💡

InsightHunt

Hunt the Insights

C

Chandra Janakiraman

Episode #54

Chief Product Officer & EVP

VRChat

🎯Product Strategy🚀Career & Leadership

📝Full Transcript

18,883 words
Chandra Janakiraman (00:00:00): I started noticing that there was a certain mystique and aura about product strategy. There was this perception that some people were intrinsically really good at strategy and others were not. It was almost as if there was a strategy gene you needed to be born with to be good at it. Lenny Rachitsky (00:00:16): Say someone's sitting down, okay, I'm going to start developing a strategy for our product. Where do you begin? What does this process look like? Chandra Janakiraman (00:00:23): 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. Lenny Rachitsky (00:00:49): Let's talk about big S strategy. When should you approach strategy this way? Chandra Janakiraman (00:00:53): There's this interesting quote by Elon Musk, which is- Elon Musk (00:00:56): "Life's got to be about more than just solving problems." Chandra Janakiraman (00:00:58): I think this is true of every sort of company. There needs to be an aspirational and cool component to strategy. What does the product look like in five to 10 years? Why is the world better in 10 years? And what is the most exciting version of that view? Lenny Rachitsky (00:01:15): 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 ...

💡 Key Takeaways

  • 1Strategy sits between Mission/Vision and the Plan (Roadmap); its primary function is to force choice on scarce resources.
  • 2Use the 'Fruit Story' approach with leadership: Ask stakeholders what 'fruit' (outcome) they want before you start building, rather than guessing and disappointing them.
  • 3A 'Small S' strategy typically takes 8-12 weeks to formulate and guides the product for 18-24 months.
  • 4Limit your strategy to exactly three 'Strategic Pillars' and explicitly list what you are NOT doing.
  • 5Ranking criteria for strategic bets: Expected Impact, