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

26:32And last but not least is what I call user observation. So I like the strategy working group to actually either interview a user or watch a video and report like key learnings. And the idea is not to action those insights. It's really to build empathy. 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 frequency, notions of what a world or the strategy should be. and it humanizes the whole process. So that I think is the purpose, but you still give them the homework of writing down what they learned, because it's a little bit of a four -sync function.

27:15So the output of all of this is what I call the comprehensive preparation readout. So it is a single master deck where you sort of have the behavior of inside -smet analysis, you have UXR inside -smet analysis, You have a download of the leadership interviews, you have the competitive stack charts, you have the adjacent road maps, and you have a section on user observations. So it's a lot of work. But to your point, it can be done in parallel with your day jobs. You can multitask. And that's why you take about four weeks to do that. And that concludes the preparation phase. you get the deck and that rolls into the strategy spirit, which is the next phase.

28:05I want to pause and see if you have any questions. I have a million questions, but I'm going to keep myself contained. But just to quickly summarize, basically, you kick off, we're going to start developing strategy for this product. And you were going to touch on this, but it may help just to talk about this right now. I know you have big, big, a strategy, small strategy. This process, what's like an example of the level of product scale that this process this fork because I know you have another approach for a larger scale of a product, like basically for a company, right? What's the best way to think about like smallest strategy, which is what we're going through?

28:37Yeah, I think it's a good question, Lenny. I would say that the process works well at a sort of a growth stage company or in a vertical within sort of a larger company. I think it scales pretty well. It's the main difference between this small S and big S is the sort of the time horizon aspect. and the sort of the aspirational component, which we get. Okay, so this is a process you can use for entire company strategy of a not a large company, not a massively, 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 VRChat 2 .0, you have this kickoff meeting with your working group, you assign action items and there's five, there's six things you ask everyone to do.

29:24Gather all the behavioral insights, all the user research insights that you've had. Leadership interviews, interview people, ask what they want and see what they're hoping for, what success looks like. Competitive analysis, adjacent road maps across other teams, and user observations. It's just like watch users see what's happening. 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?

29:59Or do you share this deck with and read it out to you? Yeah, so the deck is an output of the first phase, and then it flows into the second phase, which is a strategy sprint. So you don't share the deck with anybody yet. In the strategy sprint, it's like a key deck. Awesome. Okay. I love how very concrete an action will this is with time boxes and action items and the exact output you're looking for, I'd 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 if you think about it, the output is determined by the quality of your input.

30:34And I love, feels like a core component of this method is spend time creating, gathering all the input, all the best input, like actually spend time there. Don't just make it all half -assed, last minute thing. Okay, amazing. Okay, let's talk about step two, which is the strategy sprint. Yeah, so the strategy sprint is the heart of the process. This is sort of where you make the decision. So if you recall, the definition of strategy is it forces choice to deploy resources into your sort of a few areas for maximum impact. So the core of strategy is really sort of picking those areas and the areas you're not going to invest it.

31:17And 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 learned. And so it brings everybody in the working group to the same state of understanding, the same state of consciousness on the state of the union. So that's a great process where what I encourage people to do is write down things that you're as you're listening, write down things that you find are problems for our users, things that are coming in the way of our growth, and things that are sort of like suboptimal for the business.

32:02And so people take a lot of notes during that time and the people who are presenting are sharing sort of everything they've learned. And that's really they want. It's like just absorbing a ton of information and writing down a ton of notes so people kind of understand where all the problems are. And it's a very problems focused process. And that's an important point. I'll get back to it. You know, when we talk about big S, which is, which is different. And so once people have that that sort of common awareness shared knowledge of all the problems. Day two is literally the most important day in the entire eight to 12 weeks because that's where you actually make the choice.

32:47And so the way to flow through it, it's actually really important to flow through it correctly. So the first step is really generating a whole bunch of problems because people have been taking notes the previous day. You start the day with, like, hey, let's collect everybody's 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 throws out their observations on what's holding us back. And you just capture all of that in a Google Sheets, for example. And even in our, you start to see these patterns emerging. Of like, okay, there's these sort of clusters of problems that are really holding us back.

33:29And so the next step is you sort of do a joint clustering of sort of related problems and you sort of create these potentially like typically in my experience I've seen about 10 to 15 clusters form of very related problems. And the beauty of it is each of this bigger cluster you actually know what the sub -problems are within that cluster because you sort of generated it very organically. And then you have let's say 10 to 15 clusters, what you then do is you, because remember, because it started as a problem sort of generation exercise, each of the clusters also has a name that is a problem. And so, the next step is to flip it into an opportunity framing.

34:14And so, for example, let me give you a couple of examples. So let's say there's a bunch of problems around, you know, people don't really know where to find different things in our product. And they don't really know where to go, where to find a certain feature or an experience. And let's say a lot of problems in that area. So difficult defining things becomes the cluster, the problem cluster, and discovery becomes the opportunity framing of it. And it's 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.

34:56And so the opportunity framing of that would be relevance, right? Like it's basically, oh, like stuff that really matters to me. And or maybe like if it's a social product, then you know, maybe people are finding it difficult to find friends and they sort of like are lonely because of that, the sort of the opportunity framing would be social connection. And so flipping all of those problem clusters into 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 those 10 to 15 opportunity areas, ideally three, maybe five, but I would recommend three because it creates more clarity and focus.

35:43And 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 or whatever matters to you as a company as a business of the product. And the second dimension is certainty of impact. Certainty of impact is basically how concrete is the evidence that this is a problem. Sometimes you have like really hard data. Sometimes you have sort of more anecdotal evidence. And so the confidence really depends on how baked the problem, sort of sizing and frequency is.

36:26And 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 want it, it's going to be really difficult to like move the needle on it because you should kind of know that, oh, okay, like, I can imagine these solutions could actually move the needle. I can actually launch this sort of, you know, nudge system that can help people find things. I can recommend sort of people. I can recommend friends so that people can form friends quicker on the platform. So you should have a sense of how you would solve that particular space.

37:04So is that clarity on levers? That's the third dimension. And the fourth dimension is super, super important, which is other levers unique and differentiated to that particular team or company, which is that if another team or company could build it better than this particular team or company, then it's probably not that differentiated. It's probably going to be pretty generic once you launch it. So it's a combination of sort of like, hey, is there a lot of impact here? How confident are we of the problem? Do we have a sense of the solutions? And basically, are we sort of the team or company that has the capabilities and the skills to like uniquely build it where other teams cannot?

