting point is 00:07:39 And sort of basically, you know, I was lucky because there was actually a board member of Headspace who had a product background, kind of knew what good looked like. And sort of, you know, I came to the conclusion, hey, we needed a strategy for headspace. So with sort of extensive work with her, with the board person, we built the first sort of written product strategy for Headspace. And that and the subsequent actions on the product led to, a complete reimagination of the product. And basically, you know, we were able to create a new product,

Starting point is 00:08:22 which we call it the next generation headspace, which on one hand, it could support a comprehensive library of content, not just meditation but non-meditation content as well. It had the sort of home experience where everything was incredibly personalized for the individuals. And there were several motivational elements. built into the whole product experience.

Starting point is 00:08:48 And it was very transformational, you know, for the company and the product because it changed the product from being a meditation app to a broader health and wellness service and really put the company on a different trajectory. It led to my promotion to the first CPO at Headspace. And most interestingly, you know, I had a chance to, while going through it,

Starting point is 00:09:13 almost in a sort of an out-of-body way, observe the process of like, okay, how did we put this thing together and, you know, what actually went into it? So what really started as a, you know, almost a personal sort of crisis moment of, you know, finding this sort of need to create a strategy for a product and a company led to a bigger sort of quest for me, which is I started noticing that there was a certain mystique and aura about product strategy. And, you know, there was this perception that some people were intrinsically really good at strategy and others were not. And it was almost as if there was a strategy gene that you needed to be born with to be good at it. And that bothered me a lot. And, you know, I sort of wanted to ask myself,

Starting point is 00:10:05 is it possible to break that divide between, you know, the sort of the haves and the have-nots and make this sort of capability widely accessible through a procedural approach. And I have news for you. You know, the answer is yes. Anybody can build product strategy through a clear understanding of what it is and through a friendly and repeatable playbook. Amazing. That's exactly what I want to do here.

Starting point is 00:10:32 The point you made about the why, I think everyone listening to, of this that's been a product for long enough has heard that of just like, your team doesn't understand why we're doing this. I've heard that number of times. Like, as much as you think you're killing it, there's always that. Like, you forget sometimes to do that. Or you aren't doing it great. So, and I love that basically the solution to that is the strategy solves that problem

Starting point is 00:10:54 of helping people see. But connect the dots, understand why this is the roadmap, why this is the strategy. Okay. So before we get into it, just one more context question. What's just the best way to think about what you're about to share? And also, who's it for? Who needs to hear this briefly? So the way to think about this, the substance, is that this is not a new framework or theory that, you know, I'm going to be talking about.

Starting point is 00:11:19 There are plenty of excellent materials on strategy, you know, from ancient sort of texts like The Art of War, from Sun Tzu, you know, all of Michael Porter's work, good strategy, bad strategy by Richard Rummel, who's been on your auto. playing to win, Laughley and Roger Martin. So there's a ton of extensively researched and well sort of founded materials out there. So the way I would think about this is it's more of an operator's interpretation of all the stuff that's out there and an endeavor to package it into something that's friendly and repeatable, particularly for product people who think they are weak at strategy or perhaps have received such feedback. And, you know, just in terms of sort of like the sort of the battle-tested nature of it, you know, I personally use this playbook about five to six times, tweaking and optimizing it each time based on sort of what I thought worked, what people thought worked and didn't work, including several times at meta. And, you know, usually leading to strong results, both for me achieving senior leadership alignment as well as driving business results for the company.

Starting point is 00:12:35 Okay, I'm getting more and more excited. Let's get into it. Let's get into this playbook. People hear this word strategy a lot. They're told be more strategic, build a better strategy. What's the simplest way to understand what is a strategy? Yeah, let's start with some basic definitions, which is, as you ask, like, what is product strategy? So, and if you think back to the headspace example, this sort of comes to life as well. So strategy, product strategy, strategy sits between the mission and vision and the plan. It could be at the company level or at the team level, but it's usually sitting between the mission and vision and the plan. And the plan, you can call the plan the roadmap, which is basically an ordered list of things that you want to get done. And the

Starting point is 00:13:21 mission and vision is basically sort of the purpose of existence. What does sort of like it look like when you achieve sort of your purpose of existence? So it sits between the two and it forces choice to deploy scarce resources to generate maximum impact. And I want to borrow an analogy from the world of physics. There is this concept called resonance. And the concept of resonance is really interesting, and it's actually very close to sort of, you know, the concept of strategy.

Starting point is 00:13:54 So the concept of resonance works as follows. When you apply a certain frequency to an object, and you get pretty close to its natural frequency, you see a disproportionate increase in sort of the amplitude of how that object vibrates. And so it's very interesting. You know, if you apply any other frequency, there's very little effect on the object.

Starting point is 00:14:18 But if you get close to its natural frequency, there's this exponential increase in the vibration of the product. So this concept of resonance is interesting. So the way to think about it in the context of strategy is it is selecting that frequency to achieve resonance between the product and the market. And so when you get close to that frequency, you should see tremendous impact in terms of the product landing well in the market. And so that's how I would think about it. It sits between mission vision and the plan.

Starting point is 00:14:51 It forces choice to deploy scarce resources to generate maximum impact. So using resonance as a sort of an example. and it ideally includes three components. The first is a handful of areas to focus on. And I call these strategic pillars. And then a whole bunch of areas that are explicitly not the focus. And the third component is why. So why are the focus areas, A, B, and C?

Starting point is 00:15:22 Why are this whole bunch of areas not the focus? and that's sort of the three components. That's it. That's really it in terms of product strategy. I love it. And I love the things we aren't doing is a core part of this that comes up a lot on this podcast of being clear because we're not going to do.

Starting point is 00:15:38 We know these could be things we could do, but we're deciding we're not doing these things. Okay. So let's just talk through how you go about developing a strategy using this method. Say someone's sitting down, okay, I'm going to start developing a strategy for our product. where do you begin? What does this process look like? Let's start talking through it.

Starting point is 00:15:59 So I sort of want to first explain this concept called Smallest Strategy, and I'll sort of talk about what that is and how it's different from another kind. But the basic sort of strategic process, I would say, is it takes about eight to 12 weeks long. It's something that I think people often underestimate how long it takes and eventually end up taking a lot more time. But, you know, when they start off, they think, oh, I could probably stand this up in a couple of weeks. But usually through iteration, it actually ends up taking 8 to 12 weeks anyway. So it's good to start with sort of setting clear expectations that it takes about 8 to 12 weeks. And the way to justify the ROI on that is typically a strategy like this can be leveraged for about a couple of years.

Starting point is 00:16:47 So relative to that sort of payback period, I think the investment is relatively small. So it's pretty healthy from that sense to manage expectations and say that that's how long it's going to take. So within that period, there are five phases. There's the preparation phase. There's a strategy sprint, the design sprint, the document writing, and the rollout. And those are the five phases which I'll explain, you know, how one would go through. And basically, each of them has a certain sort of time recommendation. You know, for example, the preparation phase, I would say it's probably about four weeks.

Starting point is 00:17:26 The strategy sprint is up to about one week. The design sprint is another one week. Document writing maybe one to two weeks and the rollout is maybe two to three weeks. So that's how you get to that range of eight to 12 weeks. Essentially, it's like a quarter of work to get ahead of, to get to a final great strategy. And of these five phases, the biggest bucket is preparation. which to me sounds like it's not like a full-time team thing. It's like starting to gather data and user research.

Starting point is 00:17:55 As you talk through this, I'm curious just like how much of the team is involved at each of these steps. But I think it's an important point. If you want a really good winning strategy, you need to give a time. You can't just say in a month or a week. We need to develop a strategy. Go figure it out right at this document.

Starting point is 00:18:11 Great. Cool. So let's talk about step one preparation. That's correct, Lenny. And I think you, if I forget, remind me that sometimes there is pressure, right? There's just business pressure, like, you know, the CEO might, you know, still want a strategy in two weeks. You know, how do you respond to that? And, and I think, I think we can sort of like find some clever shortcuts there. But, but I think, like, to the extent

Starting point is 00:18:35 possible the leader should, like, push for this media to make something really great. And I think part of it is that, like, as a leader, you can start on this before, like, you know this is coming. So you should get started before it's even asked. That's correct. Yeah. Awesome. Okay. Let's get into it.

Starting point is 00:18:51 So I think you sort of touched on this in terms of the preparation phase being the longest phase, but also not being sort of like a full-time thing. So that's absolutely right. So the preparation phase is really the way to start this, which is a little different from other approaches I've seen, you know, from people, is to actually form a strategy working group. This is an important concept. So the strategy working group is sort of a small team.

Starting point is 00:19:18 typically consists of engineering, product, design, and data at a minimum. And, you know, in certain cases, there's a luxury to have other functions like product marketing, user research. That's also part of the strategy working group. But the minimum quorum, I would recommend this engineering, product, design, and data, because design in some ways represents both sort of product design and user research. So you do get the sort of the voice of the user from that perspective. And typically the PM is sort of driving the strategy working group and the process, but that working group is actually the team that's going to collaboratively create the strategy doc. And so in the preparation phase, there's usually a kickoff meeting where the PM sort of like

Starting point is 00:20:04 pulls the team together, talks about sort of the purpose of the process, lays out the different phases, and gives everybody a feel for what's going to happen in the next like eight to 12 weeks. And and basically then creates a list of very discrete action items and deliverables for each of the sort of the stakeholders in the working group. So specifically, there's an action item around sort of aggregating all the behavioral insights that the team might have around the product. And usually this is a combination of previous analysis that the team has run on the data side and potentially, you know, also sort of feature launches and how they have done. So all kind of analytical analysis. The ask is really to create a meta-analysis of all of the analysis. So the data sort of person on the strategy working group has to sort of scan the historical archives at the company and sort of synthesize and

Starting point is 00:21:06 condense that into a very sort of digestible sort of macro themes and learnings about users. So that's of one preparation phase item. The second is UXR Insight. So again, there's probably a lot of sort of soft, hard signals about users, not just based on research that's run by user researchers, but also potentially from the customer service team, you know, social channels, and basically a meta-analysis of all of that into one sort of very actionable and synthesized deck on on all the sort of the insights on users. That's usually, you know, led by the design person and, you know, with support from their research team.

