Chandra Janakiraman: A five-step path to product strategy

1. 0:00 – 4:47

   Chandra’s background

   1. CJChandra Janakiraman0:00

      (instrumental music plays) 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.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky0:16

      Say someone's sitting down, "Okay, I'm going to start developing a strategy for our product." Where do you begin? What does this process look like?

   3. CJChandra Janakiraman0:22

      In terms of what product strategy is, there is the smallest flavor of it, which focuses on solving problems, I call present forward, and it typically operates at a two-year horizon. We use a five-stage process to get there, and it takes about 8 to 12 weeks. The reason I think this process works is there is a ton of alignment built in. It goes back to human psychology of just something that comes from you feels a lot more familiar and easy to accept.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky0:49

      Let's talk about big S Strategy. When should you approach strategy this way?

   5. CJChandra Janakiraman0:53

      There's this interesting quote by Elon Musk, which is...

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky0:56

      Life's got to be about more than just solving problems.

   7. CJChandra Janakiraman0:58

      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 10 years? Why is the world better in 10 years, and what is the most exciting version of that view?

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky1:12

      (intro music plays) Today my guest is Chandra Janakiraman. 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 Zynga, 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 going to now point everyone who wants to get better at strategy to this episode and Chandra's method. Strategy is at the heart of every great product and team and business, and it's also the source of so much pain if you do it badly. This episode is meant to help you avoid that. A big thank you to Karthik 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 Janakiraman.

   9. CJChandra Janakiraman2:37

      (instrumental music plays) This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is a next generation A/B testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp, and DraftKings rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of new features, and Eppo helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most was our experimentation platform where I could set up experiments easily, troubleshoot issues, and analyze performance all on my own. Eppo does all that and more with advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks off experiment time, an accessible UI for diving deeper into performance, and out-of-the-box reporting that helps you avoid annoying prolonged analytic cycles. Eppo also makes it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team, sparking new ideas for the A/B testing flywheel. Eppo powers experimentation across every use case, including product, growth, machine learning, monetization, and email marketing. Check out Eppo at geteppo.com/lenny and 10X your experiment velocity. That's geteppo.com/lenny. (instrumental music plays) This episode is brought to you by Airtable Product Central, the unified system that brings your entire product org together in one place. No more scattered tools, no more misaligned teams. If you're like most product leaders, you're tired of constant context switching between tools. That's why Airtable built Product Central after decades of working with world-class product companies. Think of it as mission control for your entire product organization. Unlike rigid point solutions, Product Central powers everything from resourcing, to voice of customer, to road mapping, to launch execution. And because it's built on Airtable's no-code platform, you can customize every workflow to match exactly how your team works. No limitations, no compromises. Ready to see it in action? Head to airtable.com/lenny to book a demo. That's airtable.com/lenny.

2. 4:47 – 12:40

   The importance of strategy

   1. CJChandra Janakiraman4:49

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky4:51

      Chandra, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

   3. CJChandra Janakiraman4:55

      Pleasure to be here, Lenny.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky4:56

      I want to 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. (laughs) 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.

   5. CJChandra Janakiraman5:37

      Thank you. Thank you, Lenny.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky5:39

      First of all, I wanted to ask just, 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?

   7. CJChandra Janakiraman5:53

      Yeah, yeah. It's a, it's a very interesting story. You know, it, uh, goes back all the way 10 years ago, and, uh, but I remember it vividly like it happened yesterday. And, uh...

   8. 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, and, uh, on, on a, sort of a, a particular Monday, the, the founder CEO pulled me aside and, uh, in his usual disarming style, he, he sort of made a short but profound statement. He said that, "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, um, 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, um, 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 looked like and, and sort of, you know, I came to the conclusion, "Hey, we needed a strategy for, for Headspace." So with sort of extensive work with, with, uh, her, with the board person, we built the first sort of written 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, which 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 way observe the process of like, "Okay, how did we put this thing together? And know what actually went into it." So what really started as a, you know, almost a personal sort of crisis moment of, you know, finding, finding this, this sort of need to create a strategy for, for a product at 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.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky10:29

      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 see, 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, who, who needs to hear this briefly?

   10. CJChandra Janakiraman11:11

       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. There are plenty of excellent materials on strategy, you know, from ancient sort of texts like The Art of War from Sun Tzu, you know, all of Michael Porter's work. Um, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt who's been on your podcast. Playing to Win, you know, Lafley 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-tested nature of it, you know, I personally used this playbook about five to six times, tweaking and optimizing it, uh, each time based on sort of, uh, what I thought worked, what 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.

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky12:36

       Okay. Uh, I'm getting more and more excited. Uh, let's get into it. Let's get into this playbook.

3. 12:40 – 15:42

   Defining product strategy

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky12:41

      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?

   2. CJChandra Janakiraman12:49

      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, what does sort of like it look like when you achieve sort of your purpose of existence. So it sits between the two, and it forces choice to deploy scarce resources to generate maximum impact. And I 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- 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 this exponential increase in, in the vibration of the product. So this concept of resonance is interesting. So the way to think about it in the context of strategy is, it is selecting that frequency to achieve resonance between the product and the market. And, and so 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. It sits between mission, vision and the plan. It forces choice to deploy scarce resources to generate maximum impact, so using resonance as a sort of an example, and it ideally includes three components. The first is a handful of areas to focus on, and I call these strategic pillars. And then a whole bunch of areas that are explicitly not the focus, and the third component is why. So why are the focus areas A, B, and C? 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.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky15:32

      I love it. And I love the, the things we aren't doing as a core part of this. That comes up a lot on this podcast, being clear of things we're not gonna do. Uh, we know these could be things we could do, but we're deciding we're not doing these things.

4. 15:42 – 18:51

   Developing a winning strategy: an overview

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky15:42

      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.

   2. CJChandra Janakiraman15:59

      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, uh, takes about 8 to 12 weeks long. It's something that I think people often underestimate how long it takes and eventually end up taking a lot more time but, you know, when they start off they think, "Oh, I could probably stand this up in a couple of weeks," but usually through iteration it actually ta- ends up taking 8 to 12 weeks anyway. So, so it's good to start with sort of setting clear expectations that it takes about 8 to 12 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 rollout. And those are the five phases 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 is probably about, uh, four weeks. The strategy sprint is, uh, up to about one week. The design sprint is a- another one week. Document writing maybe one to two weeks, and the rollout is maybe two to three weeks. So that's how you get to that range of 8 to 12 weeks.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky17:39

      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.

   4. CJChandra Janakiraman17:49

      That's right.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky17:49

      Which to me sounds like it's not like a full-time team thing. It's like starting to gather data, user research and-

   6. CJChandra Janakiraman17:55

      Totally.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky17:56

      As you talk through this, I'm curious just like how much of the team is involved at each of these steps. But I think that's an important point. If you want a really good winning strategy, you need to give a time. You can't just say, "In a month or a week we need to develop a strategy. Go figure it out. Write a... this document."Great. Cool. So let's talk about step one, preparation.

   8. CJChandra Janakiraman18:13

      That's correct, Lenny. And I think you, if I forget, remind me, that sometimes there is pressure, right? There's this business pressure like, you know, the, the CEO might, you know, want, still want a strategy in two weeks. You know, how do you respond to that? And, and I think, uh, 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 speed, yeah, to make something really great.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky18:40

      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.

   10. CJChandra Janakiraman18:48

       That's correct.

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky18:49

       Yeah. Awesome, okay. Let's get into

5. 18:51 – 30:46

   The preparation phase

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky18:51

      it.

   2. CJChandra Janakiraman18:51

      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, fr- from people is to actually form a strategy working group. This is, this is an important concept. So, 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, u- 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, a, the strategy doc. And so, in the preparation phase, there's usually a kick-off 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 every- everybody a feel for what's gonna happen in the next like eight to 12 weeks and, and basically then creates a list of very discrete action items and deliverables for each of the, sort of the, the stakeholders in the working group. So specifically, there's an action item around sort of aggregating all the behavioral insights that the team might have around the product and usually this is a combination of previous analysis that the team has run on the data side and, uh, potentially, you know, also sort of, um, r- feature launches and how they're done so all kind of analytical, uh, analysis. 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 deck on, on all the sort of the insights on 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 interviews. So I, I sort of, like, have this, um, you know, fun, like, story of, of the fruit, uh, with, like, leadership strategy reviews whi- which I wanna share. So imagine, like, this is sort of like how sometimes strategy reviews go which is you, you bring a fruit to the, um, 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 mangos." And, uh, and you're like, oh, you're, you're sort of sad. You, you take it back, you bring an apple and you show, show, "Hey, what do you think of an apple?" And then the leader says, "I actually stopped eating apples last year." And, and so you're disappointed again. You go back, you 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 fru- fruit story kind of like tells you, like, hey, imagine if you just asked the reviewer, like, "Do you even like fruits?" (laughs) 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 s- 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?

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky23:51

      And these are, these are centered around the product that you're working on.

   4. CJChandra Janakiraman23:55

      Exactly.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky23:55

      Like if, for Headspace it'd be like what do you think success looks like for Headspace and/or the specific feature of Headspace, this-

   6. CJChandra Janakiraman24:02

      Exactly.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky24:03

      Okay, cool.

   8. CJChandra Janakiraman24:04

      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 found through this process is a lot of leaders have these pet ideas. They just, they, they just feel shy to share it because they don't want their teams to think of them as micromanaging. They don't want their team... 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, eh, in the sense that, "Hey, is it a waste of their time?" What I 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 try to understand, like, who are the comparables or the competitors in this space, and you sort of build a little bit of a head-to-head in 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 your 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 then in bigger companies, there's also an- another important input which is adjacent roadmaps, like, are the teams adjacent to you and what are they investing in? And, you know, because oftentimes, that can have a rub-off effect on, 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 and 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, what the strategy should be, and it humanizes the whole process. So, so that, I think, is, is the purpose, but, uh, but you sort of still give them the homework of, like, writing down what they learned 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 readout. 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 interviews. 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 sprint, wh- which is the next phase. I wanna pause and see if you have any questions.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky28:06

      Yeah. Uh, I have a million questions, but I'm gonna keep myself contained, but just to 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. Y- 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 another approach for a larger scale of a product, like, basically for a company, right? What's the best way to think about, like, small S strategy, which is what we're going through?

   10. CJChandra Janakiraman28:37

       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, but then 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, a- and, you know, and the sort of the aspirational component, uh, which, which we'll get to. Yeah.

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky29:02

       Okay. So this is a process you can use for an entire company strategy of a-

   12. CJChandra Janakiraman29:05

       Totally.

   13. LRLenny Rachitsky29:05

       ... not a large company, not a massively... Yeah, and then also just, like, a product within a company.

   14. CJChandra Janakiraman29:10

       Yeah.

   15. LRLenny Rachitsky29:11

       Okay. Perfect. Okay. So, hey, we're kicking off strategy for this thing, let's say VR Chat 2.0. You have this kickoff meeting with your working group. You assign action items, and there's five... There's six things you ask everyone to do. Gather all the behavioral insights, all the user research insights that you've had. Uh, leadership interviews. Interview people and ask what they want and see what they're hoping for, what success looks like. Competitive analysis, adjacent roadmaps across other teams, and user observations, just like watch users, see what's happening, and they out- and you assign tasks, each of these tasks to different people in this working group. You set a deadline where you 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?

   16. CJChandra Janakiraman30:02

       Yeah. So the deck is a- an output of the first phase, and then it flows into the second phase-

   17. LRLenny Rachitsky30:07

       Mm-hmm.

   18. CJChandra Janakiraman30:07

       ... which is a strategy sprint. So you don't share the deck with anybody yet.

   19. LRLenny Rachitsky30:10

       Got it. Just the working group.

   20. CJChandra Janakiraman30:10

       But in the strategy sprint, it's, like, a key thing. Yeah.

   21. LRLenny Rachitsky30:13

       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.

   22. CJChandra Janakiraman30:27

       That's correct.

   23. LRLenny Rachitsky30:28

       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

6. 30:46 – 45:51

   The strategy sprint process

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky30:46

      last-minute thing. Okay, amazing. Okay, let's talk about step two, which is, uh, the strategy sprint.

   2. CJChandra Janakiraman30:52

      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. So y- so the core of strategy is really sort of picking those areas and the areas you're not going to invest in. And, and so that happens in the strategy sprint. 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, 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, uh, you know, process where... You know, what I encourage people to do is, is write down things that you're... As you're listening, write on things that you find are problems for our users, things that are coming in the way of our growth, and, uh, things that are sort of, like, suboptimal for, you know, the business. And, um, and so- so people take a lot of notes during that time, and, and the people who are presenting are 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 can 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 will 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 12 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- their sort of observations on what's holding us back, and you- you just capture all of that in a- in a Google Sheets, for example. And- and over- over sort of, like, even an hour, you start to see these patterns emerging of like, okay, there's these sort of clusters of problems that are sort of really holding us back. And, and so the next step is you s- sort of do a joint clustering of sort of related problems, and- and you sort of create these, uh, potentially, like... Typically, in my experience, I've seen about 10 to 15 clusters form of- 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, 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. 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 our 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, em- 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- 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 10 to 15, you know, opportunity areas into ideally three, you know, maybe five, but I would r- re- 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 big 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 form 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 all 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 you're reasoning why it should be higher versus lower, and like, there's a ton of, like, alignment and, like, collision that's happening when you're doing that, which is, like, very, very healthy for the eventual sort of outcome. So once you do that, basically you can do a simple sort of addition of the scores and, and a sort, and what you have is basically the top three, right? And, and you have, like, the remaining 7 or, or 12 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?