37:50And so once you have that, you know, and sometimes like what happens is you don't have like too much data and so it's okay to have qualitative scores on this like high media below, you know, T -shirt scores, whatever that is. But the key is you're doing it together as a strategy working group and you're sort of like you're debating like the scores and you're reasoning why it should be higher versus lower. Like there's a ton of like alignment and like collision that's happening when you're doing that, which is 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 assault.

38:30And what you have is basically the top three, right? And you have like the remaining seven or 12 that are basically not not sort of focused. And so that's the core of the process is like getting that sort of those opportunity the areas and getting to a shared sense of, okay, how do we prioritize them and why? Okay, and this is all done in a week. I know there's more to it. There's a couple more items that help you move from what you just said to the next step, but I love that this is the core of like the biggest element of the process and you can 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.

39:10So again, highlighting the importance of that prep step. So just to share what you've shared so far, and then we'll finish the strategy sprint step. So it's basically do the share outs every one of them the same page about all the information that all the inputs essentially, enumerate all the problems like individual small problems and then cluster them into 10 to 15 problem clusters, flip it from here's the problem to here's an opportunity we have rank them based on basically there's these four attributes you shared, which actually wrote these down. So impact potential confidence that they will have the impact clarity of levers and are they differentiated unique levers?

39:48Like, yeah, are they going to, is there something different from what other folks are doing? So those are ways to rank at these ideas and problem clusters. You essentially come up with here's three big, three bets basically potentially should take. And, okay, and then I think that's where you stopped, is there? That's totally right. And those three that are at the top of that pile are basically our strategic pillars. So we've sort of gotten our strategic pillars and they basically hold up to strategy. That's why they call strategic pillars. And the idea is once you have the strategic pillars, we basically translate that into a few how -might means.

40:27So how might we do, let's say it's a relevance thing, how might we find the best content for a particular user, how might we surface it in the right place, there's a few how -might means. and the how -mightweez are basically intended to help the next phase of the process, which is the design spread. So, you generate these areas, these strategic pillars, you generate the how -mightweez, how -mightweez are typically pretty straightforward. Once you have the strategic pillars, it takes probably an hour to generate some how -mightweez for each of them, maybe two or three for each strategic pillar, and then you're done with that stage.

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

41:36Let's think about it versus like how do we improve discovery? You know, that's like a different brain works differently hearing this so that that is a really powerful phrasing Just wanted to highlight that. Yeah, that's awesome It's also something that designers are familiar with Lenny so it like flows really well into sort of a design spray Okay, so you have these how might we ease say if three pillars maybe three or four or five how might we use to solve these Opportunities such 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 all the first two days.

42:14This is the first two days. Yeah. Wow. So much done in two days. Yeah. Exactly. And the second day is particularly intense on the team. So it's good to give them a break because it's a lot of like really mental sort of wrestling. 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 because it's a very creative exercise. So you basically imagine in two years, because that's the typical time horizon of a smaller strategy, it's like 18 months to 24 months. So imagine in two years, this is what I tell the team, imagine two years there's a newspaper, there's a journalist that covers this work and there's a newspaper article that comes out.

42:58And 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 basically everybody generates a newspaper headline in parallel. And it's interesting because you often see there's these common themes that sort of form when people generate these headlines. And the forcing function with the headline is also that it has to be somewhat simple and like plain speak. It's not like too technical, you have to sort of get to like a more sort of simple lay person's language. And you have to get to like the key benefit that like ultimately like the impact it has on the world.

43:40Like, you know, those kinds of teams like come up often. And so then you do a little bit, you put them all into a blender. You put all of those headlines from the team into a blender. And like you sort of mash them together and create like the sort of the winning aspiration, which is ultimately what does progress on the strategy look like in a couple of years time?

44:06It's not like one person writing. What's an example of an aspiration that you've come up with on a project you worked on? A winning aspiration? We did this process for the privacy team when I was at Meta. and one of the sort of the aspiration, aspirational statements was around really like the strategic pillars were around a lot of sort of features that we would build. But the winning aspiration was really like, hey, could we move like consumer trust? And, you know, and the and the newspaper headline is something like, you know, you know, Facebook has moved the needle on consumer trust by investing in, you know, these areas.

44:43And so that's like how you sort of, you know, create sort of the bigger in fact, that's a great example. And obviously this is similar to the PR Amazon method. And what I love about your approach, as you said early on is you're just pulling together 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 in them, an operator's playbook for doing this. So I love that. Okay. So, and when you say Blender, by the way, you're talking, put it into Blender. What I'm inferring is you just take all the everyone's headlines and you come up with one that kind of covers the gamut of all three pillars being successful.

45:20That's exactly right. Like more practically what I typically do is I put them all on a slide and you start it's almost like a word cloud and then you start to see these common words and then you converge those words as a key elements of the final winning aspiration and then you try to create like a nice statement out of that. So you know it also like symbolically you everybody sees they are on statement on the sort of the deck and that's how you get to the final one. Awesome. And I feel like, yeah, I could help with that now just like, all your headliners and it comes up with some suggestions.

45:51Okay, cool. So, is that the end of the sprint or is there more to the sprint? That's it for the sprint. And so at the end of the sprint, what do you have? What are the outputs? Yeah, this is a great progress on strategy because now we have the three strategic pillars. We have the how might we associate it with the strategic pillars? You also have the why? Why did you get to those three strategic pillars and what are you not focused on and what are the reasons for it? And you also have the winning aspiration. So it's great progress. Team's done a great job. I think I think now we sort of move on to you know the design spirit.

46:29In 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 that I had in Meta where typically during the strategy sprint, like you don't change it once you go through the strategy sprint. But eventually there are sort of a lot of signals you get through execution where you sort of have to course correct. and we talk about one very interesting example of how that sort of changed things. Yeah. Awesome. Okay. So basically you've developed your strategy at this point.

47:04And in your experience, it ends up being like until you hit the market and test. You don't really know what's going on. Correct. But there's kind of an implication that in your experience doing this, I think you said five or six times, it has been correct and as good as doing it, any other approach. I would say it's not a sort of an empirical study obviously because of a small sample size, but I would say that it's like really open sort of people's eyes and like it's led to like really good alignment and eventually like good results. And even when it has not, it has led to like good organizational buy -in on sort of like why and how we are approaching things.