Starting point is 00:21:51 And that's sort of the second action item. The third action item is leadership interviews. So I sort of like have this, you know, fun, like, story of the fruit with like leadership strategy reviews, which I want to share. So imagine, like, this is sort of like how sometimes strategy reviews go, which is you bring a fruit to the, to the sort of the reviewer and say, hey, here's a mango, like,

Starting point is 00:22:17 you know, what do you think? And, and the reviewer says, I actually don't like mangoes. And you're like, oh, you're sort of sad. You take it back. You bring an apple and you show, hey, what do you think of an apple? And then the leader says, I actually stopped eating apples last year. And so you're disappointed. Again, you go back, you bring a banana.

Starting point is 00:22:37 Like, I hated banana since I was a kid. And so, you know, know, it's a bit of a silly caricature of reviews, but there's a bit of grade of truth there, which is, you know, imagine how frustrating that is for both the reviewer and the person, like, who's reviewing. And so it could be made so much better if you just engage with your leaders before you actually build a strategy. And it's amazing how few people actually do that. And and so the fruit story kind of like tells you like, hey, imagine if you just asked the reviewer, like, do you even like fruits? How much better the experience would have been for, you know,

Starting point is 00:23:15 both sort of parties. And, and so leadership interviews are a very important part of a strategy formulation process. So, so you can divide and conquer if there's several sort of leaders, like you assign sort of different leaders to different people on the strategy working group. And each of them sort of like talks to that leader. And there are a few sort of questions that I would recommend asking. And it's basically, you know, what does success feel like for, for the leader? What does failure look like? You know, what is the measure of success? What are principles to keep in mind while going through this process? And these are, these are centered around the product that you're working on. Exactly. Like if for Hatspace, it'd be like, what do you think success looks like for

Starting point is 00:23:58 headspace and or the specific feature of Hetspace? Exactly. Okay, cool. That's right. Yeah. And also like, I think ask them for their favorite or pet ideas. You know, it's, it's actually like, it's actually what I've found through this process is a lot of leaders have these pet ideas. They just feel shy to share it because they don't want their teams to think of them as micromanagey. They don't want their teams, they want their teams to figure out the answer themselves. But then when you ask them, they actually have a pet idea always. And so, so asking them just takes the mystery out of it. And it also gives them a creative avenue. So, some people feel nervous about, you know, engaging senior leaders in these conversations in the sense that, hey, is it a waste of their time?

Starting point is 00:24:45 What I've found is the exact opposite? Senior leaders are sort of like they welcome this because one, it's actually a more fun conversation for them than the other meetings that they have in their day, you know, because they are getting a little bit of their creative juices going. And they actually feel happy that somebody actually asked them what they're like feeling and thinking about. And so it's actually like very, very sort of positive energy, you know, when you ask leaders, just what they want. And so, and it's also not a sign of weakness. It's actually a sign of strength and humility to ask your leaders what you want. And so keeping that sort of fruit story in mind, like, I want to just sort of say that this

Starting point is 00:25:23 is a very, very positive thing, very powerful thing. The next area is competitive analysis. So if there is a product marketing person, like they can do it for you. If there isn't, the PM should do it themselves. And basically the idea is you sort of try to understand, like, who are the comparables or the competitors in the space? And you sort of build a little bit of a head-to-head and sort of a stack chart of like, where's everybody going? And what sort of like, what are the sort of the angles of investment for different people based on the explicit signals, which is what are they releasing? Because you don't really know what their strategies are, but you can kind of tell when you look at the features they are putting out that, oh,

Starting point is 00:26:04 they seem to be focusing on this particular area. And so that's sort of competitive analysis. And bigger companies, there's also another important input, which is adjacent roadmaps. Like, are the teams adjacent to you? And what are they investing in? And, you know, because oftentimes that can have a rub off effect on your team. And if you're not sort of like aligning with sort of other key teams, it's going to be important.

Starting point is 00:26:29 So adjacent roadmaps in a sort of summary of that. And last but not least is what I call sort of user observation. So I like the strategy working group to actually either interview a user or sort of watch a video and sort of report like sort of key learnings. And the idea is not to like action those insights. It's really to build empathy. You know, when you get somebody in a room with a user, it just changes their mind. It softens them a little bit. It gets them out of their own preconceived notions of what to build or the,

Starting point is 00:27:02 the strategy should be, and it humanizes the whole process. So that, I think, is the purpose, but you sort of still give them the homework of like writing down what they learn, because, you know, it's a little bit of a forcing function. So, so the output of all of this is what I call the comprehensive, you know, preparation readout. So it is a single master deck where you sort of have the behavioral insights meta-analysis, you have the UXR insights meta-analysis. You have a download of the leadership and abuse. You have the competitive sort of stack charts. You have the adjacent roadmaps, and you have sort of a section on user observations. So it's a lot of work.

Starting point is 00:27:44 So, you know, but to your point, it can be done in sort of parallel with your day jobs. You know, you can sort of multitask. And that's why, you know, you take about four weeks to do that. And that sort of, you know, sort of concludes the preparation phase. You get the deck. and that rolls into the strategy spread, which is the next phase. I want to pause and see if you have a million questions. I have a million questions, but I'm going to keep myself contained.

Starting point is 00:28:10 But just to quickly summarize, basically you kick off. We're going to start developing strategy for this product. And you were going to touch on this, but it may help just to talk about this right now. I know you have big S strategy, small as strategy. This process, what's like an example of the level of product scale that this process is for? because I know you have another approach for a larger scale of a product, like basically for a company, right? What's the best way to think about like smallest strategy,

Starting point is 00:28:35 which is what we're going through? Yeah, I think it's a good question, Lenny. I would say that the process works well at a sort of a growth stage company or in a vertical within sort of a larger company. I think it scales pretty well. It's the main difference between this small S and BigS is the sort of the time horizon aspect. and and you know and the sort of the aspirational component which which we get. Okay.

Starting point is 00:29:02 So this is a process you can use for entire company strategy of a not a large company, not a massively. Yeah. And then also just like a product within a company. Yeah. Okay. Perfect. Okay.

Starting point is 00:29:12 So hey, we're kicking off strategy for this thing. Let's say VR chat 2.0. You have this kickoff meeting with your working group. You assign action items and there's five, there's six things you ask everyone to do. gather all the behavioral insights, all the user research insights that you've had, leadership interviews, interview people ask what they want and see what they're hoping for, what success looks like, competitive analysis, adjacent roadmaps across other teams, and user observations, just like watch users see what's happening.

Starting point is 00:29:43 And you assign tasks, each of these tasks to different people in this working group. You set a deadline where we have to present this in, say, four weeks. People go work on it. You meet ongoing as it's coming to do. and then the output is a deck that you share. And do you share this deck with just that working group? Or who do you share this deck with and read it out to you? Yeah. So the deck is an output of the first phase and then it flows into the second phase,

Starting point is 00:30:07 which is a strategy sprint. So you don't share the deck with anybody yet. Got it. But in the strategy sprint, it's like a key deck. Awesome. Okay. I love how very concrete and actionable this is with time boxes and action items and the exact output you're looking for.

Starting point is 00:30:21 I love this. Okay. Cool. So basically what you're trying to do, here is gather all of the input that will inform the strategy. That's correct. And it's giving yourself time to do this because, you know, if you think about it, the output is determined by the quality of your input.

Starting point is 00:30:34 And I love, it feels like a core component of this method is spend time creating, gathering all the input, all the best input, like actually spend time there. Don't just like make it a half-fast last minute thing. Okay, amazing. Okay, let's talk about step two, which is the strategy sprint. Yeah. So the strategy sprint is the heart of the process. This is sort of where you make the decision.

Starting point is 00:30:58 So if you recall the sort of the definition of strategy is, you know, it forces choice to deploy resources into your sort of a few areas for maximum impact. So the core of strategy is really sort of picking those areas and the areas you're not going to invest in. And so that happens in the strategy spirit. So really it's the heart of the process. So typically it's like a three to five day process. The first day is the share-out day. So everybody has done some great work.

Starting point is 00:31:29 They go in, they share sort of what they've collected, what they've sort of learned. And so it brings everybody in the working group to the same state of understanding, the same state of consciousness on the state of the unit. So that's a great process where what I encourage people to do is write down things that you're, as you're listening, write on things that you find are problems for our users, things that are coming in the way of our growth, and things that are sort of like suboptimal for, you know, the business. And so, so people take a lot of notes during that time and the people who are presenting or sharing sort of everything they've learned. And that's really day one.

Starting point is 00:32:12 It's like just absorbing a ton of information and writing down a ton of notes. So people kind of understand, you know, where all the sort of the problems are. And it's a very problems-focused process. And that's an important point. I'll get back to it. You know, when we talk about Big Yes, which is different. And so once people have that sort of common awareness, shared knowledge of all the problems, day two is like literally the most important day in the entire like eight to 12 weeks because that's where you actually make the sort of the choice. And so the way to flow through it, it's actually really important to flow through it correctly. So the first step is really like generating a whole bunch of problems because people have been taking notes the previous day. You know,

Starting point is 00:32:59 you start the day with like, hey, let's collect everybody's sort of sort of thoughts on what the problems are that are holding us back. And so everybody just like it's a free flowing session. and everybody throws out their sort of observations on what's holding us back. And you just capture all of that in the Google Sheets, for example. And over sort of like even an hour, you start to see these patterns emerging of like, okay, there's these sort of clusters of problems that are sort of really holding us back. And so the next step is you sort of do a joint clustering of sort of related problems and you sort of create these potentially like typically in my experience I've seen about 10 to 15

Starting point is 00:33:42 clusters form of very related problems. And the beauty of it is each of this bigger cluster, you actually know what the sub-problems are within that cluster because you sort of generated it very organically. And then you have, let's say, 10 to 15 clusters. What you then do is you, because remember, because it started as a problem sort of generation exercise, each of the clusters also has a name that is a problem. And so the next step is to flip it into an opportunity framing. And so let me give you a couple of examples. So let's say there's a bunch of problems around, you know, people don't really know where to find different things in our product.