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky38:51

      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 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 steps. 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 10 to 15 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 op- three big, three bets basically you potentially should take. And okay, and then I think that's where you stopped, is that right?

   4. CJChandra Janakiraman40:03

      That's totally right, uh-

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky40:04

      Okay, cool.

   6. CJChandra Janakiraman40:05

      ... 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 mes. So, you know, how might we do, you know, let's say it's a relevance thing, how might we find, uh, 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 mes and the how might mes are basically intended to help the next phase of the process, which is the design sprint. So, so you generate these, uh, areas, these strategic pillars. You generate the how might mes. How might mes, uh, are typically pretty straightforward. Once you have the strategic pillars, it takes probably an hour to generate some how might mes for each of them, maybe two or three for each strategic pillar. And, and then you're, you're done with that stage.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky41:00

      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, his name was 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, that or- is a really powerful phrasing. Just wanted to highlight that.

   8. CJChandra Janakiraman41:46

      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 sprint.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky41:56

      Okay, so you have these how might mes, so you have three pillars, maybe three or four or five how might mes to solve these, uh, opportunities/problems.

   10. CJChandra Janakiraman42:04

       Mm-hmm.

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky42:04

       And then what happens after that?

   12. CJChandra Janakiraman42:06

       Exactly. And then the third day is, like, it's good to start fresh, like, you know, so the team's accomplished a lot, like it, this was like-

   13. LRLenny Rachitsky42:13

       So this was all the first two days?

   14. CJChandra Janakiraman42:14

       This is the first two days, yeah.

   15. LRLenny Rachitsky42:15

       Wow. Okay. (laughs) So much done in two days.

   16. CJChandra Janakiraman42:18

       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, y- you basically imagine in two years... 'Cause that's the typical time horizon of a, of a smaller strategy is like 18 months to 24 months. So, imagine in two years, this is what, what I tell the team, "Imagine in 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 layperson'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's comes from the working group. It's not like one person writing it.

   17. LRLenny Rachitsky44:09

       What's an example of an aspiration that you've come up with on a project you worked on? A winning aspiration.

   18. CJChandra Janakiraman44:14

       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, hey, could we move, like, consumer trust? And, you know, a- 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. And so that's, like, how you sort of, you know, create sort of the bigger impact.

   19. LRLenny Rachitsky44:47

       That's a great example and, uh, 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 was thinking as you're talking, put them 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.

   20. CJChandra Janakiraman45:20

       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 there's these common words and then you converge those words as the 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

   21. LRLenny Rachitsky45:45

       A- awesome, and I feel like AI could help with that now just, like-

   22. CJChandra Janakiraman45:48

       Exactly.

   23. LRLenny Rachitsky45:48

       ... throwing all your headline ideas and it comes up with some suggestions.

7. 45:51 – 51:19

   The design sprint

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky45:51

      Okay, cool. So, uh, is that the end of the sprint or is there more to the sprint?

   2. CJChandra Janakiraman45:55

      That's it for the sprint

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky45:56

      Okay. And so at the end of the sprint, what do you have? What, what are the outputs?

   4. CJChandra Janakiraman46:00

      Yeah. This is... This is a great, um, progress on strategy because now we have the three strategic pillars, we have the how might wes 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. The team's done a great job. I think, I think, um, now we sort of move on to, you know, the design sprint.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky46:30

      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?

   6. CJChandra Janakiraman46:38

      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 sprint. But eventually there are sort of 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.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky47:01

      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?

   8. CJChandra Janakiraman47:10

      Correct.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky47:10

      But there's kind of an implication that, 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.

   10. CJChandra Janakiraman47:21

       I, I would say, I would say it, it's not a sort of an empirical study obviously-

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky47:26

       Yeah.

   12. CJChandra Janakiraman47:26

       ... 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.