47:42This reminds me of Tomor Cohen was on the podcast, his CPU of LinkedIn, he has this phrase that everyone always says he says, which is we may be wrong, but we're not confused. And I love that a core part of this is everyone is completely on the same page from the be, 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 this first place, everyone understanding. I know there's a whole rollout at the end too, they'll solve that.

48:14Okay, cool. So we have the sprint, we have basically the three pillars that you're going to 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 next phase is the design sprint and the design sprint is can be led by the design person who's in the strategy working group. If you remember, there's like engineering, probably design and data, so the design person can lead it and the PM can sort of take a bit of a backseat during this process. So the input to the design sprint is the sort of the three strategic pillars and the how might me associated with it.

48:50And the goal of the design sprint is not to sort of come up with, oh, these are the features we should build. That's not the purpose of the design sprint. The design sprint is to generate a lot of illustrative concepts 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 people might still scratch their head. Like, what do you exactly mean? What are you going to build? And so the illustrative concepts really sort of give people something to latch out to, oh, okay, I get it. Like, this is what you're going to build at the end of the day with this strategy.

49:24And so the more generative, the better. And then like, this is the ability to, you know, sometimes if you do the Google Ventures design spread, you can even test some of it with users. And you know, get a little bit of sort of sharpening of things. but the goal here is not to build feature -ready designs. It's more to generate concepts. And so once you have that, basically, the design sprint and this different flavors of design sprints, which I won't go into, and sort of like you can lean on sort of your design lead to decide what's the appropriate way. But the input and the output is what needs to be very emphasized.

50:01The input needs to be the strategic winners. The output needs to be a kind of sort of illustrative concepts to explain each strategic pillar. So you could all those to have a section where you talk about each strategic pillar and insert those concepts in that section. And that's the idea. And we're going to go through a couple examples to make this very real. And you mentioned the design sprint method, which we had the authors on the podcast. They actually didn't go through the design sprint method. They have another book called Make Time that's about productivity. We also had their colleague from Google Ventures that designed a bullseye sprint, which is also an interesting sprint.

50:34I don't know, it's a new thing that helps you figure out your ICP and who to focus your product on and how that works. So it's another type of sprint you could use here. Okay, so the input is here's the three things we're going to invest in say discovery relevance privacy. Here's now put 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.

51:07And designers take the lead. Exactly. And the engineers are kind of inputs and thought partners in the same engine. They're optional. Yeah. Optional. But yeah, ideally they're involved because you want you want you want all the best ideas in this. Yeah. Okay, cool. We'll come next. And then the next step is the document writing. And this is sort of a solo activity that the PM should take on. But the great news is, the PM is not starting from scratch. There's so much great stuff to write. If you remember, there's a ton of user insights, a ton of behavioral insights, a ton of competitive analysis.

51:42There's the three strategic pillars, how might we use winning aspiration, there's a whole bunch of illustrative concepts. So oftentimes, probably, to have this sort of creator's a block, you know, that is solidly, 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, this is sort of like, you still have to weave together a good story. That's why I think like it takes a week or two and I think it's really about combining, connecting and editing and at this point and like telling sort of a cohesive story from all those components.

52:14But 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? Someone sits down and is trying to write this out. What do you want to see? There's kind of headings. I think you could almost take the building blocks as a little bit of a sort of a steer for the template. So you start with sort of the broader context like, you know, where you talk about what the leaders kind of want from this sort of overall effort. And then you get into key insights and analysis where you have user insights, behavioral insights, competitive analysis.

52:50And then you get into the strategic pillars and you explain them, you also explain why. And in the appendix, you include the full table that you generated on day two of your strategy sprint. You include the full table in the appendix, including the criteria. That's going to be really important because most people are going to ask, why did you big these and that's like basically the sort of the defensibility and then you have the winning aspiration that's like very bold, it's like a big part of the heart of the deck and you sort of embed the illustrative concepts into the actual like each of the strategic pillars so that it slows well and then finally you end with you know some kind of alignment questions like hey do these feel right like you know are there things we are missing so that it creates that framework for alignment in the subsequent meetings.

53:44I'm excited to chat with Christina Gilbert, the founder of OneSkima, whenever a long time podcast sponsors. Hi, Christina. Yes, thank you for having me on, Lenny. What is the latest with OneSkima? I know you now work with some of my favorite companies like Ram, Vanta, Scale, and Watershed. I heard that you just launched a new product to help product teams import CSVs from especially tricky systems like ERPs. Yes, so we just launched one scheme of file feeds, which allows you to build an integration with any system in 15 minutes as long as you can export a CSV to an SFTP folder. We see our customers all the time getting stuck with hacks and workarounds, and the product teams that we work with don't have to turn down prospects because their systems are too hard to integrate with.

54:27We allow our customers to offer thousands of integrations without involving their engineering team at all. I can tell you that if my team had to build integrations like this, how nice would it be to be able to take the software roadmap and instead use something like one schema and not just to build it but also to maintain it forever. Absolutely Lenny, we've heard so many horror stories of multi -day outages from even just a handful of bad records. We have laser -focused on integration reliability to help teams end all of those distractions that come up with integrations. We have a built -in validation layer that stops any bad data from entering your system, and one schema will notify your team immediately of any data that looks incorrect.

55:01I know that importing incorrect data can cause all kinds of pain for your customers and quickly lose their trust. Christina, thank you for joining us and if you want to learn more, head on over to oneschema .co. That's oneschema .co. I pulled up playing to win, which I know you also pull ideas from and actually Roger Martin was on the podcast talking about the stuff. And one way I think about as you're describing way to break up your strategy doc is he has these five questions that you ask The first is actually what's your winning aspirations? So I love that you're pulling that in this is like one approach your doc can be what's your winning aspiration?

55:37Where 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 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 template as well. Awesome. Okay. Okay. So this is how long of a process does the writing of the document is about one to two weeks.

56:12and I think it's mostly solo work and hopefully by the end of it there's a very tight dock and 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 as it just you sit there in a room and then... I would minimize sort of pulling them in because they've all contributed so much to the process already. So I would say that at the end of it obviously, once you have sort of a draft, it's good to share with them, but I wouldn't like have them have their cycles too much at this point, because they've sort of given a lot already.