Starting point is 00:34:23 And they don't really know where to go, where to find sort of a certain feature or a certain experience. And there's let's say a lot of problems in that area. So, So difficulty finding things becomes the cluster, the problem cluster, and discovery becomes the opportunity sort of framing of it, right? And it's sort of the more positive framing of it. And another example could be that people get a lot of content that they don't like. You know, they see a lot of stuff that they don't like and so they disengage with the product. And so the opportunity framing of that would be relevance, right? like it's basically, oh, like stuff that really matters to me.

Starting point is 00:35:03 And or maybe like if it's a social product, then, you know, maybe people are finding it difficult to find friends and they sort of like are lonely because of that. The sort of the opportunity framing would be social connection. And so flipping all of those problem clusters into, you know, positive framing and opportunity framing is the next step. And then you're in a great spot because now, all you have to do is you have to down select from like those 10 to 15, you know, opportunity areas into ideally three, you know, maybe five, but I would recommend three because it creates like more clarity and focus. And the way to do that is really sort of ranking them on, I would say like four or five like key dimensions or criteria. And the first

Starting point is 00:35:53 is expected impact. So let's say you actually tackle that, you know, that area. What is the expected impact, whatever matters to you as a company, as a business, as a product. And the second dimension is certainty of impact. Certainty of impact is basically how concrete is the evidence that this is a problem? Sometimes you have like really hard data. Sometimes you have sort of more anecdotal evidence. And so the confidence really depends on how baked the problem sort of sizing and frequency is. And so expected impact, certainty of impact.

Starting point is 00:36:30 The third one is also very important, which is clarity of levers. Do you actually have an idea of how you would solve it? If you don't, it's going to be really difficult to move the needle on it because, you know, you should kind of know that, oh, okay, like, I can imagine these solutions could actually move the needle. I can actually launch this sort of, you know, nudge system that can help people find things. I can recommend sort of people. I can recommend friends so that people can form friends quicker on the platform. So you should have a sense of like how you would solve that particular space. So is there clarity on levers?

Starting point is 00:37:06 That's the sort of the third dimension. And the fourth dimension is super, super important, which is, is, is other levers unique and differentiated to that particular team or company, which is that, you know, if another sort of team or company could build it, better than this particular team or company, then it's probably not that differentiated. It's probably going to be pretty generic once you launch it. So it's a combination of sort of like, hey, is there a lot of impact here? How confident are we of the problem? Do we have a sense of the solutions? And basically, like, are we sort of the team or company that has the capabilities

Starting point is 00:37:46 and the skills to like uniquely build it where other teams cannot? And so once you have that, And sometimes what happens is you don't have too much data. And so it's okay to have qualitative scores on this, like high, medium low, you know, t-shirt scores, whatever that is. But the key is you're doing it together as a strategy working group. And you're sort of like you're debating like the scores and you're reasoning why it should be higher versus lower. And like there's a ton of like alignment and like collision that's happening when you're doing that, which is like very, very healthy for the eventual sort of outcome.

Starting point is 00:38:21 So once you do that, basically you can do a simple sort of addition of the scores and an assort. And what you have is basically the top three, right? And you have like the remaining seven or 12 that are basically not sort of focus. And so that's the core of the process is like getting that sort of those opportunity areas and getting to a shared sense of, okay, how do we prioritize them and why? Okay. And this is all done in a week. I know there's more to it. There's a couple more items that help you move from what you just said to like the next step. But I love that this is the core of like the biggest element of the process. And you can do it you do it in a week. And you're only able to do it in a week because of the work you did ahead of time. So again, highlighting the importance of that prep step. So just to share what you've shared so far. And then we'll finish the strategy sprint step. So it's basically do the shareout. So everyone's on the same page about. all the information that all the inputs essentially. Enumerate all the problems, like individual small problems and then cluster them into 10 to 15 problem clusters.

Starting point is 00:39:31 Flip it from here's the problem to here's an opportunity we have. Rank them based on, basically there's these four attributes you shared, which actually the wrote these down. So impact, potential, confidence that it will have the impact, clarity of levers. And are they differentiated unique levers? Like, yeah, are they going to, is there something different from me? what other folks are doing. So those are ways to rank at these ideas and problem clusters. You essentially come up with here's three big, three bets basically potentially should take.

Starting point is 00:40:00 And okay, and then I think that's where you stopped. Is that right? That's totally right, Lenny. And those three that are at the top of that pile are basically our strategic pillars. So we've sort of gotten our strategic pillars and they basically hold up the strategy. That's why they're called strategic pillars. And the idea is, Once you have the strategic pillars, we basically translate that into a few how might we. So, you know, how might we do, you know, let's say it's a relevance thing. How might we find the best content for a particular user? How might we surface it in the right place?

Starting point is 00:40:35 You know, there's a few how might we's. And the how might we's are basically intended to help the next phase of the process, which is the design spread. So you generate these areas, these strategic pillars. You generate the how might we's. How might these are typically pretty straightforward. Once you have the strategic pillars, it takes probably an hour to generate somehow white piece for each of them, maybe two or three for each strategic pillar. And then you're done with that stage.

Starting point is 00:41:00 I just want to highlight real quick. This phrasing is really important. I used exactly the same phrasing at a PM that I worked with. His name is Andrew Chen, but not the Andrew Chen people know about it. That's an investor who had this concept of fertile questions that create ideas and spark ideas and solutions. and this phrase, how might we, is actually really powerful as a way to phrase, as a way to come up with ideas to solve problems. So it's just like, how might we increase discoverability in our app?

Starting point is 00:41:30 How might we improve relevance? Like, there's something magical about that phrasing that it opens up your mind to, oh, how might we? Let's think about it versus like, how do we improve discovery? You know, that's like a different, your brain works differently hearing this. So that is a really powerful phrasing. I just wanted to highlight that. Yeah, that's awesome. It's also something that designers are familiar with Lenny.

Starting point is 00:41:52 So it, like, flows really well. It does sort of a design spread. Okay. So you have these Hamitewees. So you have three pillars, maybe three or four or five hamite ways to solve these opportunities ashe problems and then what happens after that. Exactly. And then the third day is like it's good to start fresh.

Starting point is 00:42:10 Like, you know, so the team's accomplished a lot. So this was all the first two days. This is the first two days. Wow. So much done in two days. Yeah, exactly. And the second day is particularly intense on the team. So it's good to give them a break because it's a lot of like really mental sort of wrestling.

Starting point is 00:42:25 And so give the team a bit of a break. And then the third day is when people are a little bit refreshed, we get to winning aspiration. So winning aspiration is super interesting because it's a very creative exercise. So you basically imagine in two years because that's the typical time horizon of a smaller strategy is like 18 months to 24 months. So imagine in two years, this is what I tell the team, imagine two years there's a newspaper, there's a journalist that covers this work and there's a newspaper article that comes out. And I want you to imagine the progress on all these strategic pillars and what the headline of that newspaper article looks like.

Starting point is 00:43:06 So it's called a newspaper headline approach. And basically everybody generates a newspaper headline in parallel. And it's interesting because you often see there's these common themes that sort of form when people generate these headlines. And the forcing function with the headline is also that it has to be somewhat simple and plain speak. It's not too technical. You have to sort of get to like a more sort of simple layperson's language. And you have to get to like the key benefit that ultimately like the impact it has on the world. Like, you know, those kinds of themes like come up often.

Starting point is 00:43:42 And so then you do a little bit, you put them all into a blender. You put all of those headlines from the team into a blender and like you sort of mash them together and create like the sort of the winning aspiration, which is ultimately like what does sort of progress on the strategy look like in a couple of years time. And that comes from the working group. It's not like one person writing. What's an example of an aspiration that you've come up with on a project you worked on? Winning aspiration. We did this process for the privacy team, you know, when I was at MEDA. And one of the sort of the aspirational statements was around really like the strategic pillars

Starting point is 00:44:27 were around a lot of sort of features that we would build. But the winning aspiration was really like, hey, could we move like consumer trust? And, you know, and the newspaper headline is something like, you know, Facebook has moved the needle on consumer trust by investing in, you know, these areas. And so that's like how you sort of, you know, create sort of the bigger impact. That's a great example. And obviously this is similar to the PR Amazon method. And what I love about your approach, as you said early on, is you're just pulling together

Starting point is 00:44:55 all of these awesome ideas from all these different methods of strategy work to a very methodical step-by-step process, taking all the best ideas into some, and as you described kind of an operator's playbook for doing this. So I love that. Okay. So, and when you say blender, by the way, I'm sticking as you're talking, put it into a blender. What I'm inferring is you just take all the everyone's headlines and you come up with one that kind of covers the gamut of all three pillars being successful. That's exactly right.

Starting point is 00:45:21 Like more tactically, what I typically do is I put them all on a slide and you start, it's almost like a word cloud. And then you start to see these common words. And then you converge those words as a key elements of the final winning aspiration. And then you try to create like a nice statement out of that. So, you know, it also like symbolically, you everybody sees their own statement. on the sort of the deck, and that's how you get to the final line. Awesome. And I feel like AI could help with that now, just like throw in all your headline ideas and it comes up with some suggestions.