   13. LRLenny Rachitsky47:42

       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, (laughs) which is, "We may be wrong, but we're not confused."

   14. CJChandra Janakiraman47:52

       Yeah.

   15. LRLenny Rachitsky47:52

       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 started 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-

   16. CJChandra Janakiraman48:07

       Totally.

   17. LRLenny Rachitsky48:07

       ... which is (laughs) what sparked your interest in this in the first place. Everyone understanding. I know there's a whole rollout at the end too that'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 were to launch and some solution ideas with how might wes. What comes next?

   18. CJChandra Janakiraman48:26

       Yeah. So, the, the next phase 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 backseat during this process.So the input to the design sprint i- is the... Sort of the three strategic pillars and the, the how might wes associated with it. And the goal of the design sprint is not to sort of come up with, "Oh, these are the features we should build." That's not the purpose of the design sprint. The design sprint is to generate a lot of illustrative concepts 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 onto. "Oh, okay, I get it." Like, this is what you're gonna build at the end of the day with this strategy. And so, so the more generative, the better and then, like, there's, there's 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, um, 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 emphasized. The input needs to be the strategic pillars. The output needs to be, uh, a 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.

   19. LRLenny Rachitsky50:16

       And we're gonna go through a couple 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. We also had 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 ICP and who to focus your product on and how that informs your product.

   20. CJChandra Janakiraman50:40

       Oh, that's right. Interesting.

   21. LRLenny Rachitsky50:40

       So it's another type of sprint you could (laughs) you could use here. Okay. So the out- input is here's the three things we're gonna invest in. Say, discovery, relevance, privacy. Here's... And the output is here's, like, concepts of what this could look like to get people's minds going. Is there any, like... Is it just, like, a bunch of mocks basically in a deck at this point?

   22. CJChandra Janakiraman51:00

       That's correct. Yeah.

   23. LRLenny Rachitsky51:01

       Okay, cool. Okay, amazing. So that's a week. That's another sprint. The PM could maybe take a little bit of a break-

   24. CJChandra Janakiraman51:06

       Exactly.

   25. LRLenny Rachitsky51:07

       ... and designers take the lead.

   26. CJChandra Janakiraman51:08

       Exactly.

   27. LRLenny Rachitsky51:09

       And the engineers are kinda inputs and, you know, thought partners in, in this I imagine.

   28. CJChandra Janakiraman51:13

       They're optional, yeah.

   29. LRLenny Rachitsky51:14

       Optional. But, uh, yeah. Ideally they're involved 'cause you want, you want, you want all the best ideas in there.

   30. CJChandra Janakiraman51:18

       Yep,

8. 51:19 – 57:39

   Document writing

   1. CJChandra Janakiraman51:19

      yep.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky51:19

      Okay, cool. What comes next?

   3. CJChandra Janakiraman51:21

      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, there's a ton of user insights, a ton of behavioral insights, a ton of competitive analysis. There's the three strategic pillars, how might wes, winning aspiration, there's a whole bunch of illustrative concepts. So, you know, oftentimes, like, product leads have this sort of creator's, 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 a sort of like... You still have to weave together a good story. That's why I think, like, it takes a, 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 defensible.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky52:17

      Is there a template or kind of s- sections you like to include in your strategy doc? As someone sits down who's trying to write this out, what do you want to see there as kinda headings?

   5. CJChandra Janakiraman52:26

      I think you could almost take the building blocks as, like, a little bit of a... A 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 you get into the str- 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. You 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 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, it creates that framework for alignment in the... In the subsequent meetings.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky53:45

      I'm excited to chat with Kristina Gilbert, the founder of OneSchema, one of our longtime podcast sponsors. Hi, Kristina.

   7. GRGuest ad sponsor representative53:52

      Yes. Thank you for having me on, Lenny.

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky53:54

      What is the latest with OneSchema? I know you now work with some of my favorite companies like Ramp, Vanta, Skale, and Watershed. I heard that you just launched a new product to help product teams import CSVs from especially tricky systems like ERPs.

   9. GRGuest ad sponsor representative54:09

      Yes. So we just launched OneSchema File Feeds, which allows you to build an integration with any system in 15 minutes as long as you can export a CSV to an SFTP folder. We see our customers all the time getting stuck with hacks and workarounds, and the product teams that we work with don't have to turn down prospects because their systems are too hard to integrate with. We allow our customers to offer thousands of integrations without involving their engineering team at all.

