An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga)

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/a7f6cd2ea8637853

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 gonna 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 I call present forward, and it typically operates in a two-year horizon.
We use a five stage process to get there and uh it takes about eight to twelve 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 bigger strategy. When should you approach strategy this way?
This interesting quote by Elon Musk which is a little bit more than I've been in the world.
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 ten years? And what is the most exciting version of that view?

Today, my guest is Chandra Janak Raman. Chandra is Chief Product Officer and Executive Vice President at VRChat.
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 Suresh 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 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 gonna 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 Carthic for making this connection.
If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it 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 Janik Raman.
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Chandra, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.
Pleasure to be here, Lenny.
I wanna share actually the context and how this conversation happened.
I was at a meetup of my readership of my community and someone came up to me and they're like
Lenny, you need to get this guy Chandra on your podcast.
He has 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
Uh
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 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 w uh 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 it's a very interesting story, you know, it uh
goes back all the way ten years ago and uh
But I remember it vividly like it happened yesterday and uh
I was a relatively new
VP of product at Headspace and um
We had this amazing company vision and mission that the founders had laid out.
And I had come in and established sort of
uh goals for the team in terms of our sort of key metrics.
And we had uh
a very sort of buttoned up
Roadmap in my mind, um, you know, that sort of fed into that company mission and vision.
And I was feeling pretty good about sort of
um how things were sort of shaping up and uh
And you know, in a on on a sort of a
a particular Monday the the founder CEO
Pull me aside and uh in his
usual disarming style. He

Hey CJ.
I'm 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 uh
It was 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 I was feeling relatively good about the plan and uh
And so, you know, I uh I spoke to a few people. I sort of wanted to understand it a little bit deeper, like, hey, you know, what's what's happening and uh
Uh he was 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 uh
And it led to some soul searching.
And and sort of basically
You know, I was lucky because there was actually a a board member
of headspace who had a product background
Uh kind of knew what good look like.
And and sort of, you know, I came to the conclusion hey, we needed a
strategy for for a headspace. So
with sort of extensive work with with uh her with the boat person
We built the first sort of
Return
product strategy for uh headspace and um
That
and the subsequent actions uh on the product led to
A complete reimagination of the product.
And and basically, you know, we
We were able to create a new product, we we call it the next generation headspace.
Which uh
On one hand, it could support a comprehensive library of content, not just meditation, but non meditate meditation content as well.
It had um the sort of home experience where everything was incredibly personalized for for the individuals.
And there were several motivational
um elements built into the the whole product experience. And uh
And it was very transformational, you know, for the for the company and the product because
It it changed the product from being a meditation app to a broader health and wellness service and really put the company on a on a different trajectory.
It led to my promotion to the first CPO at
headspace and uh
And most interestingly
You know, I I had a chance to while going through it al almost in a sort of a
out of body, we observe the process.
of like okay, how did we put this thing together? And
No what actually went into it.
So what really started as a
you know, almost a personal sort of crisis moment of
You know, finding finding this this
sort of need to create a strategy for 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 I sort of wanted to ask myself, 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
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. Uh the point you made about
the why, I think everyone listening to this that's been in product for
long enough has heard that of just like
Your team doesn't understand why we're doing this.
Uh, I've heard that a number of times. Like as much as you think you're killing it.
There's always that like
You forget sometimes.
To do that.
You're or you aren't doing it great. So
So and I love that basically the solution to that is
Your the strategy solves that problem of helping people seek
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?
Uh and also who's it for? Who's like
Who knows who
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 gonna be talking about.
Yeah.
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, um, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumult, who's been on your podcast.
Playing to win, you know, 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
the sort of the battle testing nature of it, you know.
I personally use this playbook about five to six times.
tweaking and optimizing it uh each time based on sort of
Uh what I thought one but
People thought worked and 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 uh for for the company.
Okay. Uh I'm getting more and more excited.
Uh 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. Um
Which is
As you asked like what is product strategy?
So
And if you think back to the headspace example, this is 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 mission and vision is basically sort of the purpose of existence. One 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 wanna borrow an analogy from
From the world of physics, there is this concept called resonance.
And and the concept of resonance is really interesting and it's it's actually like very close to sort of
you know, the concept of strategy.
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 vi uh vibrates and
And so it's it's very interesting, you know, if you if you apply any other frequency
There's very little effect on the object, but if you get close to its natural frequency
There's just
exponential increase in in the vibration of the product. So this concept of resonance
He's 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 and so you when you get close to that frequency
You should see tremendous impact in terms of the
the product landing well in the market.
And and so that's how I would think about it.
Mission vision and the plan.
і 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
Why are these whole bunch of
Areas not the focus.
And and that's sort of the sort of the three components. That's it. That's really it, uh in terms of product strategy.
I love it. And I love the n the things we aren't doing as a core part of this that comes up a lot on this podcast and being clear of
Because we're not gonna do.
Yeah, we know these could be things we could do, but we're deciding we're not doing these things.
Okay.
So let's just uh talk through how you go about developing
A strategy using this method.
Say someone's
s sitting down, okay, I'm gonna start developing a strategy for
Our product.
Where do you begin? What does this process look like? Let's start.
Talking through it.
So I I sort of wanna
First, explain this concept called smaller strategy, um, and and I'll sort of talk about what that is and you know how it's different from another kind.
But um the basic sort of strategic process I would say is um takes about eight to twelve 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 take ends up taking eight to twelve weeks anyway.
So so it's good to start with sort of setting clear expectations that it takes about eight to twelve weeks.
And and the way to justify the ROI on that is
Typically a strategy like this
uh can be leveraged for about a couple of years. So
So relative to that sort of payback period, I think the investment is is relatively small. So
So it's it's pretty it's pretty healthy from that sense to manage expectations and say that that's how long it's gonna take.
So within that period there are
five phases. Uh there's the preparation phase.
There's a strategy sprint.
The design sprint.
the document writing and the roll up.
And those are the five faces which I'll explain, you know, how how one would go through.
And uh and basically each of them has a certain sort of time recommendation. Um, you know, for example, the preparation phase.
I would say it's probably about uh
Four weeks.
The strategy sprint is uh up to about one week, the design sprint is another one week.
document writing maybe one to two weeks and the roll out is maybe two to three weeks. So that's how you get to that range of eight to twelve 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 use the research and
As you talk through this, I'm curious just like how much of the team is involved in each of these steps.
But
I think it's an important point. If you want a really good winning strategy, you need to
give it time. You can't just say in a month.
Or a week, we need to develop a strategy. Go figure it out, right as this document.