Starting point is 00:45:51 Okay, cool. So is that the end of the sprint or is there more to the sprint? That's it for this. Okay. And so at the end of the sprint, what do you have? What are the outputs? Yeah, this is a great progress on strategy because now we have the three strategic pillars. We have the how might we associated with the strategic pillars.

Starting point is 00:46:10 You also have the why. Why did you get to those three strategic pillars? And what are you not focused on and what are the reasons for it? And you also have the winning aspiration. So it's great progress. Teams done a great job. I think now we sort of move on to the design sprint. In your experience, how often are these three the correct three that you end up going with

Starting point is 00:46:33 versus you learn something over the course of the rest of the sprint and adjust? It's a very good question. So we'll speak about an example that I, had in meta where typically during the strategy sprint, like you don't change it once you go through the strategy sprint. But eventually there are sort of a lot of signals you get through execution where you sort of have to course correct. And we'll talk about one very interesting example of how that sort of changed things. Yeah. Awesome. Okay. So basically you've developed your strategy at this point. And in your experience, it ends up being like until you, you know,

Starting point is 00:47:07 hit the market and test, you don't really know what's going on. Correct. But there's kind of an implication that in your experience doing this, I think you said five or six times, it has been correct and as good as doing it, any other approach. I would say, I would say it's not a sort of an empirical study,

Starting point is 00:47:26 obviously, because of the small sample size, but I would say that it's like really open sort of people's eyes and like it's led to like really good alignment and eventually like good results. And even when it has not, it has led to like good organizational buy-in on sort of like why and how we are,

Starting point is 00:47:41 which he thinks. This reminds me of Tomor Cohen was on the podcast. He's CPO of LinkedIn. He has this phrase that everyone always says he says, which is we may be wrong, but we're not confused. Yeah. And I love that a core part of this is everyone is completely on the same page from the beginning, you know, not from the beginning, but once you start this process of here's all the inputs, here's step by step we are working together on narrowing down. So at least everyone understands the why, which is what sparked your interest in this in the first place, everyone understanding. I know there's a whole rollout at the end, too, they'll solve that. Okay, cool. So we have the sprint. We have basically the three pillars that you're going to invest in, this headline of what

Starting point is 00:48:20 it might look like if you're to launch and some solution ideas with how might we use. What comes next? Yeah. So the next phase is the design sprint. And the design sprint is, can be led by the design person who's in the strategy working group. If you remember, there's like engineering product design and data. So the design person can lead it and the PM can sort of take a bit of a backseat during this process. So the input to the design sprint is the sort of the three strategic pillars and the how might be associated with it. And the goal of the design sprint is not to sort of come up with, oh, these are the features we should build. That's not the purpose of the design sprint. The design sprint is to generate a lot of illustrative concepts

Starting point is 00:49:01 that bring the strategy to life because, you know, a picture is worth a thousand words. And Oftentimes, even though you might have the right words in your strategy doc, people might still scratch their head. Like, what do you exactly mean? What are you going to build? And so the illustrative concepts really sort of give people something to latch hard to, oh, okay, I get it. Like, this is what you're going to build at the end of the day with the strategy. And so the more generative, the better. And then, like, is this the ability to, you know, sometimes if you do the Google Ventures Design Sprint, you can even test some of it with users and, you know, get a little bit of sort of sharpening of things.

Starting point is 00:49:36 But the goal here is not to like build like feature ready designs. It's more to generate concepts. And so once you have that, basically the design sprint and this different flavors of design sprints, which I won't go into and sort of like you can lean on sort of your design lead to decide what's the appropriate big. But the output, the input and the output is what needs to be very emphasized. The input needs to be the strategic winners. The output needs to be a ton of sort of illustrative concepts to explain.

Starting point is 00:50:06 explain each strategic pillar. So you could almost have a section where you talk about each strategic pillar and insert those concepts in that section. And that's the idea. And we're going to go through a couple examples to make this very real. And you mentioned the design sprint method, which we had the authors on the podcast. They actually didn't go through the design sprint method. They have another book called Make Time that's about productivity. We also had their colleague from Google Ventures that designed a bullseye sprint, which is also an interesting sprint. It's a new thing that helps you figure out your ICP and who to focus your product on and how that informs your product.

Starting point is 00:50:40 Interesting. It's another type of sprint you could use here. Okay. So the input is here's the three things we're going to invest in, say, discovery, relevance, privacy. Here's, and the output is here's like concepts of what this could look like to get people's minds going. Is there any like, is it just like a bunch of mocks basically in a deck at this point? That's correct. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:51:01 Okay, cool. Okay, amazing. So that's a week. That's another sprint. PM could maybe take a little bit of a break. Exactly. And designers take the lead. Exactly.

Starting point is 00:51:09 And the engineers are kind of inputs and, you know, thought partners in this, I imagine. They're optional, yeah. Optional. But yeah, ideally they're involved because you want, you want all the best ideas. Yeah, yeah. Okay, cool. What comes next? And then the next step is the document writing.

Starting point is 00:51:23 And this is sort of a solo activity that the PM should take on. And but the great news is they're not, the PM is not starting from scratch. There's so much great stuff to write. Like, if you remember, there's. a ton of user insights, a ton of behavioral insights, a ton of competitive analysis. There's the three strategic pillars, how my tweets, winning aspiration. There's a whole bunch of illustrative concepts. So, you know, oftentimes, like, product leads have this sort of creators block.

Starting point is 00:51:52 You know, that is solid here completely because you have a ton of great material. But I have to tell you, it doesn't make the job easier. You still have to, there's sort of like, you still have to weave together a good story. that's why I think it takes a week or two. And I think it's really about combining, connecting, and editing. And at this point and like telling sort of a cohesive story from all those components. But I think the building blocks are really solid and defensive. Is there a template or kind of sections you like to include in your strategy doc?

Starting point is 00:52:21 As someone sits down as trying to write this out, what do you want to see there as kind of headings? I think you could almost take the building blocks as like a little bit of a sort of a steer for the template. So you start with sort of the broader context, like, you know, where you, you talk about what the leaders kind of want from this sort of overall effort. And then you get into, you know, key insights and analysis where you have sort of user insights, behavioral insights, competitive analysis. And then you get into the sort of the strategic pillars and you explain them. You also explain why. And in the appendix, you include the full table. that you generated on day two of your strategy sprint,

Starting point is 00:53:05 you include the full table in the appendix, including the criteria, that's going to be really important because most people are going to ask, like, why did you pick these? And that's, like, basically the sort of the defensibility. And then you have the winning aspiration that's, like, very bold.

Starting point is 00:53:19 It's like, you know, a big part of the heart of the deck. And you sort of embed the illustrative concepts into the actual, like, each of the strategic pillars so that it flows well. And then finally, you end with, you know, some kind of alignment questions. Like, hey, do these feel right? Like, you know, are there things we are missing?

Starting point is 00:53:39 So that it creates that framework for alignment in the subsequent meetings. I'm excited to chat with Christina Gilbert, the founder of One Schema, one of our longtime podcast sponsors. Hi, Christina. Yes. Thank you for having me on, Lenny. What is the latest with One Schema? I know you now work with some of my favorite companies like Ramp, Vanta, Scale, and Watershed.

Starting point is 00:54:01 I heard that you just launched a new product to help product teams import CSVs from especially tricky systems like ERPs. Yes, so we just launched one scheme of file feeds, which allows you to build an integration with any system in 15 minutes as long as you can export a CSV to an SFTP folder. We see our customers all the time getting stuck with hacks and workarounds, and the product teams that we work with don't have to turn down prospects because their systems are too hard to integrate with. We allow our customers to offer thousands of integrations without involving their engineering team at all. I can tell you that if my team had to build integrations like this, how nice would it be to be able to take this off my roadmap and instead use something like one schema and not just to build it, but also to maintain it forever? Absolutely, Lenny. We've heard so many horror stories of multi-day outages from even just a handful of bad records.

Starting point is 00:54:48 We are laser-focused on integration reliability to help teams end all of those distractions that come up with integrations. We have a built-in validation layer that stops any bad data from entering your system, and one schema will notify your team immediately of any data. that looks incorrect. I know that importing incorrect data can cause all kinds of pain for your customers and quickly lose their trust. Christina, thank you for joining us. And if you want to learn more,

Starting point is 00:55:11 head on over to one schema.co. That's one schema.cow. I pulled up playing to win, which I know you also pull ideas from. And actually, Roger Martin was on the podcast talking about the stuff. And one way I think about as you're describing way to break up your strategy doc

Starting point is 00:55:28 is he has these five questions that you ask. The first is actually what's your winning aspiration? So I love that you're pulling that in. This is like one approach. Your doc could be. What's your winning aspiration? Where will you play? What market are you going after?

Starting point is 00:55:40 How will you win? What capabilities must be in place for you to win? And then what management systems are required? We'll link to this framework just in case people want that as a crutch in their thinking of strategy. But is there anything that we can link folks to that describe how you like to think about this doc? And if not, it'd be cool if you make a template that folks could borrow. I'm happy to share the sort of the flow chart of the process and the, you know, the template as well. Awesome. Okay. Okay. So this is how long of a process does writing of the document?

Starting point is 00:56:10 It's about one to two weeks. And I think it's mostly solo work. And hopefully by the end of it, there's a very tight talk. And, you know, that's what we use to roll out. And by solo work, I imagine you're looping in this working team to get their feedback as you're pulling it together or is it just you sit there in a room and then? I would minimize sort of pulling them in because they've all contributed so much to the process already. So I would say that at the end of it, obviously, you know, once you have sort of a draft, it's good to share with them. But I wouldn't like have them, have their cycles too much at this point because they've sort of given a lot already. I see. Okay. And like how many pages do you see the stock being roughly?