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky54:31

       I can tell you that if my team had to build integrations like this, how nice would it be to be able to take this off my roadmap and instead use something like OneSchema and not just to build it, but also to maintain it forever?

   11. GRGuest ad sponsor representative54:43

       Absolutely, Lenny. We've heard so many horror stories of multi-day outages from even just a handful of bad records. We are laser focused on integration reliability to help teams end all of those distractions that come up with integrations. We have a built-in validation layer that stops any bad data from entering your system, and OneSchema will notify your team immediately of any data that looks incorrect.

   12. LRLenny Rachitsky55:02

       I know that importing incorrect data can cause all kinds of pain for your customers and quickly lose their trust. (peaceful music) Christina, thank you for joining us and if you wanna learn more, head on over to oneschema.co. That's oneschema.co. 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 this stuff and-

   13. CJChandra Janakiraman55:24

       Yeah.

   14. LRLenny Rachitsky55:25

       ... 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 is your winning aspiration? So I love that you're pulling that in. This is like one approach your doc could be. What's your winning aspiration? Where will you play? 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 could 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.

   15. CJChandra Janakiraman56:00

       I'm happy to share the, sort of the flowchart of the process and the, you know, the template as well.

   16. LRLenny Rachitsky56:05

       Awesome. Okay. Uh, okay, so this is how long of a process, this writing of the document?

   17. CJChandra Janakiraman56:10

       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 doc and, uh, you know, that's, that's what we use to roll out.

   18. LRLenny Rachitsky56:21

       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...

   19. CJChandra Janakiraman56:27

       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 cap them, uh, cap their cycles too much at this point 'cause they've, they've sort of given a lot already.

   20. LRLenny Rachitsky56:46

       I see. Okay. And, like how many pages do you see this doc being roughly? What's like-

   21. CJChandra Janakiraman56:51

       Not-

   22. LRLenny Rachitsky56:51

       ... a good heuristic?

   23. CJChandra Janakiraman56:52

       Yeah. It's not, not too long. I would say probably like three, three or four sort of, uh, pages. And then a- an appendix has a lot of additional, like the table I spoke about and a lot of additional maybe illustrative concepts. Maybe you can only use a few illustrative concepts in the main section so that there could be others there. I think usually there's sort of a desire to, um, fro- from le- 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 a strategy doc because a 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

9. 57:39 – 1:01:28

   Rolling out your strategy

   1. CJChandra Janakiraman57:39

      just the strategy.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky57:40

      So at this point, you've basically developed your strategy. The next step I think you call rollout, 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/product.

   3. CJChandra Janakiraman57:58

      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 rollout 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, I would sort of preflight it with them and, uh, and get their alignment and-

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky58:27

      So these are one-on-one meetings with these gatekeepers?

   5. CJChandra Janakiraman58:29

      These are one-on-one meetings.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky58:30

      Okay.

   7. CJChandra Janakiraman58:30

      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 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, eight to 10 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 this stage is to land it. It's not to like seek too much feedback. So it's a delicate balance. At the same time, you don't want to appear like, you know, just sort of, 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 is the three strategic pillars. Like I wouldn't change that. I would sort of defend it using sort of the framework. But if people are like, "There's really good arguments about the criteria that led to, you know, your ranking," then it's okay to reconsider it. I've not seen it happen, um, in my sort of like five to six attempts, but it's possi- theoretically possible.

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky59:46

      Yeah. And like the core of this approach it sounds like is you've done a lot of the pre-work-

   9. CJChandra Janakiraman59:50

      Exactly.

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky59:51

       ... where you'll land in a generally correct place. Okay, so this is the rollout. 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 ICPM working on strategy. How do you think about including, say, your manager 'cause... Through this process, like when do you start to like, "Hey, uh, here's what we're planning, here's what we're thinking," making sure they're onboard 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?

   11. CJChandra Janakiraman1:00:29

       The, sort of the more, you know, 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 preflight it with the manager and say, "Hey, look. This is how it's trending and, you know, this is probably, these are things we're 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 aligned through the process. But you don't have to be like too heavyweight, just be super lightweight. Yeah.

   12. LRLenny Rachitsky1:01:24

       Great. Makes a lot of sense to me. Uh, there's like a... We're not gonna solve everyone's problems

10. 1:01:28 – 1:04:42

    Resourcing and roadmapping

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:01:28

       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 wanna get into some examples of how you've actually implemented this.