Right.
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 the CEO might
you know, w still want a strategy in two weeks, you know, how do you respond to that?
And and I think
I think we c we can sort of like find some clever shortcuts there, but uh
But I think like
To the extent possible the leader should like
push for the spirit 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 for.
Yeah.
Awesome. Okay, let's get into it.
So I think I think you sort of touched on this um in terms of the the preparation phase being the longest phase, but also not being sort of like a full time thing. So that's absolutely right. So
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 from people, is
to actually form a strategy working group.
This is this is an important concept. So the strategy working group is sort of a small team. It uh 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, um user research. That's also part of the strategy working group.
But the minimum quorum I would recommend is 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 the user from that perspective.
And typically the PM is is sort of driving the 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 the PM sort of like pulls the team together, talks about sort of the the purpose of the process, lays out the different phases.
And gives everybody a feel for what's gonna happen in the next like eight to twelve weeks.
And
And basically then creates
A list of very discrete action items and deliverables for each of the sort of the
the stakeholders in the working group.
So
Specifically
There's an action item around
Sort of
aggregat 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 uh potentially, you know, also sort of um
feature launches and how they've done. So all kind of analytical
Аналіз.
The the ask is really to create a a meta analysis.
of all of the analysis so
So the data sort of person on the strategy working group has to sort of
scan the the historical archives at the company
And uh and sort of
Synthesize and condense that into
a very sort of digestible sort of macro themes and learnings about users. So so that's sort of one
uh preparation phase item.
The second is um 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, uh you know, uh social channels.
And and basically a meta meta analysis of all of that into one sort of
very actionable and and synthesized tech on on all the sort of the insights of users. That's usually
you know, led by the design person and uh and you know, with support from their uh research.
Team.
And that's sort of the second action item. The third action item is
Leadership enemies.
So
I I sort of like have this um
You know, fun like
story of of the fruit, uh with like
leadership strategy reviews which which I want to share.
So
Imagine like this is sort of like how sometimes strategy reviews go, which is
You you bring a fruit to the uh
to to the sort of the reviewer and say, Hey, here's a mango like
You know, what do you think? And
And the reviewer says I actually don't like mangoes and uh
And then you're like, Oh, you're you're sort of sad. You d you take it back, you bring an apple
And you show show hey, what do you think of an apple? And then uh
Líderes.
I actually stopped eating apples last year and and so you're disappointed. Again, you go back and bring a banana
Like I I hated bananas since I was a kid and
And so you know, it's it's a bit of a a silly
caricature of reviews, but there's a there's a bit of grain of truth there, which is
You know, imagine how frustrating that is for both the reviewer
And the person like who's reviewing
And and so it could be made so much better.
If you just engage with your leaders before you actually build a strategy.
And it it's amazing how few people actually do that. And
And so the fruit fruit story kind of like tells you like hey
Imagine if you just asked
reviewer, like do you even like fruit? How much better the experience would have been for, you know, both sort of
parties and
And so leadership interviews are a very important part of um a strategy formulation process. So
So you can divide and conquer if there's m several sort of leaders, like you assign sort of um different leaders to different people on the strategy working group.
And each of them
sort of like uh 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 Headspace it'd be like, What do you think success looks like for
headspace and
Or the specific feature of headspace, the specific Exactly. Okay, cool.
That's right. Yeah.
And also like I think
Ask them for f 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 look they they just feel shy to share it because
They don't want their team to think of them as micromanagee. 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
And so
So asking them just takes the mystery out of it and it also gives them a creative uh 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?
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
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 and so keeping that sort of fruit story in mind, like
I wanna just sort of say that this is a very, very positive thing, a very powerful thing.
The next area is uh
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 uh basically the idea is you sort of
Trying 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 a sort of a stack.
Chart of like
Where is everybody going? Like 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?
'Cause you don't really know what their strategies are, but you can kind of tell when you look at the features they're putting out.
That oh, they seem to be focusing on this particular area.
And and so that sort of competitive analysis.
And in and bigger companies
There's also an another important input which is
adjacent road maps, like are there teams adjacent to you?
And what are they investing in? And you know, because oftentimes that can have a rub off effect on on your team.
And if you're not sort of like aligning with sort of other key teams, uh it's gonna be important. 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 the I 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 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 strategy should be
And it humanizes the whole process. So
So that I think is is the purpose.
But the 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, uh preparation read out.
So it 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 in abuse.
You have uh
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, so you know, but
To your point, it can be done.
in in sort of parallel with your day jobs, you know, you can sort of multitask.
And and that's why you know you take about four weeks to do that.
And that sort of
You know
sort of concludes the the preparation phase, you get the the deck.
And that rolls into the strategy spread, which which is the next phase. I want to pause and see if you have a good question.
I have a million questions, but I'm gonna keep myself contained, but
Just a
Quickly summarize. Basically you kick off, we're gonna start developing strategy for this product.
And
You were gonna touch on this, but it may help just to talk about this right now. Yeah, I know you have big strat big S strategy, small S strategy.
This process, what's like an example of the level of
product scale that this process is for'cause I know you have a another approach for
a larger scale of a product like basically for a company.
Right. What's the best way to think about like
Smaller strategy, which is what we're going through.
Yeah, I think uh 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 um
The the main difference between this small s and big s is the sort of the time horizon aspect.
and uh and you know and the sort of the aspirational component uh which
Where you get. Okay, so this is a process you can use for entire company strategy of a not a large company.
Not a massive lease. Yeah, and then also just like a product within a company.
Yeah. Okay, perfect. Okay. So hey, we're kicking off strategy for this thing, let's say VR chat two point oh.
You have this kick off 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.
Uh
Yeah leadership interviews.
Interview people, ask what they want, see what they're hoping for, what success looks like.
Competitive analysis.
adjacent road maps across other teams and
User observations just like watch users see what's happening.
And they out and you assign tasks each of these tasks to different people in this working group.
You set a deadline, we have to present this in say four weeks.
People go work on it, you meet ongoing as it's coming together, and then the output is a deck.
That you share.
And do you share this deck with just that working group or do you sh who do you share this deck with and read it out to you?
Yeah, so the deck is a an output of the first
phase and then it flows into the second phase, which is a strategy sprint. So you don't share the deck with anybody yet.
Got it. When the strategy spint it's like a key thing, yeah.
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
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. And I love
Uh feels like a core component of this method is
Spend time creating
Gathering the all the input.
All the best input.
Like actually spend time there. Don't just like make it a half assed last minute thing.
Okay, amazing. Okay, let's talk about step two, which is uh the strategy sprint.
