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

Strategy Mysteries and Misconceptions

Chandra Janakiraman: 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.

Lenny Rachitsky: 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?

”Small s” vs “Big S” Strategy

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

Introducing the Guest

Lenny Rachitsky: Let’s talk about big S strategy. When should you approach strategy this way?

Chandra Janakiraman: There’s this interesting quote by Elon Musk, which is-

Elon Musk: “Life’s got to be about more than just solving problems.”

Chandra Janakiraman: 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 five to 10 years? Why is the world better in 10 years? And what is the most exciting version of that view?

Origins of the Episode

Lenny Rachitsky: 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 feature episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Chandra Janakiraman.

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

Chandra Janakiraman: Pleasure to be here, Lenny.

How I Got Interested in Strategy

Lenny Rachitsky: 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’s the most amazing playbook for developing a strategy.” He’s gone through it with you at a company he worked at with you once, and he’s just like, “People need to learn this because it’s so good.” And to me, if someone can get better at strategy, it feels like it just makes so much of the way the company operates and the way that people work better. So we chatted, we met, I was like, “I completely agree. We definitely need to get you on this podcast to share your approach to the strategy.” So we made this happen, and so we’re here. So again, thank you for doing this and sharing.

Minimum Viable Strategy and 8-12 Week Process

Chandra Janakiraman: Thank you. Thank you, Lenny.

Lenny Rachitsky: First of all, I wanted to ask just you’re very passionate about strategy and developing a way to consistently create great strategies. What got you so interested in this stuff in the first place? What kind of sparked your interest in this area?

The Strategy Working Group

Chandra Janakiraman: Yeah, yeah, it’s a very interesting story. It goes back all the way 10 years ago, but I remember it vividly like it happened yesterday. And I was a relatively new VP of product at Headspace, and we had this amazing company vision and mission that the founders had laid out, and I had come in and established goals for the team in terms of our key metrics, and we had a very buttoned up roadmap in my mind that fed into that company mission and vision. And I was feeling pretty good about how things were shaping up.

And on a particular Monday, the founder, CEO pulled me aside, and in his usual disarming style, he sort of made a short but profound statement. He said that, “Hey, CJ, I’m hearing that a lot of people don’t really understand why we are working on what we are working on,” and that was it. That was really the extent of what he shared. And it was a little bit of a bubble bursting moment for me because we obviously had spent a lot of time building the plan and I was feeling relatively good about the plan.

And so I spoke to a few people. I sort of wanted to understand it a little bit deeper, like, “Hey, what’s happening?” And he was right. He was right. A lot of people didn’t really understand why we were working on the things we were working on, and it led to some soul-searching. And basically I was lucky because there was actually a board member of Headspace who had a product background, kind of knew what good looked like, and I came to the conclusion, “Hey, we needed a strategy for Headspace.”

So with extensive work with her, with the board person, we built the first written product strategy for Headspace. And that, and the subsequent actions on the product led to a complete re-imagination of the product. And basically we were able to create a new product, we call it the Next Generation Headspace, which on one hand it could support a comprehensive library of content, not just meditation, but non-meditation content as well. It had the sort of home experience where everything was incredibly personalized for the individuals, and there were several motivational elements built into the whole product experience. And it was very transformational for the company and the product because it changed the product from being a meditation app to a broader health and wellness service and really put the company on a different trajectory. It led to my promotion to the first CPO at Headspace.

And most interestingly, I had a chance to, while going through it almost in a sort of out of body way, observed the process of like, okay, how did we put this thing together? And what actually went into it? What really started as almost a personal crisis moment of finding this need to create a strategy for a product and a company led to a bigger sort of quest for me, which is I started noticing that there was a certain mystique and aura about product strategy, and 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 I sort of wanted to ask myself, is it possible to break that divide between the haves and the have-nots and make this capability widely accessible through a procedural approach. And I have news for you. The answer is yes, anybody can build product strategy through a clear understanding of what it is and through a friendly and repeatable playbook.

Leadership Interviews and the Fruit Story

Lenny Rachitsky: Amazing. That’s exactly what I want to do here. 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, “Your team doesn’t understand why we’re doing this.” I’ve heard that a number of times, as much as you think you’re killing it, there’s always that, you forget sometimes to do that or you aren’t doing it great. And I love that basically the solution to that is the strategy solves that problem of helping people connect the dots and understand why this is the roadmap, why this is the strategy. Okay, so before we get into it, just one more context question, what’s just the best way to think about what you’re about to share and also who’s it for? Who needs to hear this briefly?

Competitor Analysis and Adjacent Roadmaps

Chandra Janakiraman: So the way to think about this, the substance is that this is not a new framework or theory that I’m going to be talking about. There are plenty of excellent materials on strategy from ancient texts like The Art of War from Sun Tzu, all of Michael Porter’s work, Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt, who’s been on your podcast, Playing to Win Lafley and Roger Martin. So there’s a ton of extensively researched and well-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 are able 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 just in terms of the battle-tested nature of it, I personally use this playbook about five to six times tweaking and optimizing it each time based on what I thought worked, what people thought worked and didn’t work, including several times at Meta and usually leading to strong results, both for me achieving senior leadership alignment as well as driving business results for the company.

Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, I’m getting more and more excited. Let’s get into it, let’s get into this playbook. People hear this word strategy a lot. They’re told be more strategic, build a better strategy. What’s the simplest way to understand what is a strategy?

Conducting User Observations

Chandra Janakiraman: Yeah, let’s start with some basic definitions, which is as you asked, what is product strategy? And if you think back to the Headspace example, this sort of comes to life as well. So 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 it look like when you achieve your purpose of existence? So it sits between the two and it forces choice to deploy scarce resources to generate maximum impact.

And I want to borrow an analogy from the world of physics. There is this concept called resonance, and the concept of resonance is really interesting, and it’s actually very close to 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 the amplitude of how that object vibrates. And so it’s very interesting, 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 the vibration of the product. So this concept of resonance is interesting.

So the way to think about it in the context of strategy is, it is selecting that frequency to achieve resonance between the product and the market. And so when you get close to that frequency, you should see tremendous impact in terms of the product landing well in the market. And so that’s how I would think about it. It sits between mission, vision and the plan. 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 that’s the three components. That’s really it in terms of product strategy.

Synthesizing Research Findings

Lenny Rachitsky: I love it. And I love the things we aren’t doing as a core part of this, that comes up a lot on this podcast of being clear is what we’re not going to do. We know these could be things we could do, but we’re deciding we’re not doing these things.

Okay, so let’s just talk through how you go about developing a strategy using this method. Say someone’s sitting down, “Okay, I’m going to start developing a strategy for our product.” Where do you begin? What does this process look like? Let’s start talking through it.

The Strategy Sprint

Chandra Janakiraman: So I sort of want to first explain this concept called smallest strategy, and I’ll sort of talk about what that is and how it’s different from another kind. But the basic sort of strategic process I would say takes about eight to 12 weeks long. It’s something that I think people often underestimate how long it takes and eventually end up taking a lot more time. But when they start off, they think, “Oh, I could probably stand this up in a couple of weeks,” but usually through iteration it actually ends up taking 8 to 12 weeks anyway. So it’s good to start with setting clear expectations that it takes about eight to 12 weeks. And the way to justify the ROI on that is typically a strategy like this can be leveraged for about a couple of years. So relative to that sort of payback period, I think the investment is relatively small. So it’s pretty healthy from that sense to manage expectations and say that that’s how long it’s going to take.

So within that period, there are five phases. There’s the preparation phase, there’s a strategy sprint, the design sprint, the document writing and the rollout. And those are the five phases, which I’ll explain how one would go through. And basically each of them has a certain sort of time recommendation. For example, the preparation phase I would say is probably about four weeks. The strategy sprint is up to about one week. The design sprint is another one week, document writing maybe one to two weeks, and the rollout is maybe two to three weeks. So that’s how you get to that range of eight to 12 weeks.

Reliability of the Strategy Sprint

Lenny Rachitsky: Essentially it’s like a quarter of work to get to a final great strategy. And of these five phases, the biggest bucket is preparation, which to me sounds like it’s not like a full-time team thing. It’s starting to gather data and user research-

Design Sprint: Visualizing Strategy with Concept Maps

Chandra Janakiraman: Totally.

Writing the Strategy Doc: Weaving a Story

Lenny Rachitsky: As you talk through this, I’m curious just how much of the team is involved in each of these steps. But I think it’s an important point, if you want a really good winning strategy, you need to give a time. You can’t just say, “In a month or a week, we need to develop a strategy, go figure it out, write this document.” Great. Cool. So let’s talk about step one preparation.

Chandra Janakiraman: That’s correct, Lenny. And I think you, if I forget, remind me that sometimes there is pressure. There’s just business pressure, like the CEO might still want a strategy in two weeks, how do you respond to that? And I think we can find some clever shortcuts there, but I think to the extent possible, the leader should push for [inaudible 00:18:39] to make something really great.

Strategy Document Structure Guide

Lenny Rachitsky: And I think part of it is that as a leader, you can start on this before… you know this is coming, so you should get started before it’s even asked for.

Chandra Janakiraman: That’s correct.

Executing the Strategy Rollout

Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah, awesome. Okay, let’s get into it.

Manager Syncs During the Strategy Sprint

Chandra Janakiraman: So I think you sort of touched on this in terms of the preparation phase being the longest phase, but also not being sort of like a full-time thing. So that’s absolutely right. So the preparation phase is really… The way to start this, which is a little different from other approaches I’ve seen from people is to actually form a strategy working group. This is an important concept. So the strategy working group is sort of a small team. It typically consists of engineering, product design and data at a minimum. And in certain cases, there’s a luxury to have other functions like product marketing, user research, that’s also part of the strategy working group. But the minimum quorum, I would recommend 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 voice of the user from that perspective. And typically the PM is driving the strategy working group and the process, but that working group is actually the team that’s going to collaboratively create the strategy doc.

And so in the preparation phase, there’s usually a kickoff meeting where the PM pulls the team together, talks about the purpose of the process, lays out the different phases, and gives everybody a feel for what’s going to happen in the next 8 to 12 weeks. And basically then creates a list of very discrete action items and deliverables for each of the stakeholders in the working group. So specifically, there’s an action item around aggregating all the behavioral insights that the team might have around the product. And usually this is a combination of previous analysis that the team has run on the data side and potentially also feature launches and how they have done. So all kind of analytical analysis.

The ask is really to create a meta analysis of all of the analysis. So the data person on the strategy working group has to scan the historical archives at the company and sort of synthesize and condense that into a very sort of digestible macro themes and learnings about users. So that’s sort of one preparation phase item.

The second is UXR insight. So again, there’s probably a lot 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, social channels, and basically a meta analysis of all of that into one very actionable and synthesized deck on all the insights on users. That’s usually led by the design person and with support from their research team. And that’s sort of the second action item.

The third action item is leadership interviews. So I sort of have this fun story of the fruit with leadership strategy reviews, which I want to share. So imagine, this is sort of how sometimes strategy reviews go, which is you bring a fruit to the reviewer and say, “Hey, here’s a mango, what do you think?” And the reviewer says, “I actually don’t like mangoes.” And you’re like, “Oh,” you’re sort of sad. You take it back, you bring an apple and you show, “Hey, what do you think of an apple?” And then the leader says, “I actually stopped eating apples last year.” And so you’re disappointed again. You go back, you bring a banana. “I hated bananas since I was a kid.” And so it’s a bit of a silly caricature of reviews, but there’s a bit of grain of truth there, which is, imagine how frustrating that is for both the reviewer and the person who’s reviewing.

And so it could be made so much better if you just engage with your leaders before you actually build a strategy. It’s amazing how few people actually do that. And so the fruit story tells you, hey, imagine if you just asked the reviewer, “Do you even like fruits?” How much better the experience would’ve been for both parties. And so leadership interviews are a very important part of a strategy formulation process. So you can divide and conquer, there’s several leaders, like you assign different leaders to different people on the strategy working group and each of them sort talks to that leader. And there are a few questions that I would recommend asking, and it’s basically, what does success feel like for the leader? What does failure look like? What is the measure of success? What are principles to keep in mind while going through this process?

Lenny Rachitsky: And these are centered around the product that you’re working on?

Why This Process Works

Chandra Janakiraman: Exactly.

Lenny Rachitsky: For Headspace, it’d be like, what do you think success looks like for Headspace or the specific feature of Headspace? [inaudible 00:24:03].

Case Study: Zynga’s Strategic Clarity

Chandra Janakiraman: Exactly.

Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, cool.

Strategy Failure and Environmental Shifts

Chandra Janakiraman: That’s right, yeah. And also I think ask them for their favorite or better ideas. It’s actually what I’ve found through this process is a lot of leaders have these better ideas, they just feel shy to share it because they don’t want their teams to think of them as micromanage-y. They want their teams to figure out the answer themselves, but then when you ask them, they actually have a pet idea always.

And so asking them just takes the mystery out of it. And it also gives them a creative avenue. So some people feel nervous about engaging senior leaders in these conversations in the sense that, hey, is it a waste of their time? What I’ve found is the exact opposite, senior leaders are, they welcome this because one, it’s actually a more fun conversation for them than the other meetings that they have in their day because they’re getting a little bit of their creative juices going, and they actually feel happy that somebody actually asked them what they’re feeling and thinking about. And so it’s actually very, very positive energy when you ask leaders just what they want. And it’s also not a sign of weakness. It’s actually a sign of strength and humility to ask your leaders what you want. And so keeping that fruit story in mind, I want to just say that this is a very, very positive thing, a very powerful thing.

The next area is competitive analysis. So if there is a product marketing person, they can do it for you. If there isn’t, the PM should do it themselves. And basically the idea is you try to understand who are the comparables or the competitors in the space, and you sort of build a little bit of a head-to-head and sort a stack chart of where’s everybody going and what are of the angles of investment for different people based on the explicit signals, which is what are they releasing?

You don’t really know what their strategies are, but you can kind of tell when you look at the features they’re putting out that, oh, they seem to be focusing on this particular area. And so that’s sort of competitive analysis. And bigger companies, there’s also another important input, which is adjacent roadmaps. Are the teams adjacent to you and what are they investing in? Because oftentimes that can have a rub-off effect on your team, and if you’re not aligning with other key teams, it’s going to be important. So adjacent roadmaps and a summary of that.

And last but not least, is what I call user observation. So I like the strategy working group to actually either interview a user or watch a video and report key learnings. And the idea is not to action those insights, it’s really to build empathy. When you get somebody in the 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…

… their own preconceived notions of what to build, what the strategy should be, and it humanizes the whole process. That I think is the purpose, but you still give them the homework of writing down what they learned because it’s a little bit of a forcing function.

The output of all of this is what I call the comprehensive preparation readout. 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 the competitive stack charts, you have the adjacent roadmaps, and you have a section on user observations. It’s a lot of work, but to your point, it can be done in parallel with your day jobs. You can multitask, and that’s why you take about four weeks to do that. That sort of concludes the preparation phase. You get the deck, and that rolls into the strategy sprint, which is the next phase. I want to pause and see if you have any questions.

Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah, I have a million questions, but I’m going to keep myself contained. Just to quickly summarize. Basically you kick off, we’re going to start developing strategy for this product, and you were going to touch on this, but it may help just to talk about this right now. I know you have big S Strategy, small S strategy. This process, what’s an example of the level of product scale that this process is for? Because I know you have another approach for a larger scale of a product, basically for a company. What’s the best way to think about small S strategy, which is what we’re going through?

Implicit Knowledge in Strategy

Chandra Janakiraman: Yeah, I think it’s a good question, Lenny. I would say that the process works well at sort of a growth stage company or in a vertical within sort of a larger company. I think it scales pretty well. The main difference between this small S and big S is the time horizon aspect and the aspirational component, which we’ll get to.

Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, so this is a process you can use for entire company strategy of not a large company, not a massively, and then also just a product within a company?

Strategy at Meta: Oculus and Portal

Chandra Janakiraman: Yeah.

True Value of Strategy is Execution

Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, perfect. Okay. 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 six things you ask everyone to do. Gather all the behavioral insights, all the user research insights that you’ve had, leadership interviews, interview people, ask what they want and see what they’re hoping for, what success looks like, competitive analysis, adjacent roadmaps across other teams and user observations, just like watch users, see what’s happening. You assign each of these tasks to different people in this working group. You set a deadline. We have to present this in say, four weeks. People go work on it. You meet ongoing as it’s coming together, and then the output is a deck that you share. Do you share this deck with just that working group, or who do you share this deck with and read it out to?

Moving from Small S to Big S

Chandra Janakiraman: Yeah. The deck is an output of the first phase, and then it flows into the second phase, which is a strategy sprint. You don’t share the deck with anybody yet.

Collaboration Rhythm Between Small and Big S

Lenny Rachitsky: Got it. This is our secret.

Emotional Journey of Making Strategy

Chandra Janakiraman: In the strategy sprint, it’s like a key thing. Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky: 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. Basically what you’re trying to do here is gather all of the input that will inform the strategy.

Choosing the Right People

Chandra Janakiraman: That’s correct.

Lenny Rachitsky: It’s giving yourself time to do this, because if you think about it, the output is determined by the quality of your input. I love, it feels like a core component of this method is spend time creating, gathering all the input, all the best input, actually spend time there. Don’t just make it a half-assed last minute thing. Okay. Amazing. Okay, let’s talk about step two, which is the strategy sprint.

AI’s Impact on Strategy Formulation

Chandra Janakiraman: Yeah, so the strategy sprint is the heart of the process. This is sort of where you make the decision. If you recall, the definition of strategy is it forces choice to deploy resources into a few areas for maximum impact. The core of strategy is really picking those areas and the areas you’re not going invest in. That happens in the strategy sprint, so really it’s the heart of the process.

Typically, it’s like a three to five day process. The first day is the share out date. Everybody has done some great work. They go in, they share what they’ve collected, what they’ve sort of learned. It brings everybody in the working group to the same state of understanding, the same state of consciousness on the state of the union. That’s a great process where what I encourage people to do is write down things that you are, as you’re listening, write down things that you find are problems for our users, things that are coming in the way of our growth and things that are sort of suboptimal for the business.

People take a lot of notes during that time and the people who are presenting are sharing everything they’ve learned. That’s really day one. It’s just absorbing a ton of information and writing down a ton of notes so people can kind of understand where all the problems are. It’s a very problems focused process, and that’s an important point. I’ll get back to it when we talk about big S, which is different. Once people have that common awareness, shared knowledge of all the problems, day two is literally the most important day in the entire 8 to 12 weeks because that’s where you actually make the choice. The way to flow through it, it’s actually really important to flow through it correctly. The first step is really generating a whole bunch of problems, because people have been taking notes the previous day.

You start the day with, “Hey, let’s collect everybody’s thoughts on what the problems are that are holding us back.” It’s a free flowing session. Everybody throws out their observations on what’s holding us back, and you just capture all of that in a Google Sheets, for example. Over even an hour, you start to see these patterns emerging of like, there’s these clusters of problems that are really holding us back. The next step is you do a joint clustering of related problems and you create these potentially, typically in my experience, I’ve seen about 10 to 15 clusters form of very related problems. The beauty of it is each of those bigger cluster, you actually know what the sub problems are within that cluster because you sort of generated it very organically.

Then you have, let’s say 10 to 15 clusters. What you then do is you, because remember, because it started as a problem generation exercise, each of the clusters also has a name that is a problem, and so the next step is to flip it into an opportunity framing. Let me give you a couple of examples.

Let’s say there’s a bunch of problems around people don’t really know where to find different things in our product, and they don’t really know where to go, where to find a certain feature or a certain experience. There’s let’s say a lot of problems in that area, so difficulty finding things becomes the cluster, the problem cluster and discovery becomes the opportunity sort of framing of it. It’s sort of the more positive framing of it.

Another example could be that people get a lot of content that they don’t like. They see a lot of stuff that they don’t like, and so they disengage with the product. The opportunity framing of that would be relevance. It’s basically stuff that really matters to me. Maybe if it’s a social product, then maybe people are finding it difficult to find friends and they are lonely because of that. The opportunity framing would be social connection.

Flipping all of those problem clusters into positive framing and opportunity framing is the next step. Then you’re in a great spot because now all you have to do is you have to down select from those 10 to 15 opportunity areas into ideally three, maybe five, but I would recommend three because it creates more clarity and focus. The way to do that is really sort of ranking them on, I would say four or five key dimensions or criteria, and the first is expected impact.

Let’s say you actually tackle that area. What is the expected impact to whatever matters to you as a company, as a business, as a product? 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 really hard data, sometimes you have more anecdotal evidence, and so the confidence really depends on how big the problem’s sizing and frequency is. Expected impact, certainty of impact. The third one is also very important, which is clarity of levers.

Do you actually have an idea of how you would solve it? If you don’t, it’s going to be really difficult to move the needle on it because you should kind of know that, okay, I can imagine these solutions could actually move the needle. I can actually launch this sort of nudge system that can help people find things. I can recommend people. I can recommend friends so that people can form friends quicker on the platform. You should have a sense of how you would solve that particular space. Is there clarity on levers? That’s the third dimension.

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

Once you have that, and sometimes what happens is you don’t have too much data, and so it’s okay to have qualitative scores on this like high, medium, low, T-shirt scores, whatever that is. The key is you’re doing it together as a strategy working group, and you’re debating the scores and you’re reasoning why it should be higher versus lower. There’s a ton of alignment and collision that’s happening when you’re doing that, which is very healthy for the eventual outcome.

Once you do that, basically you can do a simple sort of addition of the scores and a sort, and what you have is basically the top three and you have the remaining 7 or 12 that are basically not the focus. That’s the core of the process, is getting those opportunity areas and getting to a shared sense of how do we prioritize them and why?

Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, and this is all done in a week. I know there’s more to it. There’s a couple more items that help you move from what you just said to the next step, but I love that this is the core of the biggest element of the process, and 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. Again, highlighting the importance of that prep step.

Just to share what you’ve shared so far, and then we’ll finish the strategy sprint step. It’s basically do the share out so everyone’s on the same page about all the information that, all the inputs essentially. Enumerate all the problems, like individual small problems and then cluster them into 10 to 15 problem clusters. Flip it from here’s the problem to here’s an opportunity we have. Rank them based on, basically there’s these four attributes you shared, which I’ll actually, I wrote these down. Impact potential, confidence that it will have the impact, clarity of levers and are they differentiated unique levers? Is there something different from what other folks are doing? Those are ways to rank these ideas and problem clusters. You essentially come up with, here’s three bets basically we potentially should take. Okay, and then I think that’s where you stopped. Is that right?

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Chandra Janakiraman: That’s totally right, Lenny.

Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, cool.

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Chandra Janakiraman: Those three that are at the top of that pile are basically our strategic pillars. We’ve sort of gotten our strategic pillars and they basically hold up the strategy. That’s why they’re called strategic pillars. The idea is once you have the strategic pillars, we basically translate that into a few how might we’s? Let’s say it’s a relevance thing. How might we find the best content for a particular user? How might we surface it in the right place? There’s a few how might we’s, and the how might we’s are basically intended to help the next phase of the process, which is the design sprint.

You generate these areas, these strategic pillars, you generate the how might we’s. How might we’s are typically pretty straightforward. Once you have the strategic pillars, it takes probably an hour to generate some how might we’s for each of them, maybe two or three for each strategic pillar, and then you’re done with that stage.

Lenny Rachitsky: I just want to highlight real quick, this phrasing is really important. I used exactly the same phrasing. I had a PM that I worked with and 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. This phrase, “How might we”, is actually really powerful as a way to come up with ideas to solve problems. It’s just like, how might we increase discoverability in our app? How might we improve relevance? There’s something magical about that phrasing that it opens up your mind to, how might we? Let’s think about it. Versus like, how do we improve discovery? That’s a different, your brain works differently hearing this. That is a really powerful phrasing. Just wanted to highlight that.

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Chandra Janakiraman: Yeah, that’s awesome. It’s also something that designers are familiar with, Lenny, so it flows really well into sort of a design sprint.

Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, so you have these how might we’d. You have three pillars, maybe three or four or five how might we’s to solve these opportunities/problems, and then what happens after that?

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Chandra Janakiraman: Exactly. Then the third day is it’s good to start fresh. The team’s accomplished a lot.

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Lenny Rachitsky: This was all the first two days.

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Chandra Janakiraman: This is the first two days, yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky: Wow. Okay. So much done in two days.

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Chandra Janakiraman: Yeah, exactly. The second day is particularly intense on the team, so it’s good to give them a break, because it’s a lot of really mental sort of wrestling, and so give the team a bit of a break. Then the third day is when people are a little bit refreshed, we get to winning aspiration. Winning aspiration is super interesting because it’s a very creative exercise. You basically imagine in two years, because that’s the typical time horizon of a smaller strategy, is like 18 months to 24 months. This is what I tell the team. Imagine two years there’s a newspaper, there’s a journalist that covers this work, and there’s a newspaper article that comes out. I want you to imagine the progress on all these strategic pillars and what the headline of that newspaper article looks like. It’s called a newspaper headline approach.

Basically, everybody generates a newspaper headline in parallel. It’s interesting because you often see there’s these common themes that sort of form when people generate these headlines. The forcing function with the headline is also that it has to be somewhat simple and plain speak. It’s not too technical. You have to get to a more simple layperson’s language and you have to get to the key benefit that ultimately, the impact it has on the world. Those kinds of themes come up often.

Then you do a little bit, you put them all into a blender, you put all of those headlines from the team into a blender, and you mash them together and create the winning aspiration, which is ultimately what does progress on the strategy look like in a couple of years time? That comes from the working group, it’s not like one person writing.

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Lenny Rachitsky: What’s an example of an aspiration that you’ve come up with on a project you worked on, a winning aspiration?

Chandra Janakiraman: We did this process for the privacy team when I was at Meta. Really the strategic pillars were around a lot of features that we would build, but the winning aspiration was really like, could we move consumer trust? The newspaper headline is something like, “Facebook has moved the needle on consumer trust by investing in these areas.” That’s how you create the bigger impact.

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Lenny Rachitsky: That’s a great example. 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, and as you described, an operator’s playbook for doing this. I love that. Okay. When you say blender, by the way, I was thinking as you were talking, put them into a blender, what I’m inferring is you just take everyone’s headlines and you come up with one that kind of covers the gamut of all three pillars being successful.

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Chandra Janakiraman: That’s exactly right. More tactically what I typically do is I put them all on a slide and start, it’s almost like a word cloud, and then you start to see these common words. Then you converge those words as the key elements of the final winning aspiration. Then you try to create a nice statement out of that. It also symbolically, everybody sees their own statement on the deck, and that’s how you get to the final model.

Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome. I feel like AI could help with that now.

Chandra Janakiraman: Exactly.

Lenny Rachitsky: Just put in all your headline ideas and it comes up with some suggestions. Okay, cool. Is that the end of the sprint or is there more to the sprint?

Chandra Janakiraman: That’s it for the sprint.

Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. At the end of the sprint, what do you have? What are the outputs?

Chandra Janakiraman: Yeah, this is a great progress on strategy because now we have the three strategic pillars. We have the how might we associate it with the strategic pillars. You also have the why. Why did you get to those three strategic pillars and what are you not focused on and what are the reasons for it? You also have the winning aspiration. It’s great progress. The team’s done a great job. I think now we sort of move on to the design sprint.

Lenny Rachitsky: 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?

Chandra Janakiraman: It’s a very good question. We’ll speak about an example that I had in Meta where typically during the strategy sprint, you don’t change it once you go through the strategy sprint, but eventually there are a lot of signals you get through execution where you sort of have to course correct. We’ll talk about one very interesting example of how that sort of changed things here.

Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome. Okay. Basically, you’ve developed your strategy at this point, and in your experience it ends up being… Until you hit the market and test, you don’t really know what’s going on.

Chandra Janakiraman: Correct.

Lenny Rachitsky: But there’s kind of an implication that in your experience doing this, I think you said five or six times, it has been correct and as good as doing it any other approach.

Chandra Janakiraman: I would say it’s not sort of an empirical study, obviously because of the small sample size, but I would say that it’s really opened people’s eyes and it’s led to really good alignment and eventually good results. Even when it has not, it has led to good organizational buy-in on why and how we are approaching things.

Lenny Rachitsky: This reminds me of, Tomer Cohen was on the podcast, he’s CPO of LinkedIn and he has this phrase that always says he says, which is, “We may be wrong, but we’re not confused.” I love that a core part of this is everyone is completely on the same page, not from the beginning, but once you start this process of here’s all the inputs, here’s step by step we are working together on narrowing down, so at least everyone understands the why. Which is what sparked your interest in this in the first place, everyone understanding. I know there’s a whole rollout at the end too to solve that.

Okay, cool, so we have the sprint. We have basically the three pillars that you’re going to invest in, this headline of what it might look like if you’re to launch and some solution ideas with how might we’s. What comes next?

Chandra Janakiraman: Yeah. The next phase is the design sprint, and the design sprint can be led by the design person who’s in the strategy working group. If you remember, there’s engineering, product design and data, so the design person can lead it and the PM can sort of take a bit of a backseat during this process. The input to the design sprint is sort of the three strategic pillars and the how might we’s associated with it.

The goal of the design sprint is not to sort of come up with 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 a picture is worth a thousand words. Oftentimes, even though you might have the right words in your strategy doc, people might still scratch their head like, “What do you exactly mean? What are you going to build?” The illustrative concepts really sort of give people something to latch onto, “Oh, okay, I get it. This is what you’re going to build at the end of the day with this strategy.”

The more generative, the better. Then there’s the ability to, sometimes if you do the Google Ventures design sprint, you can even test some of it with users and get a little bit of sharpening of things. The goal here is not to build feature-ready designs, it’s more to generate concepts. Once you have that, basically the design sprint, and there’s different flavors of design sprints, which I won’t go into. You can lean on your design lead to decide what’s the appropriate way, but the input and the output is what needs to be very emphasized. The input needs to be the strategic pillars. The output needs to be a ton of illustrative concepts to explain each strategic pillar. You could almost have a section where you talk about each strategic pillar and insert those concepts in that section. That’s the idea.

Lenny Rachitsky: We’re going to go through a couple examples to make this very real. You mentioned the design sprint method, which we had the authors on the podcast. They actually didn’t go through the design sprint method. They have another book called Make Time that’s about productivity. We also had their colleague from Google Ventures that designed a bullseye sprint, which is also an interesting sprint. It’s a new thing that helps you figure out your ICP and who to focus your product on and how that informs your product.

Chandra Janakiraman: Oh, that’s right. Interesting.

Lenny Rachitsky: It’s another type of sprint you could use here. The input is here’s the three things we’re going to invest in, say discovery, relevance, privacy. The output is here’s concepts of what this could look like to get people’s minds going. Is it just a bunch of mocks basically in a deck at this point?

Chandra Janakiraman: That’s correct. Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, cool. Okay, amazing. That’s a week. That’s another sprint. PM could maybe take a little bit of a break.

Chandra Janakiraman: Exactly.

Lenny Rachitsky: And designers take the lead.

Chandra Janakiraman: Exactly.

Lenny Rachitsky: The engineers are kind of inputs and thought partners in this, I imagine.

Chandra Janakiraman: They’re optional. Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky: Optional, but yeah, ideally they’re involved because you want all the best ideas in there.

Chandra Janakiraman: Yep.

Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, cool. What comes next?

Chandra Janakiraman: Then the next step is the document writing. This is sort of a solo activity that the PM should take on, but the great news is the PM is not starting from scratch. There’s so much great stuff to write. If you remember, there’s a ton of user insights, a ton of behavioral insights, a ton of competitive analysis. There’s the three strategic pillars, how might we’s, winning aspiration. There’s a whole bunch of illustrative concepts.

Oftentimes, product leads have this sort of creator’s block. That is solved here completely because you have a ton of great material. I have to tell you, it doesn’t make the job easier. You still have to weave together a good story. That’s why I think it takes a week or two. I think it’s really about combining, connecting and editing at this point and telling a cohesive story from all those components, but I think the building blocks are really solid and defensible.

Lenny Rachitsky: Is there a template or kind of sections you like to include in your strategy doc? As someone sits down and is trying to write this out, what do you want to see there as headings?

Chandra Janakiraman: I think you could almost take the building blocks as a little bit of a steer for the template. You start with the broader context where you talk about what the leaders kind of want from this overall effort. Then you get into key insights and analysis where you have user insights, behavioral insights, competitive analysis. Then you get into the strategic pillars and you explain them. You also explain why. In the appendix, you include the full table that you generated on day two of your strategy sprint. You include the full table in the appendix, including the criteria. That’s going to be really important because most people are going to ask, “Why did you pick these?” That’s basically sort of the defensibility.

Then you have the winning aspiration that’s very bold. It’s a big part of the heart of the deck, and you sort of embed the illustrative concepts into the actual each of the strategic pillars so that it flows well. Then finally, you end with some kind of alignment questions like, “Hey, do these feel right? Are there things we are missing?” So that it creates that framework for alignment in the subsequent meetings.

Lenny Rachitsky: I’m excited to chat with Christina Gilbert, the founder of OneSchema, one of our longtime podcast sponsors. Hi, Christina.

Christina Gilbert: Yes. Thank you for having me on, Lenny.

Lenny Rachitsky: What is the latest with OneSchema? I know you now work with some of my favorite companies, like Ramp, Vanta, Scale and Watershed. I heard that you just launched a new product.

… and to scale and watershed, I heard that you just launched a new product to help product teams import CSVs from especially tricky systems like ERPs.

Christina: Yes, so we just launched one scheme of file feeds, which allows you to build an integration with any system in 15 minutes, as long as you can export a CSV to an SFTP folder.

We see our customers all the time getting stuck with hacks and workarounds, and the product teams that we work with don’t have to turn down prospects because their systems are too hard to integrate with. We allow our customers to offer thousands of without involving their engineering team at all.

Lenny Rachitsky: 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?

Christina: 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.

Lenny Rachitsky: I know that importing incorrect data can cause all kinds of pain for your customers and quickly lose their trust. Christina, thank you for joining us, and if you want to learn more, head on over to oneschema.co. That’s oneschema.co.

I pulled up Playing to Win, which I know you also pull ideas from, and actually Roger Martin was on the podcast talking about this stuff. And one way I think about it as you’re describing a way to break up your strategy doc, is he has these five questions that you ask.

The first is actually what’s your winning aspiration? So I love that you’re pulling that in. This is one approach your doc would be. What’s your winning aspiration? Where will you play? What market are you going after? How will you win? What capabilities must be in place for you to win? And then what management systems are required?

We’ll link to this framework just in case people want that as a crutch in their thinking strategy, but is there anything that we 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.

Chandra Janakiraman: I’m happy to share of the flowchart of the process and the template as well.

Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome. Okay. So this is how long of a process, this writing of the document?

Chandra Janakiraman: It’s about one to two weeks, and I think it’s mostly solo work and hopefully by the end of it there’s a very tight doc, and that’s what we use to roll out.

Lenny Rachitsky: 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…

Chandra Janakiraman: I would minimize pulling them in, because they’ve all contributed so much to the process already. So, I would say that at the end of it, obviously, once you have a draft, it’s good to share with them, but I wouldn’t tap their cycles too much at this point, because they’ve given a lot already.

Lenny Rachitsky: I see. Okay.

And how many pages do you see this doc being, roughly? What’s a heuristic?

Chandra Janakiraman: It’s not too long. I would say probably three or four pages and then an appendix has a lot of additional… Like, the table I spoke about and a lot of additional maybe illustrative concepts. Maybe you can only use a few illustrative concepts in the main section so that there could be others there.

I think usually there’s a desire from leaders to say, “Okay, what are we building next?” And it’s important not to include 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 even though there’s interest, maybe sometimes you can include a illustrative roadmap in the appendix, but I would try to keep it clean and try to keep it focused on just the strategy.

Lenny Rachitsky: So at this point you 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 how many weeks in this is. This is like six-ish weeks of work and you’ve got a strategy for your company/product?

Chandra Janakiraman: That’s exactly right. So I think you’re probably in the last two to three weeks of the process, and pretty important final step is the rollout, and I would start with what I call gatekeepers. And these are people who are absolutely… You have to get their one-on-one alignment and blessing on this before it moves forward. And it’s probably not too many, probably two or three people. So I would pre-flight it with them and get their alignment.

Lenny Rachitsky: So these are one-on-one meetings with these gatekeepers?

Chandra Janakiraman: These are one-on-one meetings. Exactly.

And then there’s a larger group of what I call key stakeholders, people who are impacted by it, different functional leaders, et cetera. And that can be done either async or through a group review. And then there’s probably a rolling of list of team roadshows. There’s different ways to do this, but the one that I feel is most effective is the roadshow where you have about eight to 10 people in each session, so people feel more comfortable to ask questions and it’s more conversational.

So the purpose of this stage is to land it. It’s not to seek too much feedback, so it’s a delicate balance. At the same time, you don’t want to appear just being too inflexible. So it’s a very delicate balance. When people ask questions, you can clarify it, and you can add clarifications to the doc, but I wouldn’t change… The most important thing, three strategic pillars, I wouldn’t change that. I would defend it using the framework, but if people are like, “there’s really good arguments about the criteria that led to your ranking,” then it’s okay to reconsider it. I’ve not seeing it happen in my five to six attempts, but it’s possible, theoretically possible.

Lenny Rachitsky: The core of this approach it sounds like, is you’ve done a lot of the pre-work where you land in a generally correct place.

Okay, so this is the rollout. So what I’m thinking as you talk, say you’re like a PM on a team, say you’re working on privacy, it’s like an IC, your ICPM, working on strategy. How do you think about including, say, your manager because through this process, when do you start to like, “Hey, here’s what we’re planning, here’s what we’re thinking,” making sure they’re on board? Because I could see this working team off to the side working, working, working. “Okay, we’re ready to roll it out.” Oftentimes there’s like, “No, wait. There’s all this other stuff happening at the company, we don’t have resources.” Where do you loop them in? How do you think about that kind of stakeholder?

Chandra Janakiraman: The the more attuned PMs who understand organizational dynamics, probably keep the manager pretty in sync through the process. I think, definitely, the manager becomes a person who you interview as part of the leadership interviews, so you know what the manager’s looking for from the effort.

And then once you get to the strategic pillars on day two of the strategy sprint, you probably want to just quickly pre-flight it with the manager and say, “Hey, look, this is how it’s trending, and these are the things we are probably not going to do” and any issues with that. And then eventually you actually want your manager to support you in some of these bigger meetings, so you enlist their help. So I would say that it’s probably each individual style, but I would keep them pretty aligned through the process. But you don’t have to be too heavy [inaudible 01:01:23], just be super light.

Lenny Rachitsky: Great. Makes a lot of sense to me. There’s like a…

We’re not going to solve everyone’s problems with this one framework, maybe just quickly touch on resourcing. As you think about this. Like a part of a strategy includes like, oh, we also need these resources. Just any thoughts on how to include that? And then I want to get into some examples of how you’ve actually implemented this.

Chandra Janakiraman: So I actually don’t recommend thinking about resources in the strategy phase, because what you’re saying is, “these are the areas of focus” and the resourcing question becomes more relevant from a road mapping standpoint.

Because then you say, “Okay, what percentage of our engineering do we put on strategic pillar A, versus B, versus C? And what are the specific things we build?” So it becomes a road-mapping question as opposed to a strategy question.

Lenny Rachitsky: And so by the end of this, the rollout, the part of the rollout is developing the actual roadmap. We’re not going to get deep into that. That could be part two, solve every PM’s problems, teach them all the steps of the process, but we’re going to cut it off at, here’s you have a strategy that is starting to be rolled out.

Chandra Janakiraman: Exactly.

Lenny Rachitsky: Cool.

Let’s go through a couple examples where you actually move into this to make this even more real. I know there’s a couple companies you were thinking about sharing, strategies you worked on.

Chandra Janakiraman: I think there’s just three quick notes to close off this process and I’ll share two examples, Lenny.

Lenny Rachitsky: Perfect.

Chandra Janakiraman: So the reason I think this process works, the first is because there is a ton of alignment built in within team alignment and leadership alignment built in. And it’s not seen as, “Oh, this PM went off and wrote this strategy doc and I don’t agree with most of it.” And part of this is actually very…

It goes back to human psychology of just something that comes from you, feels a lot more familiar and easy to accept. So this doc is actually not from the PM, the PM is facilitating it, but it’s actually from the strategy working group. And the strategy working group are the leads of the team. And so it’s actually… And the leadership inputs have been baked in, so it’s actually very team representative. And so hopefully there isn’t too much misalignment when you roll it out. And I have seen that, I’ve seen that work out.

The second is there’s just better results. You get to better problem articulation, you get a better strategic pillar, because there’s just more minds on it than if it was just a product lead.

And the third thing is you have clearly defensible criteria and outputs, and if you want to change it, like I said, you have to go back to the criteria and the scoring and then say, “Okay, why do we believe this has to be changed?” And even a change is easy to justify once you do that. So it creates a lot of benefits, but ultimately, and we’ll get to this a little bit more, it has to be tested with execution, and that’s the most important thing.

Lenny Rachitsky: I think it’s important to highlight, no framework playbook [inaudible 01:04:26] method is going to guarantee you have the correct strategy that will win and your company will thrive. It’s always just the best effort at plan.

As the quote, “no good plan survives first contact with the customer.”

Chandra Janakiraman: Exactly.

Lenny Rachitsky: Cool. Let’s talk through some examples.

Chandra Janakiraman: so the first example I wanted to talk about is at Zynga. I was at Zynga a very long time ago, and this was 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 a entry-level PM, but the kind of strategic clarity there was really, really impressive and it was very evident and observable from all the games.

So if you look at all the games, there were three elements that were very common across all the games. The first was viral game loops. There’s these game loops that just required you to have a social and active social network to be successful and play, and it was very tightly and fictionally integrated into the core of the gameplay. That was the first one.

The second one was there was this idea of paying to complete things. So you’re not paying to skip a whole experience, what you’re paying is just to complete it. So what happens then is different people, depending on how much time they have, complete different percentages of a progression task, or a part of the gameplay, and you only had to pay the rest to get through the experience. And it was this interesting experience where people put a lot of investment into it, and they didn’t mind paying for the last 20% or 30%, which was very interesting, because it created this market for different elasticity of spend, different times that people had in their lives. And it was very, very clever. So that was again, very common across all the games.

And then the third was network. So all of Zynga games had this cross-promotional component at the top of the game and they would promote other games, and it’s like the Zynga network was the most important thing, and not an individual game. And those were the three in our parlance now strategic pillars, and there were non-focus areas. It wasn’t like…

The focus wasn’t on high-fidelity graphics, it wasn’t on complex game mechanics, and this was extremely clear and hard-coded into the company culture and operations. And it was perfectly tuned to the environment at the time. Facebook platform afforded strong support with social graph, and channels, and basically the game studios contributed through different games in a very network accretive way.

So for example, I was at Zynga San Diego, and we took the company into net new game genres like action strategy, match three puzzle games, but we stayed true to the strategic pillars of the company, and we had to invent new mechanics so that the strategic pillars would work in the new genres that we introduced to the company. And what was fascinating is the company actually had systems to reinforce these strategic pillars.

And, for example, the data infrastructure was very incredible at the time, and really reinforced these strategic pillars. There was this function called Central Product Management, which basically propagated best practices, made sure that games were network accretive and all these things worked in harmony to enhance those strategic pillars and reinforce it, and it worked really well. The company, if I remember right, got to a billion dollars, it was the fastest to get to a billion dollars in the history of companies at the time.

Lenny Rachitsky: In revenue.

Chandra Janakiraman: In revenue.

And it worked really well until the environment changed and there was a shift to mobile. And temporarily… Basically, if you go back to that resonance concept, that deep resonance between the product and the market was temporarily lost once that shift happened to mobile.

Lenny Rachitsky: 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, this lasted a long time for Zynga. And so I think it’s important to remember the work you’re doing here, even though…

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. In this case, these three elements for Zynga. And by the way, these three pillars, they didn’t emerge from this method, but it helped you see the power of being very clear…

Chandra Janakiraman: Clear, exactly.

Lenny Rachitsky: And having everything centered around, we all agree, these are the three ways we win. Okay, cool. And then I think the number three, again, I just want to highlight the power of just very few bets in investments. So it’s always three. I’ve always suggested three as well. Some people are like, “three to five,” but I think it’s… You just find, in general, three is the right number as much? Try very, very hard to make it three?

Chandra Janakiraman: I agree.

Lenny Rachitsky: 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. Network, powers of apps driving other apps, paying to complete, these are things Zynga has figured out, “this is how we” win versus other products in the market.

Chandra Janakiraman: Totally.

Lenny Rachitsky: Sweet. Anything else along those lines with Zynga?

Chandra Janakiraman: That was in hindsight reflection, Lenny, I was pretty naive when I was there, and I realized how… And this was, in fact, what led to my blind spot when I joined Headspace from Zynga, that you even need a strategy. That’s the story 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 applied that strategy. And so it was a net new muscle I had to develop when I got to Headspace.

Lenny Rachitsky: It’s like that parable of the fish swimming in the water where the older fish swims by and he’s like, “How’s the water?” And they’re like, “Hmm?” And then he leaves and he’s like, “What’s water?” You just don’t realize what you’re in. You don’t realize what you’re surrounded by until it’s gone.

Chandra Janakiraman: Exactly.

Lenny Rachitsky: Maybe one other thing I just want to highlight while we’re on this topic is just the power of focus. In the case of Zynga, just this focus on everything we do needs to get these things, these three things, everything we do, we need to do in order to win. And I think that’s a recurring theme in what you’re talking about, is just focus. The steps of the process are focus on this one part for now. So I think that’s a really interesting thread is just the power of focus.

Chandra Janakiraman: Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, cool.

And now you have another example of your time at Meta.

Chandra Janakiraman: At Meta there’s this fascinating example, which I think illustrates a different point, which is…

Basically I was standing up the product strategy for a couple of product growth teams in Reality Labs, Oculus, which was coming up with the Quest II at the time. This is a standalone headset, and then Portal, which was our video conferencing product. And we stood up these teams to go after product growth, which is basically driving hardware sales through software features. And we went through this process that I just described. We stood up strategic pillars, and the strategic pillars were fairly similar for both Portal, which is our video conferencing product, and Oculus.