56:46I see, okay. And like how many pages do you see the stock being roughly? What's like a realistic? Yeah, it's not too long. I would say probably like three, three or four sort of pages. And then in Appendix has a lot of additional, like the table I spoke about and a lot of additional, maybe illustrative concepts. Maybe you can only use a few illustrative concepts in the main section, so that there could be others there. I think usually there's sort of a desire to from leaders to sort of say like, okay, like what are we building next? And it's important not to include like a roadmap as part of a strategy doc because a strategy doc is meant to be separate from the road maps, meant to be a companion to your roadmap.

57:29And even though there's interest, maybe sometimes you can include like an illustrative roadmap in the appendix, but I would try to keep it clean and try to keep it focused on just a 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, six weeks of work and you've got a strategy for your company slash product. That's exactly right, yeah. So I think you're probably in the last two to three weeks of the process and a pretty important And so the final step is the rollout.

58:07And I would start with what I call gatekeepers. And these are people who are absolutely like you have to get there one on one sort of alignment and blessing on this before it moves forward. And it's probably not too many, like probably two or three people. So I would sort of pre -flight it with them and get the alignment. These are one -on -one meetings with these kick -kicks. These are one -on -one meetings. 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.

58:43And then there's probably a rolling sort of list of team roadshows. You know, I sort of there's different ways to do this. But the one that I feel is most effective is the roadshow where you have like about eight to 10 people in each sort of session. So people feel more comfortable to ask questions. and it's more sort of like conversational. And so the purpose of the stage is to land it, is not to like see too much feedback. So it's a delicate balance. At the same time, you don't wanna appear like, you know, just sort of, you know, being too inflexible. So it's a very delicate balance. Like, you know, when people ask questions, you can clarify it and you can add clarifications to the dog, but I wouldn't change like the most important thing in the three -seater -digitalism.

59:28I wouldn't change that. I would sort of defend it using sort of the framework. But if people are like, there's really good arguments about the criteria that led to, you know, your ranking, then it's okay to reconsider. I'm not seeing it happen in my sort of like five to six attempts, but it's possible, theoretically possible. Yeah. And like the core of this approach, it sounds like as you've done a lot of the pre -work exactly where you land in a generally correct place. Okay. So this is the rollout. So what I'm thinking is you talk say you're like a PM on a team say you're working on privacy.

1:00:00It's like an IC here IC PM working on strategy. How do you think about including say your manager because 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 working. Okay, we're ready to roll it out. Oftentimes there's like no, no, no, no, wait, wait, wait, there's all this other stuff happening at the company. We don't have resources. Where do you loop them and how do you think about that stakeholder? The more attuned PMs who understand organizational dynamics, probably keep the manager pretty like in sync through the process.

1:00:39I think definitely the manager becomes a person who you interview as part of the leadership interview. You know the manager is looking forward from the effort. And then once you sort of get to the strategic pillars on day two of the strategy sprint, you probably want to just like quickly pre -flight it with the manager and say, Hey, love, this is how it's trending. And you know, this is probably these are things we're probably not going to do and like any sort of issues with that. And then eventually you actually want your manager to sort of support you in some of these big meetings. So you know, you sort of endless their help.

1:01:12So I would say that it's probably like each individual style, but I would keep them pretty aligned through the process. But you don't have to be like too heavy -weight, just be super lightweight. Great, makes a lot of sense to me. There's like a, we're not gonna solve everyone's problems with this one framework. Maybe just quickly touch on resourcing as you think about this. Like a part of a strategy includes like, oh, we also need these resources. I guess just 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 resource in question becomes more relevant from a road mapping standpoint because then you say, okay, what percentage of our engineering do we put on strategic pillar A versus B versus C and you know, and what are the specific things we both so it becomes a road mapping question as opposed to a strategy question.

1:02:08And so by the end of this, the rollout, like the part of the rollout is developing the actual roadmap, we're not gonna get deep into that. That could be part two of our solve every PM's problems, teach them 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 have an end of this to make this even more real. You know, there's a couple of companies you're thinking about sharing the strategies you've worked on. Yeah, yeah. I think there's just sort of a three quick notes to close off this process.

1:02:42And I'll share the two examples. So the reason I think this process works is the first is because there is a ton of alignment built -in, you know, sort of within team alignment and leadership alignment built -in. And it's not seen as, oh, this PM went off and wrote this strategy dark. and I don't agree with most of it. And part of this is actually very, it goes back to human psychology of just something that comes from you feels a lot more familiar and easy to accept. So this doc is actually not from the PM. PM is kind of facilitating it, but it's actually from the strategy working group. And the strategy working group are the leads of the team.

1:03:28And so it's actually, and the leadership inputs have been and baked it. So it's actually very sort of team representative. And so hopefully there isn't sort of too much misalignment when you roll it out. And I have seen that, you know, I have seen that workout. The second is the, there's just better results. Like you get to like better sort of problem articulation, you get a better strategic pillars, because there's just more minds on it than like if it were just sort of a product lead. And the third thing is you have clearly defensible criteria and outputs. And if you want to change it, like I said, 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?

1:04:09And even a change is easy to justify what should you do that. So it creates a lot of benefits, but ultimately, and we'll get to this a little bit more, you know, it has to be tested with execution. And that's the most important thing. Yeah, I think it's important to highlight. No framework, playbook, Fred Method is going to guarantee you have the correct strategy that will win and your company will thrive. It's always just the best effort at plan. Yeah, that's the quote. No, no good plan survives first contact with the customer. Cool. Cool. Let's talk through some examples. Yeah, so so the first example I wanted to talk about is at Zingar, you know, I sort of was at Zingar a very long time ago and this was sort of the heyday of social gaming on Facebook.

1:04:58The thing that I was extremely impressed about Zingar 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 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, sort of the first was viral game loops, right? Like these game loops that just sort of required you to have a social, an active social network to be successful and play.

1:05:40and was very tightly and fictionally integrated into the core of the gameplay. That was the first one. The second one was there was this idea of paying to complete things. So you're not necessarily paying to skip a whole experience. What you're paying is just to complete it. So what happens then is different people depending on how much time they have complete different percentages of a progression task or a sort of a part of the gameplay, and you only had to pay the rest to get through the experience. And it was this interesting sort of, you know, experience where people put a lot of investment into it, and they didn't mind sort of paying for the last like 20 % or 30%, which was very interesting, because it created this market for like different like elasticity of spend different times that people had in their lives, and it was very, very clever.