Yeah. So
So the strategy sprint is the heart of the process. This is this is sort of where you make the
decision. So if you
if you recall the sort of the definition of strategy is
You know, it forces choice.
to deploy resources into s into your um sort of a few areas for maximum impact.
See so the core of strategy is really sort of picking those areas.
And the areas you're not gonna invest in.
And and so that happens in the strategy spirit. So really it's the heart of the process.
So so typically it's like a three to five day process. The first day is
is the share out day. So everybody has done some great work.
They go in, they share sort of what they've collected, what they've sort of learnt, and and so
So it brings everybody in the working group to the same state of understanding, the same state of consciousness on the state of the union. So
So that's that's a great uh
you know process where
You know, what I encourage people to do is is write down things that your
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 uh things that are sort of like suboptimal for you know the business and uh
And so
So
People take a lot of notes during that time and and the people who are presenting or sharing sort of everything they've learned.
And uh that's really day one. It's like just absorbing a ton of information and writing down a ton of notes so people could kind of understand
you know, where all the sort of the problems are.
And it's a very problems focused process, and
And that's an important point. I'll get back to it, you know, when we talk about big S, uh, which is which is different.
Um and um 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 twelve weeks because that's where you actually make the sort of the choice.
And so the way to flow through it, it's it's actually really important to flow through it correctly. So
So the first step is really like generating a a whole bunch of problems because people have been taking notes the previous day.
You know, 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, everybody uh throws out their
Your sort of observations on what's holding us back.
And you you just capture all of that in in a Google Sheets, for example.
And
And or or sort of like
Even in our 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
And so the next step is you sort sort of do a joint clustering.
Oh
sort of related problems and and you sort of create these uh potentially like
Typically in my experience I've seen about
ten to fifteen clusters form.
Uh
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 and then you have let's say ten to fifteen 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.
Uh and and so
So the next step is to flip it into an opportunity framing. And and so for ex 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 a product.
And they don't really know where to go where to find sort of
um 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 the opportunity framing of that would be relevance, right? Like it's basically oh like stuff that really matters to me.
And uh or 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 Solomon
The opportunity framing would be social connection.
And and so
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 ten to fifteen
you know, opportunity areas into
Ideally three, you know, maybe five, but I would
r recommend three because it creates like more clarity and focus.
And 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 is
Expected impact.
So let's say you actually tackle that
you know, that area, what is the expected impact of 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 and so
So the confidence really depends on how how baked
the problem sort of sizing and and frequency is.
And so expected impact, certainty of impact.
The third one is also very important, which is
Clarity of levers.
Like do you actually have an idea of how you would solve it?
If you don't, it's gonna be really difficult to like move the needle on it because
you know, you should 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
From friends quicker on the platform. So you should have a sense of like how you would solve that particular space.
So
So is there clarity on levers? That's the sort of the third dimension. And the fourth dimension
is super, super important, which is
Is
Is are the 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?
You know, do we have a sense of the solutions and
Basically like
Are we sort of the the team or company that has the capabilities and the skills to like uniquely build it?
where other teams cannot and uh and so
So once you have that
You know, and and sometimes like what happens is you don't have like
Too much data.
And 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 your reasoning why it should be higher versus lower.
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.
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 and you have like the remaining seven or or twelve.
That are
basically not not sort of focused. And 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
Uh
help you move from what you just said to like s the next step, but
Uh
I love that this is the core of like the biggest m
element of the process and it you can do 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.
uh and then we'll finish the strategy sprint step. So it's basically do the share outs 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 ten to fifteen
Problem clusters.
Flip it from here's the problem to here's an opportunity we have.
Rank them.
Based on basically c there's these four attributes you shared.
Which I'll actually 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 gonna is there something different from what other folks are doing?
So those are ways to rank these ideas and problem clusters. You essentially come up with your three up three big
Three bets basically potentially should take.
And
Okay. And then I think that's where you stopped, is that right? That's totally right. Uh Lenny. And
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 and they basically hold up the strategy. That's why they're called strategic pillars.
And the
The idea is um once you have the strategic pillars
We basically translate that into a few how might we've. So you know, how might we do
you know, let's say it's a relevance thing, how might we find um the best content for a particular user?
How might we surface it in the right place?
you know, there there's a few how might we's and the how might we're basically intended to help
The next phase of the process, which is the design spread. So
So you generate these uh
Area is the strategic pillars, you generate the how might be.
Typically pretty straightforward. Once you have the strategic pillars, it it takes probably an hour to generate somehow might be for each of them, maybe two or three for each strategic pillar.
And and then you're you're done with that stage.
I just wanna highlight real quick this phrasing is really important.
I used exactly the same phrasing at a PM that I worked with.
Uh and his name is Andrew Chen, but not the Andrew Chen people know about 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
uh as a way to come up with ideas to solve problems. So it's just like how might we
Increase discoverability in our app.
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
There is a really powerful phrasing.
Highlight that.
Yeah, that's awesome.
Um
It's also something that designers are familiar with, uh
Lenny, so it like flows really well into sort of a design spread.
Okay. So you have these how might we've so you have three pillars.
Maybe three or four or five I might ways to solve these
uh opportunities slash problems and then what happens after that.
Exactly. And then the third day is
Like it's good to start fresh. Like, you know, so the teams accomplished a lot. Like it's just So this was all the first two days. This is the first two days, yeah. Wow. Okay. 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,'cause it's a lot of like really mental sort of wrestling.
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.'Cause that's the typical time horizon of a of a smaller strategy is like eighteen months to twenty four months.
So imagine in two years
This is what I tell the team, imagine two years there's a 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. So it's called the newspaper headline approach.
And and basically everybody generates a newspaper headline.
In uh in parallel.
And
And it's interesting because
You often see there's these common themes that
that sort of form when people generate these headlines.
And and the the forcing function with the headline is also that it has to be somewhat simple and like plain speak.
It's not like too technical and you have to sort of
get to like a a more sort of simple lay person's language.
And uh and you have to get to like the key benefit.
that like ultimately like the impact it has on the world, like you know, those kinds of themes like come up.
Uh often
And and so then you do a 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 and
You know, and 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 and a project you worked on?
Winning aspiration.
We did this process for
The
privacy team, you know, when I was at Meta and um one of the
sort of the aspiration aspirational statements was around really like
the strategic pillars were s around a lot of sort of features that we would build, but the winning aspiration was really like
He could remove like consumer trust.
And you know, and the and the newspaper headline is something like
You know.
You know, Facebook has
move 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
Mm.