Lenny Rachitsky: I love Portal by the way. I was a big fan of… Sad that it’s no longer around.

Chandra Janakiraman: And that led to features that are known to everybody, like the Oculus Referrals Program, the Portal Memories Integration, where you see one of your Facebook memories on the Portal, sponsored ad in your Facebook feed. And also we had this section on the Facebook app, which is also from Facebook at the time, and then eventually also from Meta, which is these other products from the Facebook ecosystem. And all those came out of that effort.

And about 18 months into it, they actually had very different outcomes. So on one hand the Oculus effort was incredibly successful, and we graduated it into the VR division at Meta, and till today it continues to be an incredibly successful effort. The Portal effort actually didn’t move the needle as much as we wanted to, and we sunset it, and we basically redeployed that team to other initiatives. And that’s super interesting. Basically it was like the same strategy process. We got the nearly identical strategic pillars, but eventually completely different outcomes.

And I think that that illustrates the most important point about strategy, which is intrinsically strategy has no business value. It’s basically a document with a few words. And I think it starts accumulating value as you generate business impact and results. And that happens when you actually test strategy with execution.

And so ultimately any strategy is only as good as the results it produces. And so one has to have the intellectual honesty, and the humility, and the courage to say when it’s working and when it’s not. And sometimes what happens is parts of your strategy might work, parts might not, and you have to pivot away from some and double down on some. But I do think there’s that evaluation that’s really critical and testing strategy with execution.

Lenny Rachitsky: Such a great point. Just a strategy sitting there in a doc is worthless, where the worth comes from, is it actually having impact and being successful. Makes me think about a product manager also, just a PM is not worth anything until they help you drive impact.

I think an important, to trickle down from that point, is that you don’t want to spend too long just thinking about strategy, you want to spend as little time as possible to get to a strong hypothesis, basically to start learning if this is the right path. And so I love that your approach is like this middle ground between give it real time, but don’t spend three, four or five months working on this one document that just maybe one day you’ll use.

Chandra Janakiraman: Exactly.

And there is room for a six-month process, which we’ll get to in a moment. But for small S I wouldn’t recommend more than two or three months.

Lenny Rachitsky: And again, small S strategy is for a couple of years out, not like Exactly. It’s like a timeframe. Okay, cool.

Okay. Anything else along those lines of the examples of Meta or Zynga?

Chandra Janakiraman: Those are pretty good lessons I would say.

Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, sweet.

So, let’s talk about big-S strategy. When should you approach strategy this way and what are just the steps of it?

Chandra Janakiraman: So everything we’ve spoken about so far is what I would call small S, and it’s very problem focused. It’s basically what I call present forward.

It’s like you have something, you have a product out there, it has a bunch of problems. How do we make it better for… What are the areas we tackle for maximum impact? Typically led by product managers. And there’s this interesting quote by Elon Musk, which is, “Life has to be about more than just solving problems.” And he says it in the context of the aspiration to become a multi-planetary species, but I think this is true of every company, big or small. And there needs to be an aspirational and cool component to strategy. And I call this big-S strategy.

I’ll run through this at a higher level because I think this is a little bit more fluid in how you build the big-S strategy. And it typically takes longer, potentially up to about six months. The approach is a bit different from small S. And you start with the company mission and vision, and there is a little bit of groundwork that is done on 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 leadership interviews, but with a different goal of generating long-term futures.

And some of the questions you can ask during these interviews are “What does a day in the life of a user look like in five years? What does the product look like in five to 10 years? Why is the world better in 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, three cohesive holes.

And what I mean by that is three, at least fairly distinct, descriptions of the future. So to give you almost a very simple example, imagine you doing big S for the future of travel. You could have a future that is talking all about fully autonomous travel, where there’s very little human involvement in going from A to B. You could talk about another future where there’s extreme speed, where you can get from A to B really fast across the world that is really fast. You could talk about a third where there is no travel, it’s virtual travel, and you still have the feeling of travel, and you accomplish the same goals.

But those are different futures, they have different properties, like different elements to them. And once you generate those distinct futures, you actually generate prototypes with learning goals. And think of these prototypes as concept cars. And the automobile industry uses this notion of concept cars. Concept cars, the interesting thing about concept cars is they’re never commercialized. They’re often produced for inspiration, and to potentially take some part of them, like maybe a technology or a feature, and that is brought into mainstream production.

So think of these prototypes as these concept cars that really drive inspiration and potentially give you some small nuggets that you can run with. And then you start doing research with them with potential users, you answer key questions, and you uncover certain elements that resonate with people. So you eliminate a whole bunch of stuff, you combine a whole bunch of stuff, and you establish some winning components that are interesting.

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 testing your way into and understanding if it works from a scalable standpoint. And this whole thing is typically led not by the PM team, but by design and UXR. And intentionally it’s a little bit more open-ended and green field. And it actually is a very different mind space that people have when they approach big. 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, Lenny. And they are run as parallel work streams. The product management team is leading the charge of 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 work streams is really exciting and really different. And so we are building the bridge from both sides and both work streams ultimately flow into one roadmap. It’s almost like two tributaries that ultimately merge into one river. That’s how I would think about it.

Lenny Rachitsky: There’s so many things here that are so…

Chandra Janakiraman: That’s how I would think about it.

Lenny Rachitsky: There’s so many things here that are so interesting. One is we’ve had this conversation on the podcast a couple of times, this point that people think and see the world differently. Some people are very open-minded and creative, and think big, blue sky people. Some people, me, just like, “What are we doing next? How do we move this metric? Let’s talk about concrete things that we can do?” For this big S approach, I think what I’m hearing is make sure the people leading it are very open-minded, creative, blue sky type people. If you’re the person that’s like, “How will this move our metric?” Maybe you shouldn’t be leading it and give someone else the reins.

Cool. And then with these timelines of doing both at once, it’s probably hard to align them fully. So what I’m hearing is it’s like these are kind of ongoing sometimes.

Chandra Janakiraman: Correct.

Lenny Rachitsky: And they’ll both inform what you’re doing. You don’t need to have this perfect timeline of-

Chandra Janakiraman: I agree to this. Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky: Sweet. And the big thinking I love, because sometimes, you may experience this, designers often are like, “Oh, we just work on all this boring, incremental optimization stuff. I want to think bigger.” Which is great, and this is a really good lever to allow for that in a contained environment. Cool. Let’s just go crazy. Let’s think about what this could be in the future. Still, let’s make sure we’re moving some metrics short-term, but let’s give us opportunity to think big. And oftentimes the biggest ideas come out of that. So I love it’s giving space for both types of thinking, thinking bigger and thinking long term.

Anything else about these two methods that might be interesting to share? Otherwise, I want to talk about AI a little bit, just how that impacts things and a couple other things.

Chandra Janakiraman: Yeah, yeah. I’ll end on one short sort of note on how this all feels when you do it, and then we can segue into AI-

Lenny Rachitsky: Great, great.

Chandra Janakiraman: … Lenny. So I think that whether it’s big S or small S, these are incredibly satisfying processes to go through in the end. So once you get to the end, they’re incredibly deeply satisfying. But with anything in life that is very deeply satisfying at the end, they have a ton of challenge, frustration, and dead ends while you go through it where you kind of get a lot of self-doubt like, “Hey, will you ever reach the end?” And I just want to sort of normalize that. That’s actually normal and I want people to expect that as they go through it. And I think that’s what makes it even more rewarding when you get to that sort of point where you start to see things connecting.

The second thing is I would say that the person who’s leading the charge on these efforts has to be really good at connecting diverse viewpoints and keeping them all moving forward. And it’s not easy, it’s very hard because sometimes you have people who take you in different directions and you have to keep it all hanging together.

So in terms of picking people who have that skill, who are good integrators, who are good connect the dots, I think it’s critical for these to be successful. And in some ways low ego because it’s not like… They do get to introduce their own ideas, but truly, it’s about bringing the team together. So that’s the skill that you should look for for these leads.

And then the third piece is I would say that I would just approach these with a little bit of a lighter touch and more playful sort of approach, because it’s an intensive process, it’s a long process. And people can get tired, they can find it grindy. So just having a little bit of playfulness along the way goes a long way in making it feel more tolerable for the people going through it. So those are some thoughts about either of these processes.

Lenny Rachitsky: That was really important context, especially this will be frustrating throughout. It sounds really beautiful and great and smooth as you describe it. In reality, there’s a lot of pain that goes into… Because you’re making hard decisions. A lot of people have opinions, they have perspectives, there’s data that’s… Rarely is there clear answer from the beginning, so I think that’s really important context.

I wanted to actually come back to your point you made about how Elon made this point about life shouldn’t just be about solving problems. I think part of that quote is just like we should work on things that are awesome and exciting and inspiring, that aren’t just immediately pain solvers. And he’s very good at that, just inspiring people to what could be, and we should be thinking much bigger than we are.

I was actually at an interview with Zuck where he said the same thing. He’s probably inspired by Elon. He’s like, “I’ve just gotten to a point in my career where I want to work on awesome stuff, stuff that is just awe inspiring, not just-

Chandra Janakiraman: Exactly.