Starting point is 00:56:50 What's like a good heuristic? Yeah. It's not too long. I would say probably like three, three or four sort of page. And then an appendix has a lot of additional, like the table I spoke about and a lot of additional maybe illustrative concepts. Maybe you can only use a few illustrative concepts in the main section so that there could be others there. I think usually there's sort of a desire to, from leaders to sort of say like, okay, like what are we building next? And it's important not to include like a roadmap as part of a strategy doc because strategy doc is meant to be separate from the roadmaps, meant to be a company.

Starting point is 00:57:26 meant to be a companion to your roadmap. And even though there's interest, maybe sometimes you can include like an illustrative roadmap in the appendix, but I would try to keep it clean and try to keep it focused on just the strategy. So at this point, you basically developed your strategy. The next step I think you call rollout

Starting point is 00:57:45 where you just start actually rolling this out. So let's talk about that. But it's important to note, like how many weeks in this is like six-ish weeks of work and you've got a strategy for your company? slash product. That's exactly right. Yeah. So I think you're probably in the last like two to three weeks of the process and pretty important sort of final step is the rollout. And, and I would start with, you know, what I call gatekeepers. And these are people who are like absolutely like,

Starting point is 00:58:14 you have to get their one-on-one sort of alignment and blessing on this before it moves forward. And it's probably not too many, like probably like two or three people. So I would sort of pre-flighted with them and get the alignment. So these are one-on-one meetings with these kickkeepers. Exactly. Exactly. And then there's a larger group of sort of what I call key stakeholders, people who are impacted by it, you know, different functional leaders, etc.

Starting point is 00:58:39 And that can be done either async or through sort of a group review. And then there's probably a rolling sort of list of team roadshows. You know, sort of there's different ways to do this. But the one that I feel is most effective is the roadshow where you have like, about eight to 10 people in each sort of session. So people feel more comfortable to ask questions. And it's more sort of like conversational. And so the purpose of the stage is to land it,

Starting point is 00:59:08 is not to like seek too much feedback. So it's a delicate balance. At the same time, you don't want to appear like, you know, just sort of, you know, being too inflexible. So it's a very delicate balance. Like, you know, when people ask questions, you can clarify it and you can add clarifications to the doc. but I wouldn't change, like, the most important thing

Starting point is 00:59:26 in three strategic pillars, like, I wouldn't change that. I would sort of defend it using sort of the framework. But if people are like, there's really good arguments about the criteria that led to, you know, your ranking, then it's okay to reconsider it. I'm not seen it happen in my sort of like five to six attempts, but it's theoretically possible. Yeah, like the core of this approach, it sounds like,

Starting point is 00:59:49 is you've done a lot of the pre-work where you land in a generally correct place. Okay, so this is the rollout. So what I'm thinking is you talk, say you're like a PM on a team, say you're working on privacy, it's like an IC or ICPM working on strategy. How do you think about including, say, your manager? Because through this process, like, when do you start to like, hey, here's what we're planning. Here's what we're thinking. Making sure they're on board because I could see this working team off to the side, working, work and working, work in. Okay, we're ready to roll it out.

Starting point is 01:00:19 Oftentimes there's like, no, no, no, wait, wait. There's all those other stuff happening at the company. you don't resource. Like where do you, where do you loop them in? How do you think about that kind of stakeholder? The sort of the more, you know,

Starting point is 01:00:31 attuned PMs who understand organizational dynamics probably keep the manager pretty like in sync through the process. I think definitely the manager becomes a person who you interview, you know, as part of sort of the leadership interviews. So you kind of know what the managers looking for from the effort. And then once you sort of get to the strategic pillars on day two, of the strategy sprint, you probably want to just like quickly pre-flighted with the manager and say,

Starting point is 01:00:57 hey, look, this is how it's trending. And, you know, this is probably, these are the things we are probably not going to do and like any, any sort of issues with that. And then eventually you actually want your manager to sort of support you in some of these bigger meetings. So, you know, you sort of endless their help. So, so I would say that it's probably like each individual style, but I would keep them pretty like aligned through the process. But you don't have to be like too heavy way. just be super likely. Great. Makes a lot of sense to me. There's like a, we're not going to solve everyone's problems with this one framework. Maybe just quickly touch on resourcing as you think about this. Like a part of a strategy includes like, oh, we also need these resources. I guess just

Starting point is 01:01:37 any thoughts on how to include that. And then I want to get into some examples of how you've actually implemented this. So I actually don't recommend thinking about resources in the strategy phase, because what you're saying is these are the areas of focus. And the resourcing question, question becomes more relevant from a road mapping standpoint. Because then you say, okay, what percentage of our engineering do we put on strategic pillar A versus B versus C? And, you know, and what are the specific things we build? So it becomes a road mapping question as opposed to a strategy question. And so by the end of this, the rollout, like the part of the rollout is developing the actual roadmap. We're not going to get deep into that. That could be part two of our solve every

Starting point is 01:02:15 PM's problems, teach them all the steps of the process. But we're going to cut it off. that here is you have a strategy that is starting to be rolled out. Yeah, exactly. Cool. Let's go through a couple examples. We actually have a end of this to make this even more real. I know there's a couple of companies you're thinking about sharing the strategies you've worked on. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:02:34 I think there's just sort of three quick notes to close off this process. And I'll share the two examples. So the reason I think this process works is the first is because, there is a ton of alignment built in, you know, sort of within team alignment and leadership alignment built in. And it's not seen as, oh,

Starting point is 01:02:58 this PM went off and wrote this, you know, strategy doc. And I don't agree with most of it. And, and part of this is actually very, sort of, it goes back to human psychology of just,

Starting point is 01:03:11 like, something that comes from you feels a lot more familiar and easy to accept. So, so this doc is actually not from the PM, the PM is kind of facilitating it, but it's actually from the sort of the strategy working group. And the strategy working group are the leads of the team. And so it's actually, and the leadership sort of inputs have been baked in.

Starting point is 01:03:31 So it's actually very sort of team representative. And so hopefully there isn't sort of too much misalignment when you roll it out. And I have seen that. You know, I've seen that workout. The second is the, there's just better results. Like you get to like better sort of problem articulation. you get a better strategic pillars, because there's just more minds on it

Starting point is 01:03:52 than if it were just sort of a product lead. And the third thing is you have clearly defensible criteria and outputs. And if you want to change it, like I said, you have to go back to the criteria and the scoring and then say like, okay, why do we believe this has to be changed? And even a change is easy to justify once you do that. So it creates a lot of benefits. But ultimately, and we'll get to this a little bit more,

Starting point is 01:04:18 know, it has to be tested with execution. And that's the most important thing. Yeah, I think it's important to highlight. No framework, playbook, Fred Method is going to guarantee you have the correct strategy that will win and your company will thrive. It's always just the best effort at plan. Yeah, as the quote, no good plan survives first contact with the customer. Exactly. Cool.

Starting point is 01:04:42 Cool. Let's talk through some examples. Yeah. So the first example I wanted to talk about is, at Zinger, you know, I sort of was at Zinger a very long time ago, and this was sort of the heyday of social gaming on Facebook. The thing that I was extremely impressed about Zinger was the strategic clarity and strategic encoding at the company. And this was not attributable to me, by the way, this was already there when I got there as sort of an entry level PM. But the kind of strategic

Starting point is 01:05:16 clarity there was really, really impressive. And it was very evident and observable from all the games. So if you look at sort of all the games, there were sort of three elements that were very common across all the games. You know, sort of the first was viral game loops, right? Like these game loops that just sort of required you to have an active social network to be successful and play. It was very like tightly and fictually integrated into sort of the core of the gameplay. That was the first one. The second one was there was this idea of like paying to complete sort of things. So you're not necessarily paying to like skip a whole sort of like experience. What you're paying is just to complete it. So what happens then is different people, depending on how much time

Starting point is 01:06:03 they have, complete like different percentages of sort of a progression task or a sort of a part of the gameplay. And you only had to pay the rest to get through the experience. And it was this interesting sort of, you know, experience where people put a lot of investment into it and they didn't mind sort of paying for the last like 20% or 30%, which was very interesting because it created this market for like different like elasticity of spend, different times that people had in their lives. And it was very, very clever. So that was again like very common across all the games. And then the third was network cross-promotion. So all of Zinger games had this cross-promotional component at the top of the game,

Starting point is 01:06:47 and they would promote other games. And it's sort of like the Zinger Network was the most important thing and not sort of an individual game. And those were sort of the three big, you know, in our parlance now, strategic pillars, right? And there were non-focus areas. Like it wasn't like the focus wasn't on high fidelity graphics. It wasn't on like complex game mechanics.

Starting point is 01:07:11 And this was extremely clear. hard-coded into the company culture and operations. And it was perfectly tuned to the environment at the time. You know, Facebook platform afforded strong support with social graph and channels. And basically, the game studios contributed through different games in a very network agreed a way. So for example, I was at Zingar San Diego and we took the company into net new game genres like action strategy, match three, puzzle games.

Starting point is 01:07:40 But we stayed true to the strategic pillars of the. company and we had to invent new mechanics so that the strategic pillars would work in the new genres that we introduced to the company. And what was fascinating is the company actually had systems to reinforce these strategic pillars. And for example, the data infrastructure was very incredible at the time and really reinforced these strategic pillars. There was this function called central product management, which basically propagated best practices,

Starting point is 01:08:10 made sure that games were network accretive, and all these things worked sort of in harmony to enhance those strategic pillars and reinforce it. And it worked really well. You know, the company, if I remember right, got to a billion dollars. It was the fastest to get to a billion dollars in the history of sort of companies at the time.

Starting point is 01:08:31 In revenue. In revenue. And it worked really well until the environment changed, right? And sort of there was a shift to mobile. and temporarily, you know, basically, if you go back to that resonance concept, that deep resonance between the product and the market was temporarily lost. You know, once sort of that shift happened to mobile. So there's a lot here.

Starting point is 01:08:52 I think one interesting note here is, as you said, the strategy work you're doing, which sounds like a lot of time, eight to 12 weeks potentially, like this lasts at a long time for Zinga. And so I think it's important to remember the work you're doing here, even though, like on the one hand it feels like a long time, and the other hand, it feels like very little time. to come up with the things that will most help your business grow. In this case, these three elements for Singa.