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 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 speaking as you're talking, put him into a blender. Uh
I 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. 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 this 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 on the sort of the deck and and that's how you get to the final one. Awesome. And I feel like AI could help with that now, just like if there are in all your headline ideas and it comes up with some suggestions.
Okay, cool. So
Yeah, is that the end of the sprint or is there more to the sprint? That's it for the sprint. Okay.
And so at the end of the sprint, what do you have? What what are the outputs?
Yeah, this is
This is a great um progress on strategy because now we have the three strategic pillars. We have the how might we s associated with the
Strategic pillars.
You also have the the why.
Why did you get to those
Three strategic pillars and
What are you not focused on?
And and what are the reasons for it?
And you also have the winning aspiration.
So so it's great progress, team's done a great job. I think I think um now we sort of move on to you know the design spread.
In your experience, how often are these three the correct three that you end up going with 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 um that I that I had in meta where
Typically during the strategy sprint, like
You don't change it once you go through the strategy spirit.
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. Um
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, hit the market and
test, you don't really know what's going on. Correct. But there's kind of an implication that the
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 I would say I would say
Yeah.
It's not a sort of an empirical study, obviously, because of the small sample size, but
I would say that it's like really opened 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 approaching things.
This reminds me of Tomer Cohen was on the podcast. He's CPO of LinkedIn and 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 roll out at the end too, they'll solve that. Okay, cool. So we have the sprint, we have
Basically the three
Pillars that you're gonna invest in.
this headline of what it might look like if you're to launch and some solution ideas with how might we use
What comes next?
Yeah. So the the next physical is the design sprint. And the design sprint is
Um can be led by the design person who's in the strategy working group. Um, 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
Take a bit of a back seat during this process.
So the input to the design framed it.
is the sort of the three strategic pillars and the 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 know.
That's not the purpose of the design spirit.
The design sprint is to generate a lot of illustrative concepts.
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 what do you exactly mean? What are you gonna build?
And so the illustrative concepts really sort of
give people something to latch out to. Oh okay, I get it. Like this is what you're gonna build at the end of the day with the strategy.
And so 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. Uh, but the goal here is not to like
build like feature ready designs. It's it's more to generate concepts and uh
And so
Once you have that, basically the design sprint and there's different flavors of design sprints, which I won't go into and and sort of like you can lean on sort of your design lead to decide what's the the appropriate way.
But the output the input and the output is w what needs to be very
emphasise the input needs to be the strategic pillars, the output needs to be a uh
ton of sort of illustrative concepts to 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 and that's the idea.
And we're gonna go through a couple of examples to make this very real.
And you mentioned the design sprint method, which um 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.
Well said the um
Their colleague from
Google Ventures that uh designed a bullseye sprint, which is also an interesting sprint. I don't know, it's a new thing.
That helps you figure out your I C P and who to focus your product on and how that informs your product.
Okay. So the out input is
Here's the three.
Things we're gonna invest in, say discovery relevance.
Privacy.
Here's 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. Okay, cool.
Okay, amazing. So that's a week. That's another sprint. The PM could maybe take a little bit of a break. Exactly. And designers take the lead.
Exactly. And the engineers are kinda inputs and you know, thought partners in in this, I imagine.
They're optional, yeah.
optional. But uh yeah, ideally they're involved'cause you want you want you want all the best ideas in there. Yep. Yep.
Okay, cool.
What comes next?
And then the next step is is the document writing. And this is sort of a solo activity that the the PM should take on. And uh
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 this
A ton of user insights, a ton of behavioral insights, a ton of competitive analysis.
There's the three strategic pillars, how might we use winning aspiration, there's a whole bunch of illustrative concepts.
So you know, oftentimes like product leads have this sort of creators uh
Block, you know.
That is solved 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 like it takes uh
a week or two and um and I think it's really about combining, connecting and editing.
And 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? If someone sits down and is trying to write this out, what do you
Want to see those kind of headings.
I think you could almost take the
building blocks as like a little bit of a
I sort of um
a steer for the template. So you know, 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 uh you get into the
St sort of the strategic
pillars and 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.
include the full table in the appendix, including the criteria, that's gonna be really important because most people are gonna ask, like why did you pick these? And
And that's like
basically the sort of the defensibility. And uh
And then you have the winning aspiration, that's like very bold. It's like um you know a big part of the the heart of the deck.
And and you sort of embed the illustrative concepts.
into the um actual like each of the strategic pillars so that it flows.
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?
So that it it creates that
framework for alignment in the 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.
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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 builder. 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.
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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.
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I pulled up.
Um
Playing to win.
Which uh 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.
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 and be what's your winning aspiration.
Where will you play? Like what market are you going after?
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 strategy.
But
Uh, 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.
Uh
Okay, so this is how long of a process does writing of the document.
It's about one to two weeks. Um
And uh and I think it's mostly solo work and uh hopefully by the end of it there's a very tight talk and uh you know that's that's what we used 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 it's I would say that at the end of it, obviously
you know, once you have sort of a draft, uh it's good to share with them. But I wouldn't like
Tab them uh have their cycles too much at this point,'cause they've they've sort of given a lot already.
I see, okay.
And like how many pages do you see the stock being, roughly? What's like a good heuristic? Yeah, it's a not too long. I would say probably like
Three, three or four
sort of uh pages and then an 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 there there could be others there.
I think usually there's
Sort of a desire to
um fr from lee leaders to sort of say like okay like what are we building next? And
And it's important not to include like a roadmap as part of the strategy doc because
Strategy Doc is meant to be
separate from the roadmap, it's meant to be a companion to your roadmap and
And even though there's interest, maybe sometimes you can include like a 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 roll out, 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
So I think you're probably in the last like two two to three weeks of the process and uh
Pretty important.
sort of final step is the roll out and um and I would start with
you know, what I call gatekeepers and
These are people who are like absolutely like
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 flight it with them and uh and get their alignment. These are one on one meetings with these people. Exactly.
Exactly. And then um
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, et cetera.
And that can be done either async or through sort of a group review.
And then um
And then there's probably a rolling sort of list of team road shows, you know, I sort of
There's different ways to do this, but the one that I feel is most effective
Is
The road show where you have like
about eight eight to ten people in each sort of session, so people feel more comfortable to ask questions.
And um and it's more sort of like
conversational and uh
And so
The the purpose of the stage is to land it, is not to like see 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 um
you know, being too inflexible. So it's a very delicate balance, like
You know, when people ask questions you can clarify it and and you can add clarifications to the doc, but I wouldn't change like
The most important thing in three strategic pillars, like I won'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've not seen it happen, um, in my sort of like five to six attempts, but
It's possible theoretically possible.