1:06:36So that was again like very common across all the games and then the third was network cross promotion. So all of Zinger Games had this cross promotional component at the top of the game and they would promote other games and you know it's sort of like the Zinger Network was the most important thing and not sort of an individual game and those were sort of the three big you know in our parlance now strategic pillars right and the folk and there were non -focus areas like it wasn't like the focus wasn't on high -finality graphics. It wasn't on complex game mechanics and this was extremely clear and hard -coded into the company culture and operations.

1:07:16And it was perfectly tuned to the environment at the time. Facebook platform afforded strong support with social graph and channels. And basically the game studios contributed through different games in a very network, a creative way. So for example, I was at Zingers and Diego and we took the company into net new game genres like action strategy, match three puzzle games, but we stayed true to the strategic pillars of the company. And we had to invent new mechanics so that the strategic pillars would work in the new genres that we introduced to the company. And what was fascinating is the company actually had systems to reinforce the strategic pillars.

1:07:57And for example, the data infrastructure was very incredible at the time and really reinforced course, these strategic pillars. There was this function called Central Product Management, which basically propagated best practices, made sure that games were networked accrued. And all these things worked sort of in harmony to enhance those strategic pillars and reinforce it. And it worked really well. The company, if I remember right, got to a billion dollars. It was the fastest to get to a billion dollars in the history of sort of companies at the time. In revenue. in revenue and it worked really well until the environment changed, right?

1:08:38And sort of there was a shift to mobile. And temporarily, you know, basically if you go back to that resonance concept, that deep resonance between the product and the market was temporarily lost, you know, one sort of that shift happened 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 12 weeks, potentially like this lasted a long time for Zingga. And so I think it's important to remember the work you're doing here, even though like, I know when I feel like a long time and the other hand feel like very little time to come up with the things that will most help your business grow.

1:09:13In this case, these three elements for Zingga. And by the way, this, these three pillars, they didn't emerge from this method, but it helped you see the power of having being very clear. Yeah, exactly. And having everything centered around, we all agree, these are the three ways we win. Okay, cool. And then I think the number three again, I just want to highlight the power of just very few bets and investments. So it's always three. I've always suggested three as well. Some people are like three to five. But I think it's, you just find in general three is the right number as much try very, very hard to make it three.

1:09:46I agree. Okay, cool. And then I think there's also this element of differentiation being really important. So these three elements you share for Zinger, just like They're unique and differentiated for Zingga. Network powers of apps driving other apps, paid into complete, like these are things Zingga's figured out. This is how we win versus other products in the market. Totally, totally, yeah. Sweet. Anything else along those lines with Zingga? That was in hindsight reflection, Lenny. I was pretty naive when I was there. And I realized how, and this was, in fact, like what led to my blind spot when I joined headspace from Zinger that you even need a strategy, right?

1:10:30Like that's the story I said at the beginning. The reason is because Zinger had figured out so well that I didn't actually have a need to exercise that muscle at Zinger and we just had to come up with new games that sort of applied that strategy and so it was a net new muscle I had to develop, you know, when I got to headspace. It's like that parable of the fish, so it'd be in the water, were the older fish swam to buy and he's like, how's the water? And they're like, and then he leaves and he's like, what's water? You just don't realize what you're in. You don't realize what you're surrounded by until it's gone.

1:11:05Exactly. Maybe one other thing I just want to highlight while we're on this topic is just a power focus. In the case of Zingga, just this focus on everything we do needs to get these things right, these three things, everything we do need, 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. It's just the power of focus. Yeah. Okay, cool. And now you have another example of your time at meta. Yeah, at meta there's this fascinating example, which I think sort of like illustrates a different point, which is basically, I was standing up the product strategy for a couple of product growth teams in reality labs, Oculus, which was coming up with the Quest 2 at the time.

1:11:58This is a standalone headset and then Portal, which is our 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 we went through this process that I just described. We stood up strategic pillars and the strategic pillars were fairly similar for both portal which is our video conferencing product and Oculus. And portal by the way, I was a big fan, I'm sad that it's no longer around. Yeah, yeah. And that led to features that are known to everybody like the Oculus Referels Program, the portal memories integration where you see one of your Facebook memories on the portal sort of sponsored ad in your Facebook feed.

1:12:46And also we had this sort of section on the Facebook app, which is also from Facebook at the time and then eventually also from Meta, which is these other products from the Facebook ecosystem. And all those came out of that effort. And you know, about 18 months into it, they actually had like very different outcomes. So on one hand, the the Oculus sort of effort was incredibly successful and we graduated it into the VR division at Meta. And until today it continues to sort of be an incredibly successful effort. The portal sort of effort actually didn't move the needle as much as we wanted to and we sunset it and we basically redeployed that team to other sort of initiatives.

1:13:35And 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. And I think that that illustrates the most important point about strategy, which is intrinsically strategy has no business value. It's basically sort of a document with a few words. And I think it starts accumulating value as you generate business impact and results. And that happens when you actually test strategy with execution. And so ultimately, any strategy is only as good as the results it can produce.

1:14:21And so one has to have the intellectual honesty and the humility and the courage to say when it's working and when it's not. And sometimes what happens is parts of the strategy might work, parts might not, and you have to pivot away from some and double down on some. But I do think there's that sort of evaluation that's really critical and testing sort of strategy with execution. Such a great point. Just the strategy sitting there in a doc is worthless. Where the work worth comes from is actually having impact and being successful. Make me think about a product manager also. Just a PM is not worth anything until they help you drive impact.

1:15:01I think an important kind of trickle down from that point is that you don't want to spend too long just thinking about strategy. You want to spend as little time as possible to get to a strong hypothesis, basically, to start learning if this is the right path. And so I love that your approach is like this middle ground between I mean, give it real time, but don't, you know, spend three, four, five months working on as one document that's just, maybe one day you'll use. Exactly. And there is room for like a six month process, which we really get to in a moment, but for small less, I wouldn't recommend more than like two or three months here.

1:15:39And again, small less strategy is for like a couple years out, not like it's like a timeframe. Okay, cool. Okay, anything else along those lines? of the examples of meta or Zinga. Those are pretty good like lessons, I would say. Okay, sweet. So let's talk about big -ass strategy. When should you approach strategy this way? And what are just like the steps of it? So yeah, I think so everything we've spoken about so far is what is what I would call small s. And it's very problem focused, right? It's basically what I call present forward. It's like you have something, you have a product out there, it has a bunch of problems, how do we make it better for what are the areas we tackle for maximum impact, typically led by product managers.