Starting point is 01:09:16 And by the way, these three pillars, they didn't emerge from this method, but it helped you see the power of being very clear. Yeah, exactly. And having everything centered around, we all agree. These are the three ways we win. Okay, cool. And then I think the number three again, I just want to highlight the power of just very few bets and investments. So it's always three.

Starting point is 01:09:36 I've always suggested three as well. some people are like three to five. But I think it's, do you just find in general three is the right number as much? Try very, very hard to make it three. I agree. Okay, cool. And then I think there's also this element of differentiation being really important. So these three elements you share for Zinga are just like they're unique and differentiated for Zinga.

Starting point is 01:09:58 Network powers of apps driving other apps, paying to complete like these are things Zingas figured out. This is how we win versus other product in the market. Totally, totally. Yeah. Sweet. Anything else along those lines with Zinger? That was in hindsight reflection, Lenny, you know, I was pretty naive when I was there. And, you know, I realized how, and this was, in fact, like, what led to my blind spot when I joined Headspace from Zinger that you even need a strategy, right?

Starting point is 01:10:29 Like, that's the story I said at the beginning. The reason is because Zinger had figured out so well that I didn't actually have a need to exercise that muzzle at Zinger, and we just had to come up with new games that sort of applied that strategy. And so it was a net new muscle I had to develop, you know, when I got to headspace. It's like that parable of the fish swimming in the water where the older fish swims by and he's like, how's the water? And they're like, and then he leaves and he's like, what's water? You just don't realize what you're in. You don't realize what you're surrounded by until it's gone. exactly. Maybe one other thing I just want to highlight while we're on this topic is just the power of focus.

Starting point is 01:11:11 In the case of Zinga, just this focus on everything we do needs to get these things, right? These three things, everything we do we need to do in order to win. And I think that's a recurring theme in what you're talking about is just like focus. Like the steps of the process are like focus on this one part for now. So I think that's a really interesting thread is just the power of focus. Yeah. Okay, cool. And now you have another. example of your time at meta. Yeah, at meta, there's this fascinating example, which I think sort of like illustrates a different point, which is basically, you know, I was standing up the product strategy for a couple of product growth teams in reality labs, you know, Oculus, which was coming up with the Quest 2 at the time, this is a standalone headset, and then Portal, which was our, you know, video conferencing product.

Starting point is 01:12:03 and we stood up these teams to go after sort of product growth, which is basically driving hardware sales through software features. And we went through this process that I just described. We stood up strategic pillars. And the strategic pillars were fairly similar for both Portal, which is our radio conferencing product and Oculus. I love Portal, by the way. I was a big fan.

Starting point is 01:12:25 I'm sad that it's no longer around. Yeah, yeah. And that led to features that are known to everybody. like the Oculus referrals program, you know, the portal memories integration where you see one of your Facebook memories on the portal sort of, you know, sponsored ad in your Facebook feed. And also we had this sort of section on the Facebook app, which is also from Facebook at the time and then eventually also from meta, which is these other products from the Facebook ecosystem. And all those came out of that effort. And, you know, about 18 months,

Starting point is 01:13:03 into it, they actually had like very different outcomes. So on one hand, the Oculus sort of effort was incredibly successful and we graduated it into the VR division at Meta and until today, it continues to sort of be an incredibly successful effort. The portal sort of effort actually didn't move the needle as much as we wanted to and we sunsetted and we basically redeployed that team, you know, to other sort of initiatives. And that's super interesting, right? Basically, you know, he was sort of like the same strategy process. We got to nearly identical sort of strategic pillars, but eventually like completely different outcomes. And, and I think that that illustrates the most important point about strategy, which is intrinsically strategy has no business value.

Starting point is 01:13:58 It's basically sort of a document with a few words. And I think it starts accumulating value as you generate business impact and results. And that happens when you actually test strategy with execution. And so ultimately, any strategy is only as good as the results it can produce. And so one has to have the intellectual honesty and the humility and the courage to say, when it's working and when it's not. And sometimes what happens is parts of your strategy might work, parts might not, and you have to, you know, pivot away from some and double down on some.

Starting point is 01:14:37 But I do think there's that sort of evaluation that's like really critical and testing sort of strategy with execution. Such a great point. Just the strategy sitting there in a dock is worthless. It's where the worth comes from is that actually having impact and being successful makes me think about a product manager also. Just a PM is not worth anything until they help you drive impact.

Starting point is 01:15:01 I think an important to kind of trickle down from that point is that you don't want to spend too long just thinking about strategy. You want to spend as little time as possible to get to a strong hypothesis, basically, to start learning if this is the right path. And so I love that your approach is like this middle ground between give it real time, but don't, you know,

Starting point is 01:15:24 spend three, four, or five months working on as one document that's just maybe one day you'll use. Exactly. And there is room for like a six month process, which we'll get to in a moment. But for small S, I wouldn't recommend more than like two or three months. And again, small S strategy is for like a couple years out, not like it's like a time frame. Okay, cool. Okay.

Starting point is 01:15:47 Anything else along those lines of the examples of meta or Zinga? Those are pretty good, like, lessons, I would say, yeah. Okay, sweet. So let's talk about Big S strategy. When should you approach strategy this way? And what are just, like, the steps of it? So, yeah, I think, so everything we've spoken about so far is what I would call small S. And it's very problem focused, right?

Starting point is 01:16:14 It's basically what I call present forward. It's like you have something, you have a product out there, it has a bunch of problems. how do we make it better, for what are the areas we tackle for maximum impact, typically led by product managers. And there's this interesting quote by Elon Musk, which is life has to be about more than just solving problems. And he says it in the context of the aspiration to become a multi-planetary species. But I think this is true of every sort of company like big or small.

Starting point is 01:16:46 and they need to be an aspirational and cool component to strategy. And I call this sort of biggest strategy. And I'll sort of run through this at a higher level because I think like this is a little bit more fluid in how you build sort of the biggest strategy. And it typically takes, you know, longer, potentially up to about six months. The approach is a bit different from smallest. And you start with the company, you know, mission and vision.

Starting point is 01:17:18 And there is a little bit of groundwork that is done on, you know, long-term cultural trends, social trends, competitive trends, technological trends. And those are all the backdrop to trigger ideas. And what you do with that backdrop is you again do these sort of like leadership interviews, but with a different goal of generating like long-term futures. And, you know, some of the questions you can ask during these. interviews are what does a day in the life of a user look like in sort of five years? What does the product look like in sort of five to ten years?

Starting point is 01:17:52 Why is the world better in like 10 years? And what is the most exciting version of that view? And basically take all of that input and cluster it into, I would say, like three cohesive holes. And what I mean by that is three at least fairly distinct descriptions of the future. So to give you a sort of almost like a, a very sort of simple example. Imagine you're sort of doing big guess for the future of travel.

Starting point is 01:18:19 You could have a future that is talking all about sort of fully autonomous travel, you know, where sort of your is very little sort of human involvement in going from A to B. You could talk about another future where it's this extreme speed where you can get from A to B like really fast, like across the world that is really fast. You could talk about a third where there is no travel. It's virtual travel. And you sort of, you still have the feeling of travel. and you accomplish the same goals.

Starting point is 01:18:45 But those are different futures. They have different properties, like different sort of elements to them. And once you generate those distinct futures, you actually generate prototypes with sort of learning goals. And think of these prototypes as concept cars. And, you know, the automobile industry uses this notion of concept cars. Concept cars, the interesting thing about concept cars is they're never commercialized.

Starting point is 01:19:11 They're sort of often produced for inspirations. and to potentially like take some part of them, like maybe a technology or a feature, and that is brought into mainstream production. So think of these prototypes as these concept cars that really sort of drive inspiration and like potentially give you some small nuggets that you can run with. And then you start doing research with them with like sort of potential users, you answer key questions, and you uncover certain elements that resonate with people. So you eliminate a whole bunch of stuff, you combine a whole bunch of stuff,

Starting point is 01:19:42 you combine a whole bunch of stuff, and you establish some winning components that are interesting. And then what you do is you push stuff that is winning into the product, live product testing. So this is actually something that you actually want to start like testing your way into and sort of understanding if it works from a scalable standpoint. And this whole thing is typically led not by the sort of the PM team, but by design and UXR.

Starting point is 01:20:10 And intentionally it's a little bit more. open-ended and green field. And it actually is a very sort of different sort of mind space that people have where they approach biggest. So the roadmap is really built through a combination of smallest and biggest work. And for example, at VRChad, we are doing both smallest and biggest work, Lenny. And they are sort of runners parallel work streams. The product management team is leading the charge of the smallest work. And the design team is leading the charge are the biggest work. And it's really exciting stuff.

Starting point is 01:20:45 What's coming out of both worth streams is really exciting and really different. And so we are building kind of the bridge from both sides. And both work streams ultimately flow into one roadmap. It's almost like two tributaries that ultimately merge into one river. That's how I would think about it. There's so many things here that are so interesting. One is we've had this conversation on the podcast a couple of times. This point that people think and see the world differently.

Starting point is 01:21:11 some people are very open-minded and creative and like think big blue sky people some people me just like what are we going next how do we move this metric let's talk about concrete things that we can do for this big ass approach I think what I'm hearing is make sure the people leading it are very open-minded creative blue sky type people if you're the person that's like how will this move our metric maybe you shouldn't be leading it and give someone else the reins cool and then with these timelines of doing both at once, it's like, it's probably hard to align them fully. So it's kind of, what I'm hearing is it's like, these are kind of ongoing sometimes. Correct. And they'll both inform what you're doing. You don't need to like have this perfect timeline. I agree with this. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:21:56 Sweet. And the big, the big thinking I love because I, sometimes you may experience this. Designers often are like, oh, we just work on all this boring incremental optimization stuff. I want to think bigger, which is great. And this is a really good. lever to allow for that in a contained environment. Cool. Let's just go crazy. Let's think about what this could be in the future. Still, let's make sure we're moving symmetric short term. But let's give us opportunity to think big. And oftentimes the biggest ideas come right of that.