Yeah. Like a the core of this approach, it sounds like is you've done a lot of the pre work.
Exactly.
generally correct place.
Okay, so this is the roll out. So what I'm thinking as you talk, say you're like a PM on a team, say you're working on privacy, it's like an IC you're an IC PM working on strategy.
How do you think about including, say, your manager?'Cause
through this process, like when do you start to like, hey, and 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, working, working.
Okay, ready to roll it out.
Oftentimes there's like no no no wait wait wait. There's all this other stuff happening at the company, we don't have resources.
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, I
attuned PMs who understand organizational dynamics probably keep the manager pretty like
in sync through 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 manager's looking for from the effort.
And then once you sort of get to the strategic uh pillars on day two of the strategy sprint, you probably wanna just like quickly pre-flight it with the manager and say, Hey, look, this is how it's trending.
And you know, this is probably these are the things we are probably not gonna 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 enlist uh their help.
So
So I would say that it's probably like
each individual style, but I would keep them pretty like
align through the process. But you don't have to be like too heavy weight, just be super light.
Great. Makes a lot of sense to me.
Uh there's like a
We're not gonna solve everyone's problems with this one framework.
Uh 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 any
Thoughts on how to include that and then I want to get into some examples of how you 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 becomes more relevant from a road mapping standpoint because then you say, Okay, what percentage of our engineering do we put on s strategic pillar A versus B versus C.
And you know, and what are the specific things we build. So it becomes a roadmaping question as opposed to a strategy question.
And so by the end of this the roll out
Like the part of the roll out is developing the actual roadmap. We're not gonna get deep into that. That could be part two of our
Solve every PMs.
problems teach them all the
All the steps of the process.
But we're gonna cut it off and here's the strategy that is starting to be rolled out.
Yeah, exactly.
Cool. Let's go through a couple examples.
We actually implement this to make this even more real.
I know there's a couple of companies you're thinking about sharing that of strategies you worked on.
Yeah, yeah. I think I think there's just a sort sort of um three quick notes uh to to close off this um
this process and and I'll share the uh two two examples, uh Lenny. So
So the the the 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 this PM went off and wrote this, you know, strategy dog, and I uh I don't agree with most of
And uh
And and and part of this is actually very
sort of it goes back to human psychology of just
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 and so it's actually and the leadership
sort of inputs have been baked in. So it's actually very sort of
team representative and and so
hopefully there there isn't sort of too much misalignment when you roll it out. And I I have seen that. You know, I have seen that work out.
The second is the there's just better results. Like you get to like better sort of problem articulation, you get to better strategic pillars.
Because there's just more minds on it than like if it were just sort of a product lead.
And the third thing is you have clearly defensible
criteria and outputs and and if
you want to change it, like I said, like you have to go back to the criteria and like 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
So it creates a lot of benefits.
But ultimately
And and we'll get to this a little bit more, you know, it has to be tested with execution. And and that's that's the most important thing. Yeah, I think it's it's important to highlight no
Framework Playboy Fred method is gonna
guarantee you have the correct strategy that will win and your company will thrive.
Uh it's always just the best effort.
A plan.
Uh yeah, as the quote, uh no no good plan survives first contact with the customer.
Um
Cool.
Cool. Let's talk through some examples.
Yeah.
So
So
uh the first example I wanted to talk about is uh at Zinga. You know, I I sort of um was at Zinga a very long time ago and this was um
Um sort of the heyday of social gaming on Facebook.
The thing that I
was extremely impressed about Zinga 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 a entry level PM.
But the kind of strategic clarity there was 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.
Now there were sort of three elements that were very common across all the games, you know, um
sort of
The first was
Viral game loops.
Right? Like this these game loops that just sort of
required you to have a social an active social network to be successful and play
It was very like tightly and fictionally integrated into sort of the core of the gameplay.
That was the first one.
The second one was there was this idea of like pay 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 what happens then is different people, depending on how much time they have,
complete like different percentages of sort of a a progression task or uh 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, um, experience where people put a lot of investment into it and they didn't mind sort of paying for the last like twenty percent or thirty percent.
Which 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 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
So all all of Zinga games had this um cross promotional component at the top of the game and they would promote other games and
No, it's sort of like the single network was the most important thing and not sort of an individual game.
And and those were sort of the three uh big you know, in in our parlance now, strategic pillars, right? And uh
The fo and there were non focus areas. Like it wasn't like
The focus wasn't on high finality graphics.
It wasn't on like complex game mechanics.
And this was extremely clear and hard-coded into the company culture and operations. And
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 away. So for for example, I was at Zinga San Diego.
And we took the company into net neo game genres.
like action strategy, match three puzzle games.
But we stay true to the strategic pillars of 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 was very in incredible at the time and really reinforced this
These strategic pillars.
There's this function called central product management.
Which basically propagated best practices, made sure that games were network accretive.
And and all these things worked
sort of in harmony to
Enhanced those strategic pillars and reinforce it en
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 in the history of sort of
Companies at the time.
In in revenue. And um
And it worked really well until the environment changed.
Right, and and sort of there's 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 to mobile.
So there's a lot here. 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 twelve weeks potentially.
Like this lasted 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, on the other hand it feels like very little time.

come up with the things that will most help your business.
Right.
In this case, these three elements were single.
And by the way, this
These three pillars, they w they didn't emerge from this method, but it helped you see
the power of having being very clear. Yeah, exactly. And it ev 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. 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 showed for Zinger just like
They're unique and differentiated for Zinga.
Uh
network powers of apps driving other apps.
Yeah.
paying to complete like these are things Zing has figured out. This is how we win.
Versus other
product in the market.
Totally, totally.
Yeah. Sweet.
Anything else along those lines,
That that was that was um
In hindsight reflection, uh, Lenny, you know, I was I was pretty naive when I was there and um you know, I realized how
And this was
In fact, like
What led to my blind spot
When I joined Headspace from Zinga that
you even need a strategy, right? Like I that's the story I s I said at the beginning.
The reason is because Zinga had it figured out so well that I didn't actually have a need to exercise that muscle at Zinga.
And we just had to come up with new games that sort of
apply that strategy
And and so it was a net new muscle I had to develop, you know, when I got to um headspace.
It's like uh 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
Mm-hmm.
And then he leaves and he's like, What's water?
Yeah.

You just don't realise what you're in. You don't realise what
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.
In the case of Zinga, just this focus on everything we do needs to get these things right. These three things, everything we do.
Ne 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 or like focus on this one part for now.