Lenny Rachitsky: … another social feature.” so I think that’s a really important point. And there’s a lot of power in that. People get really excited about holy moly, I did not imagine this is what Headspace could become, what VRChat could become, what Meta could become. It’s just really powerful, getting people really inspired. And I love this process they shared of how to do that.

And I didn’t actually summarize it, so I have it right here in front of me. I’ll just share the five steps of the biggest process. So it’s preparation, mission, you figure [inaudible 01:26:10] mission, vision, trends, interview people about where they think things are going. Then you come up with three distinct futures of what the future might look like if you were to do the things you’re thinking. Then you build prototypes of what might this look like? And then you actually test these in your product, which I love, to start de-risking these ideas. That helps you converge to here’s actual plan we want to execute, and then you turn that into roadmap.

Chandra Janakiraman: Yeah, yeah. And the first testing of the prototypes is with UXR, so it’s more sort of concept testing or prototype testing with a handful of users. And then you use that as synthesizing to a live product test.

Lenny Rachitsky: Great. Basically, it’s like big ideas and then de-risking, validating them along the way-

Chandra Janakiraman: Exactly.

Lenny Rachitsky: … in various ways to like, “Okay, maybe this could actually work. Let’s try.” Sweet. Okay, so just two more things. One is I want to talk about AI briefly, of how that impacts this work. And then two, just maybe a recap of the framework for people that are listening, you’re like, “Oh my god, I have so much. I wrote all these notes.” Let’s give them a summary so they could remember to use it.

Okay, cool. So let’s talk about AI briefly. How has AI tooling helped you evolve this process? How can people use AI to make this easier?

Chandra Janakiraman: So the first disclaimer is I’m not sort of an AI futurist, but I read all the emerging stuff that’s coming out, most of the emerging stuff that’s coming out and use some of the tools. And it’s fascinating what’s happening. And I think it will definitely have an impact on strategy formulation. So what I’ll share is what resonates for me in the context of strategy formulation with AI.

So right away, I think the basic idea is everybody should be using assistance in the strategy formulation process with the basic tools that we have. And there are two ways to get AI to assist you in the strategy formulation process. The first is to support the preparation phase in terms of research. And this could be competitive analysis and, for example, you could do trend analysis from a vast library of competitors’ release notes. And you can sort of say, “Okay, what are the themes of investment of a competitor’s release notes?” Or you could do a reviews analysis of a competitor product and sort of understand what’s resonating for users, what’s not. And you could also ask a tool like ChatGPT to do a head-to-head comparison between a few players on a certain dimension and really give you a heat map of how they all stack up. And you could also ask an open-ended question like, “Hey, why is this new product so successful? Why is it getting so many users?” And there’s some good hypothesis that you usually get. So really leverage in sort of the preparation phase from a competitive analysis standpoint.

The second one is in this idea called generating mock strategies. And I know Claire Rowe at your summit spoke about this, and I think this is absolutely right and should be a critical input into the strategy process, which is asking these tools for a mock strategy. And I call this a mock strategy because it’s kind of almost the answer but not quite the answer. So what I’ve found is that these mock strategies, like let’s say I support VRChat now and I ask it like, “Hey, what should VRChat do? How should we grow?” And it generates a mock strategy.

What I’ve found is that it’s, one, surprisingly good. It’s incredibly well-informed and well-articulated. I’ve also found that its biggest strength is also somewhat its weakness, which is these mock strategies tend to be pretty comprehensive and extensive, and there’s an investment recommendation in a vast number of areas. So basically, if you remember, the core of strategy is really to be very targeted and to be very focused. So these mock strategies become an interesting input and the burden is still on the team to down-select into the most important areas for investment. So forcing that choice still, I think, is a human element and needs that layer of additional judgment, which is very context specific to the company. So this is sort of right away, I think people should be doing this.

I think more medium term and probably not too distant future and likely sooner than we all think, there’s probably going to be, sort of the model that resonates with me is sort of the multi-agent model, which is you probably have different components of the strategy workflow automated. So you probably have a strategy agent, you probably have a roadmap or feature agent, you have maybe a engineering agent, and these can communicate amongst each other to cycle through results and iterate. And I think Armand Ruiz from IBM has some good definitional frameworks on some of the stuff. He shares it often on LinkedIn.

But let’s take a simple example. I can easily imagine something like this for a topic like onboarding. So every company and product team obsesses about their onboarding experience. And today, there are advanced experimentation frameworks. So imagine you’re expecting a large surge in traffic. There’s these sort of experimental frameworks like multi-armed bandits that can really help you get to the optimal sort of variation very quickly in real time. And there are variations of that, like contextual multi-armed bandits, there’s combinatorial bandits.

But the interesting thing is they still rely on human design of the variations, the different variations that you test. Even though the experimentation framework is very sophisticated, the variations are still human generated. Now imagine if those variations could actually be generated through generative AI and could be plugged into the advanced experimentation frameworks. The possibilities become infinite. And really, you might be surprised by what you find is the winning onboarding experience that you couldn’t even have humanly imagined. And it might be different for every user, different for every sort of territory, etc.

Lenny Rachitsky: That is such a cool idea, I just want to say. This agent that’s just running, thinking about ways to optimize your onboarding, coming up with concepts that you probably review, like, “Cool, let’s try it.” And then it does it, ships an experiment to run it and just is constantly optimizing your onboarding. Holy shit, that’s an awesome idea. I think everyone will have this.

And then what that makes me think there’s going to be some company that’s built the best onboarding agent. That’s what you’re going to be paying for.

Chandra Janakiraman: Totally. Totally.

Lenny Rachitsky: Oh my god, that’s so good. Okay. Great. Great idea.

Chandra Janakiraman: Yeah, yeah. So then the question becomes, hey, what is our job? Our job becomes architecting bigger and bigger pieces of the product to take advantage of these agents. And there will be a sequential increase in the complexity of workloads that get automated over time. Onboarding is probably relatively on the easier side in terms of complexity of workload. And you get into deeper experiences, eventually AI will get there.

So funnily enough, when that happens, some of the manual processes I describe about will seem archaic. But I think the fundamentals will still have a long shelf life, and as you think about these automated frameworks as well.

Lenny Rachitsky: Man, this could be its own podcast. I have this whole post about how AI, how PMs are the best position, role in tech to thrive in a world of AI, which I’ll link to that makes people, I find, feel better when they hear you talk about how much might get done through agents in AI.

The other quick thought I had, and I want to get to the wrap up, is I have this ongoing debate with a friend about strategy in AI. My feeling is in theory, an AI tool will be incredibly good at coming up with your strategy for you because it’s just, here’s all the data, here’s everything you need to know, how do we win? And to me, that feels like the ultimate way AI is good, is just here’s data, here’s what I found as a path to a winning. But my friend’s also arguing that’s the one thing that AI will be least good at because that’s where we need people and context and discussion, all these things.

I don’t know, it’s like one or the other. Either AI will be incredibly good at helping you figure out your strategy or the worst.

Chandra Janakiraman: Interesting.

Lenny Rachitsky: I’m curious. I’m curious, I guess, do you have any quick thoughts on that? Where do you side?

Chandra Janakiraman: I think there is a crossover point where the human judgment will be inferior to something that’s able to process multiple signals simultaneously. There’s an element of lateral thinking as well here, and I’ll sort of share a simple example.

For those who drive Tesla cars with the fully self-driving capabilities, when you make a turn, humans have this fairly narrow field of vision. So you have to look both ways and you have to make a decision combining both those signals, right? Whereas the car has six cameras, which is simultaneously processing and it can make a decision not in sequence, but in parallel. And it moves with confidence at turnings because of that. So there is this crossover point where some of these, the ability to hold multiple signals in the head, it’s going to be more… It’s going to be stronger.

Lenny Rachitsky: That makes total sense. What it makes me think about, there’s going to be a strategy agent just sitting around always looking for ways to improve your strategy and point you all in a different direction. Oh my god, future is wild, as I’ve said before.

Okay, let’s do a quick wrap up of the process for folks that are taking notes and they’re like, “Cool, here’s the overview.” So let’s just do that and then let’s go to get to the exciting lightning round.

Chandra Janakiraman: I think the quick recap of everything we’ve covered is that product strategy definitionally sits between mission vision at the top and plan at the bottom. So it sits between those two either at the company level or at the team level. What it does is it forces choice to deploy scarce resources towards maximum impact. And think about the frequency selection and resonance as an analogy, and it ideally includes three components. A handful of areas to focus on, which we call strategic pillars, and several areas that are explicitly not the focus and why. That’s really it in terms of what product strategy is.

There is a smallest flavor of it which focuses on solving problems. It’s what I call present forward, and it typically operates in a two-year horizon. We use a five-stage process to get there, and it takes about eight to 12 weeks. There is a biggest process that focuses on an aspirational future, is future backward and typically has a three, five, 10-year horizon, also a five-stage process, and can be ongoing up to a six-month period to give it enough space to generate something exciting.

And the roadmap for the company or the team is built from a combination of smallest and biggest work, which is like building a bridge from both sides of a river. And ultimately, any strategy is only as good as the results it can produce. So test and iterate through execution and double down on what’s working and pivot away from what’s not.

Lenny Rachitsky: Incredible. I’m glad we did that. Anything else that you want to share or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round?

Chandra Janakiraman: Just all the best with strategy work and ultimately individual and business success.

Lenny Rachitsky: Amazing. And when I asked you at the beginning, before we started recording, what your goal was for this conversation, your answer was just to create a ripple of success across companies and teams, and I feel like we’ve done that.