    2. CJChandra Janakiraman1:01:42

       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 roadmapping standpoint, because then you say, "Okay, what percentage of our engineering do we put on strategic pillar A versus B versus C, and, you know, and what are the specific things we build?" So it becomes a roadmapping question as opposed to a strategy question.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:08

       And 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, all the steps of the process, but we're gonna cut it off at here as you have a strategy that is starting to be rolled out.

    4. CJChandra Janakiraman1:02:23

       Yeah, exactly.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:24

       Cool. Let's go through a couple examples-

    6. CJChandra Janakiraman1:02:27

       Yeah. Okay.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:27

       ... where you actually implemented this to make this even more real.

    8. CJChandra Janakiraman1:02:29

       Yeah. Yeah.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:29

       I know there's a couple companies you're thinking about sharing the, uh, strategies you've worked on.

    10. CJChandra Janakiraman1:02:34

        Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think there's just a sort, sort of, um, three quick notes, um-

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:38

        Oh, yeah.

    12. CJChandra Janakiraman1:02:39

        ... to, to close off this, um, this process and, and I'll share the, uh, two, two examples, uh, Lenny.

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:45

        Perfect.

    14. CJChandra Janakiraman1:02:45

        So, so the, the, the reason I think this process works is, uh, 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 doc and I ag- and I don't agree with most of it." 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 a better strategic pillars because there's just more minds on it than like if it was 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.

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky1:04:22

        Yeah. I think it's, it's important to highlight no s- no framework, playbook for a method is going to guarantee you have the correct strategy that will win and your company will thrive. Uh, it's always just the best effort at plan. Uh, yeah, as the quote, uh, "No, no good plan survives first contact with the customer."

    16. CJChandra Janakiraman1:04:40

        (laughs) Exactly.

    17. LRLenny Rachitsky1:04:40

        Um, cool.

11. 1:04:42 – 1:11:34

    Strategy lessons from Zynga

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:04:42

    2. CJChandra Janakiraman1:04:42

       Cool.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:04:42

       Let's talk through some examples.

    4. CJChandra Janakiraman1:04:43

       Yeah. So, so the first example I wanted to talk about is, uh, at Zynga. You know, I, I sort of, um, was at Zynga 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 Zynga 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 im- impressive and it was very evident and observable from all the games. So if you look at sort of all the games, you know, 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 there's these game loops that just sort of required you to have a social, an active social network to be successful and play, and 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 paying to complete sort of things. So you're not necessarily paying to like skip a whole sort of like experience. What you're paying is just to complete it. So what, 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 a, 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 20% or 30%, 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 Zynga games had this, um, cross-promotional component at the top of the game and they would promote other games and, you know, it's sort of like the Zynga 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 they were non-focus areas. Like it wasn't like... the focus wasn't on high fidelity graphics, it wasn't on like complex game mechanics. And this was extremely clear and hardcoded 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-accretive way. So for, for example, I was at Zynga San Diego, and we took the company into net new game genres like action strategy, match-3 puzzle games, but we stayed 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 was 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 enhance those strategic pillars and reinforce it. And, 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 i- in the history of sort of companies at the time.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky1:08:31

       In revenue.

    6. CJChandra Janakiraman1:08:32

       In, in revenue. And, um, and it worked really well until the environment changed, right, and, and sort of there was a shift to mobile. And temporarily, you know... Basically, if you go back to that resonance concept, that deep resonance between the product and the market was temporarily lost, you know, once sort of that shift happened to, to mobile.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky1:08:51

       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 Zynga. 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 to come up with the things that will most help your business grow-

    8. CJChandra Janakiraman1:09:13

       Exactly.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky1:09:14

       ... in this case, these three elements for Zynga. 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-

    10. CJChandra Janakiraman1:09:24

        Yeah, exactly.

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky1:09:24

        ... and e- 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 wanna highlight the power of just very few bets and investments.

    12. CJChandra Janakiraman1:09:35

        Yep.

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky1:09:35

        So it's always three. I've always suggested three as well. Some people are like, "Three to five."

    14. CJChandra Janakiraman1:09:39

        (laughs)

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky1:09:40

        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?

    16. CJChandra Janakiraman1:09:46

        I agree.

    17. LRLenny Rachitsky1:09:47

        Okay, cool. And then I think there's also this element of differentiation being really important. So these three elements you shared for Zynga are just like... they're unique and differentiated for Zynga. Uh, network powers of apps driving other apps, uh, paying to complete, like these are things Zynga's figured out, "This is how we win versus other product in the market."