So I think that's a really interesting thread is just the power focus. Yeah.
Okay, cool. Um
And now you have another example of your time at Meta.
Yeah, at Meta there's this uh fascinating example which I think um
sort of like illustrates a a different point which is
Basically, you know, I I was standing up the the product strategy for a couple of uh product growth teams on in reality labs, uh, you know, uh Oculus.
which was coming up with the the Quest two at the time. Um this is a standalone headset. And then Portal, which was our
you know, video conferencing product, and we stood up these teams to go after sort of product growth, which is basically driving hardware sales through software features.
And uh and we sto we went through this process that I just described. We stood up strategic pillars.
Um
The strategic pillars were fairly similar for both Portal, which is our we re conferencing product, and and Oculus. I love Portal, by the way. I was a big fan. I'm sad that it's no longer
More.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
And uh
And that led to, you know, uh features that are known to everybody, like the Oculus Referals program, you know, the uh portal memory syntegration, where you see
One of your Facebook memories on po on the portal sort of you know sponsored ad in your Facebook feed.
And also we had this sort sort of section on on the Facebook app, which is also from
Facebook at the time and then eventually also from Meta
which is these other products from uh the Facebook ecosystem.
And all those came out of that that effort.
And you know
About eighteen months 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 at Meta and till till today it 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 sunset it and we basically redeploy that team uh, you know, to other sort of initiatives.
And
That's super interesting, right? Basically
You know, it was sort of like the same strategy process. We got to nearly identical sort of strategic pillars.
But eventually like
Completely different outcomes.
Um
And I think that that illustrates the most important point about strategy, which is
Intrinsically strategy has
No business value.
It's it's basically sort of a a a document with a few words.
And 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 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 and sometimes what happens is parts of your strategy might work, parts might not, and you have to
you know, uh pivot away from some and double down on some.
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 a strategy sitting there in a dock is worthless. It's
Uh where the work worth comes from is it actually having impact and
And being successful.
Makes me think about a product manager also. Just a PM is not use is not worth anything until they help you drive impact.
I think an an important kind of
trickle down from that point is that you don't want to spend
Too long just thinking about strategy.
You wanna 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, spend th
Three, four, five months.
Working on as one document that just maybe one day you'll use.
Exactly. And uh
There is room for like a six month process, which we'll get to in a moment, but uh for small s I wouldn't recommend more than like two two or three months. Yeah. And again, small s strategy is for
Like a couple years out, not like
Excellent like a time frame.
Okay, cool.
Um
Okay.
Anything else along those lines?
Or the examples of meta area.
Zingah.
Th those are 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 um so everything we've spoken about so far is
what is what I would call small S
And um it's very
problem focused, right? It's basically pr 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 um interesting quote by Elon Musk, which is
Life has to be about more than just solving problems.
And
And he he says it in the context of the aspiration to become a multiplanetary species.
But I think this is true of
every sort of company, like big or small and
There needs to be an aspirational and cool component.
to to strategy. And uh
And I call this sort of biggest strategy and
You know, I'll I'll sort of run through
This
at a higher level because I think like this is a little bit more fluid.
in in how you build uh sort of the big strategy.
And uh
It typically takes
you know longer, uh potentially up to about six months.
Approach is a bit different from smallest. And
You start with the company, you know, mission and vision.
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 uh generating like long term futures.
And you know, some of the questions you can ask uh during these interviews are what does a day in the life of a user look like in in sort of five years?
What does the product look like in sort of five to ten years?
Why is the world better in like ten 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
Три когісив холз.
And what I mean by that is three at least fairly distinct
descriptions of the future. So
So to give you a sort of a almost like um a very sort of simple example, imagine you're sort of doing big S for the future of travel.
You could have a a future that is talking all about sort of fully autonomous travel, you know, where sort of your there's very little sort of human involvement in going from A to B.
You could talk about another future where it's there's extreme speed.
Where you can get from A to B like really fast, like across the world, that that is really fast.
You could talk about a third where there is no travel, it's virtual travel, and and you sort of you still have the feeling of travel.
And you accomplish the same goals.
But those are different futures. They have like different properties, like different sort of elements to them.
And once you 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 they interest
Thing about concept cars is
They're never
Commercialized.
They're they're sort of often produced for inspiration
and to like potentially like take some part of them like a maybe a technology or a feature.
And that is brought into you know mainstream production. So
So think of these prototypes as these concept cars that really sort of drive inspiration and 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.
And you establish some winning components that are interesting.
And then what you do is you push
Stuff that is
Winning
into the product while product testing. So this is actually something that you actually want to start like testing your way into and and sort of
Understanding if it works.
From a scalable standpoint.
And this whole thing is typically led
Not by the the sort of the PMP but by design and UXR and
And in intentionally it's a little bit more open ended and and green field.
And it it actually
is a very sort of different sort of mind space that people have when they approach uh big guests. So
So the roadmap is really built
Through a combination of
Smallest and biggest work.
And
For example, at VR chat, we are doing both small S and Biggest work, uh, Lenny, and uh they are sort of run as parallel work streams.
The product management team is leading the charge on the smallest work and the design team is leading the charge on the biggest work.
And it's really exciting stuff. What's coming out of both work street is really exciting and really different.
And 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, you know, two tributaries.
that ultimately merge into one river.
Uh 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.
Point that people
Think in a
And
see the world differently. Some people are very open minded and creative.
And like think big blue sky people.
Some people me
Just like what are we doing next? How do we move this metric? Let's d talk about concrete things that we can
Do
For this big S 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.
Could be a 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.
You and
they'll both inform what you're doing. You don't need to like have this perfect timeline of this and stuff. Yeah.
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 wanna think bigger.
Which is great.
And this is a really good uh
lever to allow for that.
Yeah. In a contained environment. Cool. Let's just go crazy. Let's think about what this could be in the future. Still let's smoke make sure we're moving some metrics short term. But let's give this opportunity to think big.
And oftentimes the biggest ideas come right out that
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 other
I was I want to talk about AI a little bit, just like how that impacts things.
A couple other things.
Yeah, yeah. I'll 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. Uh great, great.
Lady. So um
So I think I think that this whether it's
Big S or small S. Uh, these are like incredibly satisfying sort of processes to go through uh 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, where you kind of get like a lot of self-doubt, like, hey, will you ever reach the end?
And I just want to sort of normalise that. Like that's actually like normal and um
I want people to expect that uh as they go through it. And 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.
The
Second thing is
I would say that
The person who's leading the charge on
These efforts has to be really good at connecting diverse viewpoints.