1:16:28And this is an interesting quote by Elon Musk, which is, life has to be about more than just solving problems. And he says it in the context of the aspiration to become a multi -planetary species, but I think this is true of every sort of company like Big or Small and they needs to be an aspirational and cool component to strategy. And I call this sort of Biggest Strategy and I'll sort of run through this at a higher level because I think this is a little bit more fluid in how you build the Biggest Strategy. and it typically takes, you know, longer, potentially up to about six months. The approach is a bit different from smallest and you start with the company, you know, mission and vision 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 back to office, you again do these sort of like leadership interviews, but with a different goal of generating like long term futures.

1:17:41And you know, some of the questions you can ask during these interviews are, what does the 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 10 years? Why is the world better in like 10 years? And what is the most exciting version of that view? and basically take all of that input and cluster it into, I would say like, three cohesive holes. And what I mean by that is three at least fairly distinct descriptions of the future. So to give you a sort of almost like a very simple example, imagine you're doing big S for the future of travel, you could have a future that is talking all about fully autonomous travel, you know, where sort of your is very little sort of human involvement in going from A to B.

1:18:29You could talk about another future where it's this extreme speed where you can get from A to B like really fast like across the world that that is really fast. You could talk about a third where there is no travel. It's virtual travel and you sort of you still have the feeling of travel and you accomplish the same goals, but those are different futures. They have like different properties like different sort of elements to them. And once you generate those distinct futures, you actually generate prototypes with learning goals. And think of these prototypes as concept cars. And the automobile industry uses this notion of concept cars.

1:19:04Concept cars, the interesting thing about concept cars is they're never commercialized. They're sort of often produced for inspiration and to potentially take some part of them, like maybe a technology or a feature, and that is brought into mainstream production. So think of these prototypes as these concept cars that really sort of drive inspiration and like potentially give you some small nuggets that you can run with. And then you start doing research with them with 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.

1:19:48And then what you do is you push stuff that is winning into the product, live product testing. So this is actually something that you actually want to start like testing your way into and sort of understanding if it works from a scalable standpoint. And this whole thing is typically led not by the sort of the PMT, but by design and UXR. And it intentionally, it's a little bit more open -ended and Greenfield, and it actually is a very different mind space that people have when they approach Big S. So the roadmap is really built through a combination of smallest and Big S work. And for example, at VRChat, we are doing both smallest and Big S work, Lenny.

1:20:35And they are run as parallel work streams. The product management team is leading the charge of the smallest work and the design team is leading the charge of the biggest work and it's really exciting stuff what's coming out of both worth Street is really exciting and really different and and so we are building kind of the bridge from both sides and both Workstreams ultimately flow into one roadmap. It's almost like you know two tributeries that ultimately merge into one river. That's how I would think about it. There's so many things here that are so interesting. One is we've had this conversation on the podcast a couple of times.

1:21:07It's a point that people think and see the world differently. Some people are very open -minded and creative and think big, blue sky people. Some people, me, just like, what are we doing next? How do we move this metric? Let's talk about concrete things that we can do for this big -ass approach. I think what I'm hearing is make sure the people leading it are very open -minded, created blue sky type people. If you're the person that's like, how will this move our metric? Maybe you shouldn't be leading it and give someone else the reins. Cool. And then with these timelines of doing both at once, it's like it's probably hard to line them fully.

1:21:46So it's kind of what I'm hearing is it's like these are kind of ongoing sometimes. Correct. And they'll both inform what you're doing. You don't need to like have this perfect timeline I agree with this stuff. Sweet. And the big thinking I love, because sometimes you may experience this, designers often are like, oh, we just work on all this boring incremental optimization stuff. I want to think bigger, which is great. And this is a really good lever to allow for that in a contained environment. Cool. Let's just go crazy. Let's think about what this could be in the future. Still, let's make sure we're moving some metrics short -term.

1:22:21But let's give this opportunity to think big. And oftentimes the biggest idea is coming out of that. So I love it's giving space for both types of thinking, thinking, bigger, and taking long -term. Anything else about these two methods that might be interesting to share? There was a one to talk about AI a little bit, just like how that impacts things and a couple of these things. Yeah, yeah. I'll end on one short sort of note on how this all feels when you do it. And then we can segue into AI. Great, great. So I think that this, whether it's big as or small as, these are like incredibly satisfying sort of processes to go through in the end.

1:23:01So once you get to the sort of the end, like 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 out like he really ever reached the end. And I just want to sort of normalize that. Like that's actually like normal and I want people to expect that as they go through it. And I think that's what makes it even more rewarding when you get to that sort of point where you start to see like things connecting. The second thing is I would say that the person who is leading the charge on these efforts has to be really good at connecting diverse viewpoints and keeping the model moving forward and it's not easy.

1:23:47It's very hard because sometimes you have people who take you in different directions and you have to sort of keep it all hanging together. And so in terms of like picking people who have that skill, who are good integrators, who are good sort of connect the dots, I think is critical for these to be successful. And in some ways like low ego because you know it's not like they do get to sort of like introduce their own ideas but like And truly it's about bringing the team together. And so that's the skill that you should look for for these leads. And then the third piece is I would say that I would just approach these with a little bit of a lighter touch and more playful sort of approach because it's an intensive process.

1:24:31It's a long process and people can get tired, they can find it grindy. So just having a little bit of playfulness along the way, it goes a long way and making it feel like more, more colorable for the people going through it. So those are 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, barely is there clear answer from the beginning.

1:25:06So I think that's really important context. I wanted to actually come back to your point. You made about how Elon made this point about life. life shouldn't just be about solving problems. I think part of that quote is just like we should work on things that are awesome, exciting and inspiring that aren't just immediately paying solvers. And he's very good at that, like just inspiring people to what could be. And we should be thinking much bigger than we are. I was actually at an interview with Zach where he said the same thing. He's probably inspired me a lot. And he's like, I've just gotten to a point in my career where I just work, I want to work on awesome stuff.

1:25:40stuff that is 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, people get really excited about holy moly. I did not imagine this is what Headspace could become a VR check could become a medic could become. It's just like really powerful getting people really inspired Yeah And I love this process. They shared about how to do that and I didn't actually summarize it So I have it right here in front of me. I'll just share the five steps of the biggest process. So it's preparation, mission, you figure out mission, vision, trends, interview people about what they think things are going.