Starting point is 01:22:25 So I love it's giving space for both types of thinking, thinking bigger and thinking long term. Anything else about these two methods that might be interesting to share? Otherwise, I want to talk about AI a little bit, just like how that impacts things and a couple other things. Yeah, yeah. I'll end on like one short sort of note on how this all feels when you do it. And then we can segue into AI. Great, great. Let me. So I think, I think that this, whether it's big as or small as, these are like incredibly satisfying sort of processes to go through in the end. So once you get to the sort of the end, like they're incredibly deeply satisfying. But they with anything in life that is. like very deeply satisfying at the end, they have a ton of challenge, frustration, and dead ends while you go through it,

Starting point is 01:23:15 where you kind of get like a lot of self-doubt, like, he will you ever reach the end? And I just want to sort of normalize that. Like, that's actually like normal. And I want people to expect that as they go through it. And I think that's what makes it even more rewarding when you get to that sort of point where you start to see like things connecting.

Starting point is 01:23:33 The second thing is, I would say that the person who is leading the charge on these efforts has to be really good at connecting diverse viewpoints and keeping them all moving forward. And it's not easy. It's very hard because sometimes you have people who take you in different directions and you have to sort of keep it all hanging together. And so in terms of like picking people who have that skill, who are good integrators, who are good sort of connect the dots, I think is critical for these to be successful. And at some ways, like low ego, because, you know, it's not like they do get to sort of like introduce their own ideas,

Starting point is 01:24:15 but like truly it's about bringing the team together. And so that's the skill that you should look for for these leads. And then the third piece is I would say that I would just approach these with a little bit of a lighter touch and more playful sort of approach because it's an intensive process. It's a long process and people can get tired. They can find it grindy. So just having a little bit of playfulness along the, it goes a long way and making it feel like more, more tolerable for the people going through it.

Starting point is 01:24:44 So those are some thoughts about either of these processes. That was a really important context, especially this will be frustrating throughout. It sounds really beautiful and great and smooth as you describe it. In reality, there's a lot of pain that goes into because you're making hard decisions. A lot of people have opinions. They have perspectives. There's data that's, you know, rarely is there a clear answer from the beginning. So I think that's a really important context.

Starting point is 01:25:07 I wanted to actually come back to your point you made about how Elon made this point about life shouldn't just be about solving problems. I think part of that quote is just like we should work on things that are awesome, exciting and inspiring that aren't just immediately pain solvers. And he's very good at that, like just inspiring people to what could be. And we should be thinking much bigger than we are. I was actually at an interview with Zuck where he said the same thing. He's probably inspired by Elon. He's like, I've just gotten to a point in my career where I just work, I want to work on awesome stuff. Stuff that is just like awe-inspiring, not just another social feature.

Starting point is 01:25:45 And so I think that's a really important point. And there's a lot of power in that, you know, people get really excited about holy moly. I did not imagine this is what Headspace could become, what VR check could become, what Medica could become. It's just like really powerful, getting people really inspired. Yeah. And I love this process that you shared of how to do that. And I didn't actually summarize it, so I have it right here in front of me. I'll just show the five steps of the biggest process.

Starting point is 01:26:08 So it's preparation, mission, you figure out of mission, vision, trends, interview people about where they think things are going. Then you come up with three distinct futures of what the future might look like if you were to do the things you're thinking. Then you built prototypes of what might this look like. And then you actually test these in your product, which I love to start derisking these ideas. That helps you converge to here's like an actual plan we want to execute.

Starting point is 01:26:34 and then you turn it into roadmap. Yeah, yeah. And the first testing of the prototypes is with the UXR. so it's more sort of concept testing or prototype testing with like a handful of users and then you use that as synthesizing to like a live product test. Great. Basically it's like big ideas and then de-risking,

Starting point is 01:26:53 validating them along the way in various ways. To like, okay, maybe this could actually work. Let's try. Sweet. Okay, so just two more things. One is I want to talk about AI briefly of how that impacts this work. and then two, just maybe a recap of the framework for people that are listening.

Starting point is 01:27:08 You're like, oh, my God, I have so much. I wrote all these notes. Let's give them a summary so they could remember to use it. Okay, cool. So talking about AI briefly. How is AI tooling helped you evolve this process? How can people use AI to make this easier? So the first disclaimer is, you know, I'm not sort of an AI futurist,

Starting point is 01:27:28 but I read all the emerging stuff that's coming out, most of the emerging stuff that's coming out and use some of the tools. And it's fascinating, you know, what's happening. And I think it will definitely have an impact on sort of strategy formulation. So what I'll share is what resonates for me in the context of strategy formulation with AI. So right away, I think the basic idea is everybody should be using assistance in the strategy formulation process with the basic tools that we have. And there are two ways to get AI to assist you in the strategy formulation process. The first is to support the preparation phase in terms of

Starting point is 01:28:14 research, right? And this could be like competitive analysis. And for example, you could do trend analysis from a vast library of competitors release notes. And you can sort of say like, okay, like what are the sort of the themes of investment of a competitor's release dots? Or you could do sort of a reviews analysis of a competitor product and sort of understand like what's resonating for users, what's not. And you could also do a sort of ask a tool like chat GPD to do a head-to-head comparison between like a few players on a certain dimension and really give you sort of a heat path of sort of like how they all stack up. And And you could also ask an open-ended question, like, hey, why is this new product so successful?

Starting point is 01:29:01 Like, why is it getting so many users? And there's some good hypothesis that you usually get. So really, a ton of leverage in sort of the preparation phase from a, you know, competitive analysis standpoint. The second one is in this idea called generating mock strategies. And I know Claire, Roe at your summit spoke about this. And I think this is absolutely right and should be a critical input into the strategy process, which is asking, you know, these tools for a mock strategy. And I call this a mock strategy because it's sort of like kind of almost the answer,

Starting point is 01:29:34 but not quite the answer. And so what I found is that these mock strategies, like let's say, you know, you, you know, I support VR chat now and I ask it like, hey, what should VR chat do? How should we grow? And it generates a mock strategy. What I've found is that it's surprisingly one, surprisingly good. It's incredibly well-informed and sort of well-articulated. And I've also found that its biggest strength is also somewhat its weakness, which is

Starting point is 01:30:01 these mock strategies tend to be pretty comprehensive and extensive. And there's an investment recommendation in a vast number of areas. So basically, if you remember, the core of strategies really like to be very targeted and to be very sort of focused. So these mock strategies become an interesting input. and the burden is still on the team to downselect into the sort of the most important areas for investment. So forcing that choice still, I think,

Starting point is 01:30:32 is sort of a human element and needs that sort of layer of additional judgment, which is very context-specific to the company. And so this is sort of right away, I think people should be doing this. I think more medium term and probably not too distant future and likely sooner than we all think

Starting point is 01:30:50 there's probably going to be, you know, the sort of the model that resonates with me is sort of the multi-agent model, which is sort of you probably have a, you probably have different components of the strategy workflow automated. So, you know, you probably have a strategy agent, you probably have a roadmap or feature agent, you have maybe like a engineering agent, and these can communicate amongst each other to sort of cycle through results and iterate. And I think, you know, Armand Ruiz, from IBM has some good definitional frameworks on some of the stuff. He shares it often on LinkedIn. But let's take a simple example.

Starting point is 01:31:29 I can easily imagine something like this for a topic like onboarding. So every company and product team obsesses about their onboarding experience. And today there are advanced experimentation frameworks. So imagine you're expecting a large surge in traffic. There's these sort of experimental frameworks. like multi-armed bandits that can really help you get to the optimal sort of variation very quickly in real time. And there are variations of that, like contextual multi-armed bandits, there's combinatorial bandits. But the interesting thing is they still rely on human design of the

Starting point is 01:32:09 variations, right? Like the different variations that you test, even though the experimentation framework is very sophisticated, the variations are still human generated. Now imagine if you know, those variations could actually be generated by, through generator AI, and could be plugged into the advanced sort of experimentation frameworks, the possibilities become infinite. And really, you might be surprised by what you find is the winning sort of, you know, onboarding experience that you couldn't even have humanly imagined. And it might be different for every user, different for every sort of territory, etc.

Starting point is 01:32:44 That is such a cool idea, I just want to say. This agent that's just running, thinking about ways to optimize your onboarding, coming up with concepts that you probably review, like, cool, let's try it. And then it does it, ships an experiment to run it, and just constantly optimizing your onboarding. Holy shit, that's an awesome idea. I think everyone will have this. And then what that makes me think, there's going to be some company that's built the best onboarding agent.

Starting point is 01:33:10 That's what you're going for. Totally. That's so good. Okay. Great. Great idea. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:33:17 And so then the question becomes, hey, what does? our job. Our job becomes architecting, you know, bigger and bigger pieces of the product to take advantage of these agents, right? And there will be a sequential increase in the complexity of workloads that get automated over time. You know, onboarding is probably like relatively on the easier side in terms of complexity of workload. And, you know, you get into like deeper sort of experiences. Eventually, yeah, I will get there. So, funnily enough, and that happens, like some of the manual processes I describe about will seem archaic. But I think the fundamentals will still have a long shelf life. And, you know, as you think about these automated frameworks as well.