And keeping the ball moving forward. And it's not easy. It's uh
It's very hard because sometimes you have people who take you in different directions and you have to sort of keep it all um hanging together.
And and so 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 is critical for for these to be successful.
And in some ways like low ego because
You know, it's not like
they they do get to sort of like
introduce their own ideas, but like truly it's about bringing the team together. And and so so that's that's the skill that you should look for for these uh 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,'cause
It's an intensive process, it's a long process and people

Tired, they can find it grindy. So just having a little bit of playfulness along the way goes a long way in making it feel like
uh more more tolerable for the people going through it. So th those are some some thoughts about either of these processes.
That was 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, you're
A lot of people have opinions, they have perspectives, there's data that's, you know, rarely is there clear.
answer from the beginning. So I think that's really important context.
I wanted to actually come back to your point you made about how um
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.
Yeah. Exciting and inspiring.
Uh that aren't just s 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.
Uh I was actually at an interview with Zach 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 wanna work on awesome stuff.
Stuff that's just like awe inspiring. Not just
Another social feature.
And so I think that's a really important point. And there's a lot of power in that.
You know, think people get really excited about holy moly.
I did not imagine this is what
Headspace could become, what VRChat could become, what Meta could become.
It's just like
Really powerful.
Getting people really inspired.
Yeah.
And I love this process they 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. So it's preparation.
Mission, you figure out mission vision.
Trends he 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 build prototypes.
Of what these what might this look like.
And then you
You actually test these in your product, which I love to start de risking these ideas.
That helps you converge.
See here's like a actual plan we wanna execute and then you wrote turn that into roadmap.
Yeah, yeah. And the and the first testing of the prototypes is with uh uh UXR, so it's more sort of uh
you know, concept testing or prototype testing.
with like a handful of users and then you use that to synthesize into like a live product.
Great.
Big ideas and then de risking validating them along the way in various ways to like, okay, maybe this could actually work. Let's try it.
Sweet.
Okay, so just two more things. Uh 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 are like, Oh my God, I have so much I wrote all these notes.
Uh let's give'em a summary.
So they can
Remember he's
Okay, cool. So
Talk about AI briefly.
How has AI tooling helped you evolve this process? How has
How can people use AI to make this easier?
So the first disclaimer is um you know, I'm not sort of an AI futurist, but um
I I read all the emerging stuff that's coming out, most of the emerging stuff that's coming out, and uh
use some of the tools and and it's fascinating, um, you know, what's happening and uh
And I think it will definitely have an impact on on sort of strategy formulation. So what I'll share is what resonates for me in the context of strategy formulation.
with AI. So
So right away I think
The
The basic
idea is
Everybody should be using
Assistance
uh in the strategy formulation process with with uh the basic tools that we have. And 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 research, right? And uh
This could be like competitive analysis
And for example, you could do trend analysis from a vast library of
Uh competitors release notes.
And and you can sort of say like okay, like what are the sort of the teams of investment?
uh of a competitor's release dots.
Or you could do sort of a a reviews analysis of a competitor product and sort of understand like what's resonating for users, what's not.
And uh and you could also do a sort of ask um
a tool like chat GPT to do a head to head comparison between like a few
Play on a certain dimension.
and really give you sort of a heat back of sort of like how they all stack up.
And um
And you could also ask an open ended question like, Hey, why is this new product so successful? Like why is it getting so many users? And
is some good hypothesis that that you usually get. So
So really 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 uh I know Claire Bo at uh 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, but not quite the answer.
And and so what I found is that these mock strategies like let's say you know you you know I
I you know, I support VR chat now and I ask it like hey
what should we our shot do, how should we grow and uh
It generates a mock strategy.
What I've found is that um
It's surprise one surprisingly good. Like it's incredibly sort of well informed and and sort of well articulated.
And I've also found that its biggest strength is also somewhat its weakness, which is
it tends these mock strategies tend to be pretty comprehensive and extensive. And and there's an investment recommendation
In a vast number of areas.
So
Basically, if you remember, like str the the core of strategy is really like to be very targeted and to like be very sort of focused.
So these mock strategies become an interesting input and and the the burden is still on the team to like down select.
into the sort of the most important areas for for investment. So
So forcing that choice.
still I think is is sort of sort of a human element.
um and and needs that sort of layer of uh 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, um, and likely sooner than we all think.
There's probably going to be
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Uh 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
uh you know Armand Drew is uh on from from IBM has some good definitional
framework on some of the stuff. He you know, he shares it often on on LinkedIn.
But uh let's take a simple example, you know.
I can easily imagine something like this for a topic like onboarding.
Right. 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.
You know, there's these sort of uh experimental
frameworks like multi armed bandits um that can really g 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 like rely on human
design of the variations, right? Like the the different variations that you test.
Even though the experimentation framework is very sophisticated.
The variations are still human generated.
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those variations could actually be generated by through generative AI.
and could be plugged into the advanced sort of experimentation frameworks.
the possibilities become infinite. And and really you might be surprised by what you find as 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, et cetera.
That is such a cool idea, I just wanna 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 as
Constantly optimizing your onboarding. Holy shit. That's an awesome idea. Uh, I think everyone will have this.
And then what that makes me think there's gonna be some company that's built the best
onboarding agent. That's what you're gonna be for.
Do we get.
That's so good. Okay.
Great. Great idea.
Yeah, yeah. And so so the then the question becomes, hey, what is our job? Like our job becomes architecting, you know, bigger and bigger pieces of the product.
To take advantage of these ages, 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 and you know, you you get into like deeper sort of experiences, eventually AI will get
So
Uh f funnily enough, when that happens, like some of the manual processes I describe above will seem archaic. Um
But I think the fundamentals will still have a a long shelf life and and you know as you think about these automated frameworks as well.
Man.
This could be its own podcast.
And this whole post about how AI
How PMs are the best position role and
In tech to thrive in world API.
Which I'll link to that uh 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 wanna get to the wrap up is
Uh I have this d ongoing debate with a friend about strategy in AI.
My 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.
What how do we win?
And to me that feels like the ultimate
way AI is good. It's just here's data, here's what I found as a
Path to a winning.
But you know, my friends also arguing that's like the one thing
Yeah.
AI will be least good at because that's where we need people and
Uh context and discussion, all these things. So I don't know. That's like an it's like one or 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 well I guess do you have any quick thoughts on that? Any where do you where do you saw it?
I think there is a crossover point where the sort of the human judgment
will be inferior.
to sort of um 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 I'll sort of share a simple example, uh, 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. 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 uh in in not in sequence, but uh in parallel and uh
And it it moves with confidence at turnings because of that. And and so
There is this crossover point where some of these
the ability to hold sort of multiple signals in the head.