1:26:14Then 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 to here's like of actual plan we want to execute and then you turn it into roadmap. Yeah, yeah. And the first testing of the prototypes is with the UXR. So it's more sort of concept testing or prototype testing with like a handful of users and then you use that as synthesizing to like a live product.

1:26:50Yeah. Great. Basically, it's like big ideas and then de -risking validating them along the way in various ways to like, okay, maybe this could actually work with Strap. Sweet. Okay. So just two more things. One is I want to talk about AI briefly about how that impacts this work and then two just maybe a recap of the framework for people that are listening. You're like, oh my God, I so much I wrote all these notes. Let's give them a summary so they can remember to use it. Okay, cool. So talk about AI briefly. How is AI tooling helped you evolve this process? How can people use AI to make this easier?

1:27:23So the first disclaimer is, you know, I'm not sort of an AI futurist, but I read all the emerging stuff that's coming out, most of the emerging stuff that's coming out and use some of the tools and it's fascinating, you know, what's happening and I think it will definitely have an impact on sort of strategy formulation. So what I'll share is what resonates for me in the context of strategy formulation with AI. So right away, I think the basic idea is everybody should be using assistance in the strategy formulation process with the basic tools that we have. And there are two ways to get AI to assist you in the strategy formulation process.

1:28:11The first is to support the preparation phase in terms of research, right? And this could be like competitive analysis. And for example, you could do trend analysis from a vast library of competitors release notes. And you can sort of say like, okay, like what are the sort of the teams of investment of competitors release thoughts? Or you could do sort of a reviews analysis of a competitor product and sort of understand like what's resonating for users, what's not. And you could also do a sort of ask a tool like chat GPT to do a head -to -head comparison between a few players on a certain dimension and really give you a heat path of how they all stack up.

1:28:56And you could also ask an open -ended question, like, hey, why is this new product so successful? Why is it getting so many users? And there's some good hypothesis that you usually get. So really, a ton of leverage in the preparation phase from a competitive analysis standpoint. The second one is in this idea called generating mock strategies. And I know Claire will at your summit, spoke about this. And I think this is absolutely right. And should be a critical input into the strategy process, which is asking 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.

1:29:36And so what I found is that these mock strategies, like let's say, you know, I support VRChat now and I ask it like, hey, what should we are chat do? How should we grow? And it generates a mock strategy. What I found is that it's surprisingly, more surprisingly good. Like it's incredibly sort of well informed 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 there's an investment recommendation in a vast number of areas. So basically, if you remember, like the core of strategies really like to be very targeted and to be very focused.

1:30:19So these mock strategies become an interesting input. And the burden is still on the team to like downselect into the most important areas for investment. So forcing that choice still I think is sort of a human element and needs that sort of layer of additional judgment which is very context specific to the company. And so this is sort of right away I think people should be doing this. I think more medium term and probably not to distant future. And likely sooner than we all think, this probably going to be, 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, automate it.

1:31:04So, 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 Armand Ruiz from IBM has some good definitional frameworks on some of the stuff he shares with often on LinkedIn. But let's take a simple example. I can easily imagine something like this for a topic like onboarding. So every company and product team obsesses about their onboarding experience. And today there are advanced experimentation frameworks. So imagine you're expecting a large surgeon traffic.

1:31:46There's these experimental frameworks, like multi -armed bandits that can really help you get to the optimal variation very quickly in real time. And there are variations of that contextual multi -armed bandits, there's combinatorial bandits. But the interesting thing is, they still rely on human design of the variations. right? Like the different variations that you test, even though the experimentation framework is very sophisticated, the variations are still human -generated. Now imagine if, you know, those variations could actually be generated by, through generate a AI, and could be plugged into the advanced sort of experimentation frameworks, the possibilities become infinite.

1:32:32And 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, etc. That is such a cool idea. And just what I 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, it ships an experiment to run it and just constantly optimizing your onboarding. Holy shit. That's an awesome idea. I think everyone will have this.

1:33:06And 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 doing for. Now we got that so good. Okay, great, great idea. Yeah, yeah. And so then the question becomes, hey, what is our job? Like our job becomes architecting, bigger and bigger pieces of the product to take advantage of these agents, right? And there will be a sequential increase in the complexity of workloads that can automate it over time. you know, onboarding is probably like relatively on the easier side in terms of complexity of workload. And you know, you get into like deeper sort of experiences.

1:33:42Eventually AI will get there. So funnily enough, and that happens like some of the manual processes I described about will seem archaic. But I think the fundamentals will still have a long shelf life. And you know, as you think about these automated frameworks as well. Man, this could be its own podcast. And this whole post about how AI, how PMs are the best position role in tech to thrive in a world -ape AI, which I'll link to that makes people, I find it feel better when they hear you talk about how much might get done through agents in AI. The other quick thought I had and I want to get to the wrap up is, I have this ongoing debate with a friend about strategy in AI.

1:34:21My 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 is just, here's data. Here's what I found as a path to a winning. But, you know, my friends all started giving that's like the one thing that will, well, AI will be least good at because that's where we need people and, uh, context and discussion, all these things. I don't know. That's like, it's like one or the other. Either AI will be incredibly good at helping you figure out your strategy or, the worst.

1:34:59And I'm curious, I'm curious. Well, I guess do you have any quick thoughts on that? Any, where do you decide? I think there is a crossover point where the sort of the human judgment will be inferior to sort of something that's able to process multiple signals simultaneously. There's an element of sort of lateral thinking as well here. And I'll sort of share a simple example or for those who drive Tesla cars with fully self -driving capabilities. When you make a turn, you sort of humans have this fairly narrow field of vision. So you have to look both ways and you have to make a decision combining both the signals.

1:35:41Whereas the car has six cameras, which is simultaneously processing. And it can make a decision in non -sequence, but in parallel and it moves with confidence at turnings because of that. And so there is this crossover point where some of these the ability to hold multiple signals in the head, it's going to be more, it's going to be stronger. That makes total sense. What it makes me think about, there's going to 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, features wild as I've said before. Okay, let's do a quick wrap up of the process for folks that are taking notes and they're like, cool, here's the overview.

1:36:27So let's just do that and then let's go to the, get to the exciting lightning round. So I think sort of the quick recap of everything we've covered is that product strategy definitely sits between mission vision at the top and plan at the bottom. So it sits between those two, even 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 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.