Starting point is 01:33:59 Man, this could be its own podcast. I have this whole post about how AI, how PMs are the best position role in tech to thrive in a world ap AI, which I'll link to that makes people, I find, feel better when they hear you talk about how much might get done through agents and AI. The other quick thought I had, and I want to get to the wrap up, is I have this ongoing debate with a friend about strategy and AI. My feeling is, in theory, an AI tool will be incredibly good at coming up with your strategy for you because it's just, here's all the data, here's everything you need to know, how do we win? And to me, that feels like the ultimate way AI is good, is just here's data, here's what I found as a path to a winning. But, you know, my friend's also

Starting point is 01:34:45 arguing, that's like the one thing that will, AI will be least good at, because that's, That's where we need people and context and discussion, all these things. So I don't know. That's like one over the other. Either AI will be incredibly good at helping you figure out your strategy or the worst. And I'm curious. I'm curious. I guess, do you have any quick thoughts on that?

Starting point is 01:35:02 Any, where do you decide? I think there is a crossover point where the sort of the human judgment will be inferior to sort of something that's able to process, you know, multiple signals simultaneously. there's an element of sort of lateral thinking as well here. And, you know, I'll sort of share a simple example, you know, sort of for those who drive, you know, Tesla cars with like the fully self-driving capabilities. When you make a turn, you know, you sort of humans have sort of this fairly sort of narrow field of vision.

Starting point is 01:35:35 So you have to sort of look both ways and you have to make a decision combining both those signals, right? Whereas the car has six cameras, which is simultaneously processing. and, you know, it can make a decision in, not in sequence, but in parallel. And it moves with confidence at turnings because of that. And so there is this crossover point where some of these, the ability to hold sort of multiple signals in the head, you know, there's, it's going to be more, you know, it's going to be stronger. That makes total sense. So what it makes me think about, there's going to be a strategy agent just sitting around, always looking for ways to improve your

Starting point is 01:36:15 strategy and point you all in a different direction. Oh my God. Future is wild, as I've said before. Okay. Let's do a quick wrap-up of the process for folks that are taking notes and they're like, cool, here's the overview. So let's just do that and then let's go to the, get to the exciting lightning ground. So I think sort of the quick recap of everything we've covered is that product strategy definitionally sits between mission vision at the top and plan at the bottom. So it sits between those two, either at the company level or at the team level. What it does is it forces choice to deploy scarce resources towards maximum impact.

Starting point is 01:36:52 And think about the sort of the frequency selection and resonance as an analogy. And it ideally includes three components, a handful of areas to focus on, which we call strategic pillars, and several areas that are explicitly not the focus. And why? That's really it in terms of what product strategy is. there is a smallest flavor of it, which focuses on solving problems. It's what I call present forward, and it typically operates in a two-year horizon. We use a five-stage process to get there, and it takes about eight to 12 weeks.

Starting point is 01:37:29 There is a biggest process that focuses on an aspirational future is future backward, and typically has a three, five, ten-year horizon, also a five-stage process, and can be ongoing up to a six months sort of period to give it sort of enough space to generate something exciting. And the roadmap for the company or the team is built from a combination of smallest and biggest work, which is like building a bridge from both sides of a river. And ultimately, any strategy is only as good as the results it can produce. So test and iterate through execution and double down on what's working and pivot to be from what's not. incredible. I'm glad we did that.

Starting point is 01:38:12 Anything else that you want to share or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round? Just all the best with strategy work and ultimately sort of individual and business success. Amazing. When I asked you at the beginning before we started recording what your goal was for this conversation, your answer was just to create a ripple of success across companies and teams. And I feel like we've done that. Thank you. Okay. With that, we reached our very exciting. setting lightning ground. Chandra, are you ready?

Starting point is 01:38:41 Yes. Let's do it. First question, what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people? Yeah, I love books on creativity and innovation, Lenny. And some of my sort of classic favorites are, you know, Wal Disney's biography. And there's several out there, but I think the one that I like the most is the triumph of the American imagination. And what's interesting is it talks about how Walt Disney actually loved the theme parks more than the movies. And the reason for that was he could actually like tinker with the theme parks. Like he could make changes to like where the rides were.

Starting point is 01:39:20 He could change rides in and out. And then he could observe like real sort of changes to reactions of people flowing into the theme parks, which he couldn't do with the movies. You know, because it was once it was produced, it was done, like it was out of his control. And it was interesting, like, he was basically A-B testing long before the term was coined. And it's just a fascinating look into how his brain worked, like, way ahead of its time. The other classic is Ed Catmoles, Creativity, Inc. And it talks about all the negative forces that, like, eat away at creativity in an organization.

Starting point is 01:39:55 How do you sort of as a leader have to keep them at bay and, like, make sure, you know, the team can innovate? And then there's this probably like less popular book, but really good one from Tom Kelly of IDEO, which is the 10 Faces of Innovation. It talks about different archetypes that you need on the team that are essential for creating something special. And you actually need like, you know, I think there's like the devil's advocate. You need like the researcher. You need the ethnographer. You need sort of the stage setter. Like there's all these interesting personalities that you.

Starting point is 01:40:30 you need to actually make something successful. So I would say those are some of the ones that I usually record. That's a really cool. That third book is really interesting. I haven't heard of that. In Creativity, something I want to highlight real quick is to your point that a lot of it is how to avoid killing good ideas. And my favorite metaphor from that book is the ugly baby metaphor where every new idea

Starting point is 01:40:52 is an ugly baby that people just want to get rid of. Get rid of this ugly baby. We don't want this around here. And just every new idea is ugly when it starts. and you need to protect the ugly baby, basically. Although, I don't know who's, like, hurting ugly babies. Like, that's nice. Yeah, yeah, it feels a bit harsh.

Starting point is 01:41:09 Yeah, but it's memorable because I've never forgotten that. Okay, next question. Is there a favorite recent movie or TV show I've really enjoyed? Yeah, yeah. We watch a lot of animated films with the kids, but a couple of good movies this year. We really liked if, you know, imaginary friend, It's about sort of growing up and like forgetting sort of these memories of your younger sort of days.

Starting point is 01:41:36 It's a really nice movie. And then, of course, we enjoyed Dune 2 as well. It was a fun watch. And, but most of our time is dominated by the kids' sort of animated films, you know, at home or the cinema. There's a new Dune TV show. I don't know if you've been watching it just started recently on HBO. It's not the best thing in the world, but it gets you. you like a little dune fix.

Starting point is 01:42:01 Interesting. In between movies. I think there's a third movie coming up. I see. Third question, do you have a favorite product you recently discovered that you really love? Yeah, yeah. I've been playing this cute little game for the last few days. It's called Capybara Go.

Starting point is 01:42:18 It's a tab-based strategy RPG game. It's got really humorous writing and this cute capybara that goes off on an adventure. it's very well-paced and it's a very well-produced game. It's sort of one game I've been sort of playing recently. I've also been poking around blue sky. Blue sky is interesting. I haven't gotten into a habit yet, but it's super interesting concept of empowering the community

Starting point is 01:42:48 with like these community-generated feeds. It's like very different experience. But it's also interesting. There's a trade-off with like the simplicity of the product and, you know, what do you get to the additional complexity? It'll be interesting to see how it plays out, how it scales. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to find useful in work or in life? So there was this 1995 interview of Steve Jobs where he talks about this idea of

Starting point is 01:43:17 there's a tremendous amount of craftsmanship between a great idea and a great product. And it sort of stuck with me over the years. and you know sort of the simple way to think about that is it takes a lot of effort to make something special and conversely you know if it's easy it's probably not that special or not that great and it's something that you know I sort of think about when we build product is there's sufficient pain here where you know is sort of a proxy for like are we creating something great is interesting Wow. It makes me think about founder mode a little bit like people talk about founder mode. The reason

Starting point is 01:43:58 founder mode I think is important is the people that are most committed and passionate and driven to go through that pain and continue to take it from just an ugly baby idea to an awesome winning product. Oftentimes it needs to be the founder. And that's why I think it's kind of emerged as a trend is it's important to have that drive to just continue to refine it and not just like I had the idea go build it now

Starting point is 01:44:25 okay final question you have an amazing background behind you if people are in YouTube it's just like a beautiful book background a bunch of objects and books I'm curious if there's like an object on there or a book on there that might be fun to highlight that you're especially into or proud of and feel free to turn around if you want to like look around

Starting point is 01:44:44 curious if there's one thing that stands out like oh here's this thing oh well it's the it's the picture of my kids right in the center which is, without doubt, the most important and memorable thing there. It's also caught at a unique time when they were like incredibly like, they were sort of super like embracing each other. And it's like it's a phase where they've grown out of it. Now there's a lot more, you know, I think like rivalry and then simpling tussles.

Starting point is 01:45:15 But that moment is my favorite. I also have a bunch of fun stuff, like a big sort of snow. Snoopy fan. And so it is also a big Beatles fan. So that picture is actually an interesting blend between Snoopy walking, crossing the road, and then the Beatles crossing the other way. And then a bunch of books that are more memorable over the years. You'll see creativity in there. You'll see the 10 phases of innovation, all of that. Amazing. Thank you for sharing. Your kids' photos block when you're in the center. So it's like a little Easter egg. Thank you for sharing that. Chandra, this was incredible. Was everything

Starting point is 01:45:54 I was hoping to be? I think we're going to create that ripple that you were hoping for. Two final questions. Where can folks finding a line if they want to reach out? And how can listeners be useful to you? A reasonable choice would be LinkedIn to reach me. And I, I'd really like, like you and I discussed earlier, I'd be really happy if this creates, you know, that kind of ripple effect of successes, both for individuals and for products. And, uh, And, you know, I want everybody to think of this, the stuff I shared as a bit of an open source model. So test some of the concepts, modify it, remix it, and, you know, share what worked or did not. And ultimately, you know, that's what makes it all interesting is sort of the community owns it ultimately and it's not sort of doesn't belong to an individual.

Starting point is 01:46:42 That's what would make me like super happy. Amazing. Chandra, thank you for so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me, Lenny. thanks for your service to the product community. Same to you. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening.

Starting point is 01:46:59 If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's Podcast.com. See you in the next episode.

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga)

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.