Chandra Janakiraman: Thank you.

Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. With that, we’ve reached our very exciting lightning ground. Chandra, are you ready?

Chandra Janakiraman: Yes.

Lenny Rachitsky: Let’s do it. First question, what are two or three books that you’ve recommended most to other people?

Chandra Janakiraman: Yeah, I love books on creativity and innovation, Lenny, and some of my classic favorites are Walt Disney’s biography. And there’s several out there, but I think the one that I like the most is the Triumph of the American Imagination. And what’s interesting is it talks about how Walt Disney actually loved the theme parks more than the movies. And the reason for that was he could actually tinker with the theme parks. He could make changes to where the rides were, he could change rides in and out, and then he could observe real sort of changes to reactions of people flowing into the theme parks, which he couldn’t do with the movies because once it was produced, it was done, it was out of his control. And it was interesting, he was basically A-B testing long before the term was coined. And it’s just a fascinating look into how his brain worked, way ahead of its time.

The other classic is Ed Catmull’s Creativity Inc, and it talks about all the negative forces that eat away at creativity in an organization. How do you, as the leader, have to keep them at bay and make sure the team can innovate?

And then there’s this probably less popular book, but really good one from Tom Kelly of IDEO, which is The Ten Faces of Innovation. It talks about different archetypes that you need on the team that are essential for creating something special. And you actually need, I think there’s the devil’s advocate, you need the researcher, you need the ethnographer, you need the stage setter. There’s all these interesting personalities that you need to actually make something successful. So I would say those are some of the ones that I usually recommend, yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky: That’s a really cool… That third book is really interesting, I haven’t heard of that. And Creativity Inc, something I want to highlight real quick is to your point, that a lot of it is how to avoid killing good ideas. And my favorite metaphor from that book is the ugly baby metaphor where every new idea is an ugly baby that people just want to get rid of. Get rid of this ugly baby, we don’t want this around here. And just every new idea is ugly when it starts, and you need to protect the ugly baby, basically. Although I don’t know who’s hurting ugly babies, that’s not-

Chandra Janakiraman: Yeah, yeah, it feels a bit… Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky: Feels aggressive.

Chandra Janakiraman: Harsh.

Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah, harsh. Yeah. But it’s memorable because I’ve never forgotten that.

Okay, next question. Is there a favorite recent movie or TV show you really enjoyed?

Chandra Janakiraman: Yeah, yeah. We watch a lot of animated films with the kids. But were a couple of good movies this year. We really liked If, Imaginary Friend, it’s about growing up and forgetting these memories of your younger days, is was a really nice movie. And then of course, we enjoyed Dune II as well. It was a fun watch. But most of our time is dominated by the kids sort of animated folks at home or the cinema.

Lenny Rachitsky: There’s a new Dune TV show, I don’t know if you’ve been watching it. It just started recently on HBO. It’s not the best thing in the world, but it gets you a little Dune fix-

Chandra Janakiraman: Interesting.

Lenny Rachitsky: … in between movies. I think there’s a third movie coming out.

Chandra Janakiraman: I see.

Lenny Rachitsky: Third question, do you have a favorite product you recently discovered that you really love?

Chandra Janakiraman: Yeah, yeah. I’ve been playing this cute little game for the last few days. It’s called Capybara Go! It’s a tab-based strategy RPG game. It’s got really humorous writing and this cute capybara that goes off on an adventure. It’s very well-paced and it’s a very well-produced game. It’s one game I’ve been playing recently.

I’ve also been poking around Bluesky. Bluesky is interesting. I haven’t gotten into a habit yet, but it’s super interesting concept of empowering the community with these community-generated feeds. It’s very different experience. But it’s also interesting, there’s a trade-off with the simplicity of the product and what you get with the additional complexity. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out, how it scales.

Lenny Rachitsky: Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to, find useful in work or in life?

Chandra Janakiraman: So there was this 1995 interview of Steve Jobs where he talks about this idea of there’s a tremendous amount of craftsmanship between a great idea and a great product, and it sort of stuck with me over the years. And the simple way to think about that is it takes a lot of effort to make something special. And conversely, if it’s easy, it’s probably not that special or not that great. And it’s something that I sort of think about when we build product, is there sufficient pain here where it’s sort of a proxy for, are we creating something great, is interesting.

Lenny Rachitsky: Wow. It makes me think about founder mode a little bit. Like people talk about founder mode. The reason founder mode I think is important is the people that are most committed and passionate and driven to go through that pain and continue to make it… To take it from just an ugly baby idea to an awesome winning product oftentimes needs to be the founder. And that’s why I think it’s kind of emerged as a trend is it’s important to have that drive, to just-

Chandra Janakiraman: Surely. Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky: … continue to refine it and not just like, “I had the idea, go build it now.”

Okay, final question. You have an amazing background behind you. [inaudible 01:44:31] if people are on YouTube, it’s just a beautiful book background, a bunch of objects and books. I’m curious if there’s an object on there or a book on there that might be fun to highlight that you’re especially into or proud of. And feel free to turn around if you want to look around. Curious if there’s one thing that stands out, like, “Oh, here’s this thing, [inaudible 01:44:48].”

Chandra Janakiraman: Oh, well, it’s the picture of my kids right in the center, which is without doubt the most important and memorable thing there. It’s also caught it a unique time when they were incredibly… They were sort of super embracing each other and it’s a phase where they’ve grown out of it. Now there’s a lot more, I think rivalry and then sibling tussles. But that moment is my favorite.

I also have a bunch of fun stuff, like a big sort of Snoopy fan, and so it is… Also a big Beetles fan, so that picture is actually an interesting blend between Snoopy walking, crossing the road and then the Beetles crossing the other way. And then a bunch of books that are more memorable over the years. You’ll see Creativity Inc there, you’ll see The Ten Phases of Innovation, all of that.

Lenny Rachitsky: Amazing. Thank you for sharing… Your kids’ photo’s blocked when you’re in the center, so it’s like a little Easter egg. Thank you for sharing that. Chandra, this was incredible. It was everything I was hoping it’d be. I think we’re going to create that ripple that you were hoping for.

Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out? And how can listeners be useful to you?

Chandra Janakiraman: A reasonable choice would be LinkedIn to reach me, and I really, like you and I discussed earlier, I’d be really happy if this creates that kind of ripple effect of successes, both for individuals and for products. And I want everybody to think of this, the stuff I shared as a bit of an open source model. So test some of the concepts, modify it, remix it, and share what worked or did not. And ultimately, that’s what makes it all interesting is the community owns it ultimately, and it doesn’t belong to one individual. That’s what would make me super happy.

Lenny Rachitsky: Amazing. Chandra, thank you so much for being here.

Chandra Janakiraman: Thank you so much for having me, Lenny, and thanks for your service to the product community.

Lenny Rachitsky: Same to you. Bye everyone.

Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at LennysPodcast.com. See you in the next episode.

Glossary

English	中文
alignment	对齐
Armand Ruiz	Armand Ruiz
Bluesky	Bluesky
bullseye sprint	靶心冲刺（bullseye sprint）
Capybara Go!	Capybara Go!
Central Product Management	Central Product Management（中央产品管理）
Christina Gilbert	Christina Gilbert
Claire Rowe	Claire Rowe
CPO	CPO（首席产品官）
Creativity Inc	《创新公司》（Creativity Inc）
creator’s block	创作阻塞感
design sprint	设计冲刺（design sprint）
Ed Catmull	Ed Catmull
fertile questions	”沃土问题”（fertile questions）
founder mode	创始人模式（founder mode）
gatekeepers	守门人（gatekeepers）
Good Strategy, Bad Strategy	《好战略，坏战略》
Google Ventures	Google Ventures
Headspace	Headspace
how might we	”我们如何可能”（how might we）
ICP	ICP（理想客户画像）
IDEO	IDEO
illustrative concepts	说明性概念
key stakeholders	关键干系人
Lafley	Lafley
Make Time	Make Time
meta analysis	元分析
Michael Porter	Michael Porter
mock strategy	模拟战略（mock strategy）
multi-agent model	多智能体模型（multi-agent model）
natural frequency	固有频率
network accretive	对网络持续增值的
newspaper headline approach	报纸标题法
Oculus	Oculus
OneSchema	OneSchema
operator’s guide to strategy	运营者的策略指南
Playing to Win	《Playing to Win》
Portal	Portal
present forward	当下向前推演
Quest II	Quest II
Reality Labs	Reality Labs
resonance	共振
Richard Rumelt	Richard Rumelt
roadmap	路线图
roadshow	路演
Roger Martin	Roger Martin
rollout	推广（rollout）
small S / big S	small S / big S（小写 s 战略 / 大写 S 战略）
smallest strategy	最小化战略
Steve Jobs	Steve Jobs
strategic pillars	战略支柱
strategy working group	战略工作组
Sun Tzu	孙子
The Art of War	《孙子兵法》
The Ten Faces of Innovation	《创新的十张面孔》（The Ten Faces of Innovation）
Tom Kelly	Tom Kelly
Tomer Cohen	Tomer Cohen
Triumph of the American Imagination	《美国想象力的胜利》（Triumph of the American Imagination）
UXR	UXR（用户体验研究）
viral game loops	病毒式游戏循环
VP of product	产品副总裁
winning aspiration	制胜愿景（winning aspiration）

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Reformatted by reformat_english.py