1:37:07And why? That's really it in terms of what product strategy is. There is a smallest flavor of it, which focuses on solving problems. It's what I call present forward. It typically operates in a two -year horizon. We use a five -stage process to get there and it takes about eight to 12 weeks. There is a biggest process that focuses on an aspirational future is future backward. Typically has three, five, ten -year horizon, also a five -stage process. and can be ongoing up to a six months sort of period to give it sort of enough space to generate something exciting. And the roadmap for the company or the team is built from a combination of small S and biggest work, which is like building a bridge from both sides of a river.

1:37:57And ultimately any strategy is only as good as the results it can produce. So test and iterate through execution and double down on what's working and pivot to be from what's not. Incredible. I'm glad we did that. Anything else that you want to share or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round? Just all the best with strategy work and ultimately sort of individual and business success. Amazing. When I asked you at the beginning before we started recording what your goal was for this conversation, your answer was just to create a ripple of success across companies and teams.

1:38:34And I feel like we've done that. Thank you. Okay, with that we reached our very exciting lightening round. 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, Lenny, and some of my sort of classic favourites are your Walt Disney's biography. And there's several out there, but I think the one that I like the most as the triumph of the American imagination. And what's interesting is it talks about how Walt Disney actually loved the theme parks more than the movies. And the reason for that was he could actually like tinker with the theme parks like he could make changes to like where the rides were, he could change rides in and out.

1:39:22And then he could observe like real sort of changes to reactions of people flowing into the field parks, which he couldn't do with the movies, because once it was produced, it was done like it was out of his control. And it was interesting, he was basically every testing, long before the term was coined. And it's just a fascinating look into how his brain worked, like way ahead of its time. The other classic is Ed Catmoles' Creativity Inc. And talks about all the negative forces that eat away at creativity in an organization. how do you sort of as a leader have to keep them at bay and make sure the team can innovate.

1:40:01And then there's this probably less popular book but really good one from Tom Kelly of IDO which is the 10 faces of innovation. It talks about different archetypes that you need on the team that are essential for creating something special. And you actually need like, I think there's the devil's advocate, you need the researcher, you need the ethnographer, you need sort of the stage setter. Like there's all these interesting personalities that you need to actually like make something successful. So I would say like those are some of the ones that I usually record. That's a really cool. That their book is really interesting.

1:40:39I haven't heard of that. In Creativity Inc. something I want to highlight real quick is, to your point though, a lot of it is how to avoid killing good ideas. And my favorite metaphor from that book is the ugly baby metaphor where every new idea is an ugly baby that people just want to learn. 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 nice. Yeah, yeah, it feels a bit, yeah. It feels aggressive. Yeah, yeah.

1:41:11But it's memorable because I've never forgotten that. Okay, next question. Is there a favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed? Yeah, yeah. We've watched a lot of animated films with the kids, It's, but a couple of good, good movies this year. We really liked, if you know, imaginary friend, it's about sort of growing up and like forgetting sort of these memories of your younger sort of days. It was a really nice movie. And then of course, we enjoyed Dune 2 as well. It was a fun watch. And, but most of our time is dominated by the kids sort of animated films, you know, I call it War Art of the Super Mario.

1:41:52There's a new Dune TV show. I don't know if you've been watching it. It just started recently on HBO. It's not the best thing in the world, but it gets to you like a little Dune fix. Interesting. In between movies. I think there's a third movie coming up. I see. Third question. Do you have a favorite product you recently discovered that you really love? Yeah, I've been playing this cute little game for the last few days. It's called Capybara Go. It's a tap -based strategy RPG game. It's got really humorous writing and this cute capybara that goes off on an adventure. It's very well -paced and it's a very well -produced game.

1:42:33It's one game I've been playing recently. I've also been poking around Blue Sky. Blue Sky is interesting. I haven't gotten into a habit yet, but it's a super interesting concept of. empowering the community with like these community generated feeds. It's like very different experience, but it's also interesting. There's a trade off with like the simplicity of the product and you know, what would you get the additional complexity? It'll be interesting to see how it plays out how it scales. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to find useful in work or in life? So there was this 1995 interview of Steve Jobs, where he talks about this idea of there's a tremendous amount of craftsmanship between a great idea and a great product and it sort of stuck with me over the years and you know sort of the simple way to think about that is it takes a lot of effort to make something special and conversely you know if it's easy it's probably not that special or not that great and it's something that But I sort of think about when we build product, is there sufficient pain here where it's sort of a proxy for like, are we creating something great?

1:43:51Is interesting. Wow. It 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 from just an ugly baby idea to an awesome winning product. Oftentimes, it needs to be the founder. And that's why I think it's kind of emerged as a trend is it's important to have that drive to just continue to refine it. And not just like, I had the idea, go build it now. Okay, final question. You have an amazing background behind you at a people are in YouTube.

1:44:31It'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. Curious if there's one thing that stands out like here's this thing. Oh well it's the it's the picture of my kids right in the center which is without doubt the most important and memorable thing there. It's also caught at a unique time when they were incredibly like, they were sort of super like embracing each other and it's like it's a phase where they've grown out of it.

1:45:09Now there's a lot more, you know, I think like rivalry and then sibling tussles, but that moment is my favorite. I was out of bunch of, you know, like fun stuff, like a big sort of Snoopy fan and so it is also a big Beatles fans, so that picture is actually an interesting blend between Snoopy walking crossing the road and then the Beatles crossing the other way. And then a bunch of books that are more memorable over the years. You'll see creativity in there, you'll see the 10 faces of innovation, all of that. Amazing. Thank you for sharing. Your kid's photo is blocked when you're in the center, so it's like a little Easter egg.

1:45:51Thank you for sharing that, John Dread. This was incredible. was everything as hoping it'd be, I think we're going to create that ripple that you were hoping for. Two final questions, we're going to focus finding a line if they want to reach out and how can listeners be useful to you? A reasonable choice would be LinkedIn to reach me. And I'd really like, like you and I discussed earlier, I'd be really happy if this creates that kind of ripple effect of successes both for individuals and for products. And you know, I want everybody to think of this, the stuff I shared as a bit of an open source model.

1:46:26So test some of the concepts, modify it, remix it, and you know, share what work or did not. And ultimately, you know, that's what makes it all interesting is sort of the community owns it ultimately and it's not sort of doesn't belong to an individual. That's what would make me like super happy. Amazing. Shandra, 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. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.

1:47:05Also, please consider giving us a rating or a leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny'sPodcast .com. See you in the next episode.