    18. CJChandra Janakiraman1:10:08

        Totally, totally. Yeah.

    19. LRLenny Rachitsky1:10:09

        Sweet. Anything else along those lines with Zynga?

    20. CJChandra Janakiraman1:10:13

        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 Zynga that you even need a strategy, right? Like, that's the story as I said at the beginning. The reason is because Zynga had it figured out so well that I didn't actually have a need to exercise that muscle at Zynga, and we just had to come up with new games that sort of applied that strategy. And, and so it was a net new muscle I had to develop, you know, when I got to, um, Headspace.

    21. LRLenny Rachitsky1:10:48

        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?"

    22. CJChandra Janakiraman1:10:59

        (laughs)

    23. LRLenny Rachitsky1:11:00

        You... You just don't realize what you're in. You don't realize what, what you're surrounded by until it's gone.

    24. CJChandra Janakiraman1:11:05

        Exactly.

    25. LRLenny Rachitsky1:11:07

        Maybe one other thing I just wanna highlight while we're on this topic is just the power of focus. In the case of Zynga, 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 are like focus on this one part for now. So I think that's a really interesting thread is just the power of focus.

    26. CJChandra Janakiraman1:11:32

        Yeah.

    27. LRLenny Rachitsky1:11:33

        Okay, cool.

12. 1:11:34 – 1:15:55

    Strategy lessons from Meta

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:11:34

       Um, I know you have another example of your time at Meta.

    2. CJChandra Janakiraman1:11:37

       Yeah. At Meta, there's this 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, R... in reality labs, you know, uh, Oculus, which was coming up with the, the Quest 2 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 st- 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 v- video conferencing product, and, and Oculus. And-

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:12:23

       I love Portal, by the way. I was a big fan. I'm sad that it's no longer around.

    4. CJChandra Janakiraman1:12:27

       Yeah, yeah. Uh, and, uh, and that led to, you know, uh, features that are known to everybody, like the Oculus referrals program, you know, the, uh, Portal Memories integration where you see one of your Facebook memories on Po- on the Portal sort of, you know, sponsored ad in, in your Facebook feed. And also, we had this so- 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 18 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, 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 sunsetted and we basically redeployed 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. And, 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.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky1:14:44

       That's such a great (laughs) point. Just a strategy sitting there in a doc is worthless. It's, uh... What, 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 i- an important to kind of trickle down from that point is that you don't wanna 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 this one document that just maybe one day you'll use.

    6. CJChandra Janakiraman1:15:30

       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.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky1:15:39

       And again small S strategy is for, like, a couple years out, not like...

    8. CJChandra Janakiraman1:15:43

       Exactly.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky1:15:44

       It's like a timeframe. Okay, cool. Um... okay. Anything else along those lines of the examples of Meta or Zynga?

    10. CJChandra Janakiraman1:15:52

        Tho- those are, those are pretty good, like, lessons,

13. 1:15:55 – 1:26:58

    Big S strategy

    1. CJChandra Janakiraman1:15:55

       I would say. Yeah.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky1:15:55

       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?

    3. CJChandra Janakiraman1:16:05

       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 p- what I call present forward. It's like y- 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 (laughs) just solving problems." And, and he, 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 there needs to be an aspirational and cool component to, to strategy. And, uh, and I call this, sort of big S 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 a... sort of the big S strategy and, uh, it typically takes, you know, longer. Uh, potentially up to about six months. The approach is a bit different from small S 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 a 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 wholes. And what I mean by that is three at least fairly distinct descriptions of the future. So, so e- to give you a sort of, uh, a- almost like a, 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 you're... 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... The interesting 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 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, live product testing. So this is actually something that you actually want to start, like, testing your way into and, and sort of, uh, understanding if it works from a scalable standpoint. And this whole thing is typically led not by the, the sort of the PM team, but by design and UXR. And, and intentionally it's a little bit more open-ended and, and greenfield, and it, it actually is a very sort of different sort of mind space that people have when they approach, uh, big S. So, so the roadmap is really built through a combination of small S and big S work and... For example, at VRChat, we are doing both small S and big S work, uh, Lenny, and they are sort of run as parallel workstreams. The product management team is leading the charge on the small S work, and the design team is leading the charge on the big S work. And it's really exciting stuff, what's coming out of both workstreams 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 tributaries that ultimately merge into one river. Uh, that's how I would think about it.

Episode duration: 1:47:21