No, there's it's gonna be um
It's going to be more um
You know, it's gonna be stronger. That makes total sense. What it makes me think about. There's gonna be a strategy agent just sitting around
Always looking for ways to improve your 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
The overview. So let's just do that and then let's go to the
Get to the exciting lightning round.
So I think uh I think sort of the quick uh 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's it's 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.
And think about the 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 flavour of it.
And which focuses on solving problems. It's um what I call present forward.
And it typically operates at a two year horizon.
We use a five stage process to get thro get there and uh it takes about eight to twelve weeks.
There is a biggest process that focuses on an aspirational future.
Is future backward.
And typically has, you know, a three, five, ten year horizon, also a five stage process.
And can be ongoing up to a six.
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 um of 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 away from what's not.
Incredible. I'm glad we did that.
Anything else that you want to share or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round?
Just all the best, uh with uh, you know, strategy work and and ultimately sort of
You know, individual and and business success.
Amazing. And 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 lightning ground. Chandra, are you ready? 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, uh Lenny, and uh some of my sort of
Classic favorites are um
Your uh Waldisney's biography, um, and um there's several out there, but I think the one that I like the most is uh
The triumph of the American imagination
And what's interesting is um
It talks about how uh Waldisney 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, 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,'cause it was once it was produced, it was done, like it was out of uh his control.
Um
And it was interesting, like he was basically A B testing uh long before the term was was coined.
And uh and it it's just a fascinating look into how his brain worked, like way ahead of its time.
Um
The the other classic is uh Ed Catmole's uh Creativity Inc. and uh
Talks about all the negative forces that like eat away at creativity in a in an organization. How do you
So as the leader have to keep them at bay and like make sure um you know the the team can innovate.
And then there's this this
Probably like less popular book, but uh but really good one.
from Tom Kelly of IDO, uh which is the ten phases of innovation.
It talks about different
archetypes that you need on the team that
are essential for for creating something special and uh
And you actually need like, you know, I think there's uh
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 and that you need to actually like make something successful. So
I would say like those are some of the the ones that I usually recommend. Yeah. That's a really cool uh
That third book is really interesting. I haven't heard of that.
Yeah, creativity ink something I want to
highlight real quick is uh to your point that a lot of it has had a
avoid killing good ideas and they
My favorite metaphor from that book is the ugly baby.
Metaphor where every new
idea is an ugly baby that people just want to like 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 not Yeah, yeah. It feels a bit uh yeah. Feels aggressive. Yeah. Yeah.
But it's memorable'cause I I've never forgotten that.
Okay, next question. Is there a favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed?
Yeah, yeah.
We watch a lot of uh animated films with the kids, um but we've a couple of good good movies this year.
Um we we really liked uh
If you know, imagine friend, uh it's about sort of growing up and like forgetting sort of
These m memories uh of of your younger sort of days is really um
Nice movie and then uh
Of course we enjoyed Dune two as well. It was it was a fun watch. Um
And uh
Um but most of our time is dominated by the kids sort of
animated films, uh
You know, I I talk about art of this at my
There's a new Dune TV show. I don't know if you've been watching it. It just started recently on HPO.
Uh, it's not the best thing in the world, but uh but it gets you like a little dune fix. Interesting. In between movies. I think there's a third movie coming out.
I see.
Third question, do you have a favorite product you recently discovered that you really love?
Yeah, yeah, I mean uh
playing this cute little game for the last few days. It's called uh Cappy Burra Go. It's uh it's a tab based, you know, strategy RPG game. It's uh
Is it's got really humorous writing and this cute capybara that goes off on an adventure.
It's very well paced and it's uh it's a very well produced game. Uh it's um
Uh sort of
That's one game I've been sort of playing recently.
I've also been poking around uh blue sky. Um blue sky is uh interesting.
I haven't gotten into a habit yet, but uh but it's super interesting concept of empowering the community.
with like um these community generated feeds. It's like very different um experience.
But it's also interesting, there's a trade-off with like the simplicity of the product and and you know what what do you get with the additional complexity.
It'll be interesting to see how 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 nineteen ninety five interview um
of Steve Jobs where he he talks about uh this idea of
There's a tremendous amount of craftsmanship.
Between a great idea and a great product.
And it sort of stuck with me uh over the years.
And um
And you know
sort of the 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 and it's something that, you know, I I sort of think about uh when we, you know, build product is uh
Is there sufficient pain here where, you know, is it's sort of a proxy for like are we creating something great? Uh is is interesting.
Wow.
Uh makes me think about founder mode a little bit, like people talk about founder mode. The reason
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 make it.
To take it from it just a
ugly baby idea. It's a an awesome winning product.
Oftentimes think needs to be the needs to be the founder.
And that's why I think it's kind of emerged as a trend is
It's it's important to have that drive to just continue to
Yeah. Not just like I had the idea, go build it now.
Okay, final question.
Uh, you have an amazing background behind you. I don't know if people are on 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.
Oh well it's the uh
It's the picture of my kids right in the center. Which uh
is um you know without doubt the most important and memorable thing there.
It also caught at a unique time when they were like
Incredibly like uh the
They were sort of um
Super like
embracing each other and and it's like it's a phase where they've grown out of it. Now they
There's a lot more, you know
uh I think like uh rivalry and and sibling tussles, but uh
That that movement is is my favorite.
I also have a bunch of, you know, like fun stuff, like a big sort of Snoopy fan and so it is uh
Uh, also a big Beatles fan, so that picture is actually uh
An interesting blend between um Snoopy walking
crossing the road and and then the Beetles crossing the other way.
And um and then a bunch of books that are you know
Um
more memorable over the years. You'll see creativity there, you'll see, you know
The 10 faces of innovation, uh all of that. Amazing. Thank you for sharing. And uh your kids' photos block when you t when you're in the center. So it's like a little Easter egg.
Thank you for sharing that.
Chandra, this was incredible. There's everything I was hoping it'd be I think we're gonna create that ripple that you were hoping for.
Two final questions, where can folks find you a line if they want to reach out? And how can listeners be useful to you?
A reasonable choice would be uh LinkedIn, uh to to reach me.
And uh
I I'd really like
Like you and I um discussed earlier, I 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 won't 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 uh ultimately, um, you know, that that's what makes it all interesting is sort of the
the community owns it ultimately and it's not sort of b doesn't belong to one individual.
Uh 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, and thanks for your service to the product community.
Same to you.

Bye everyone.
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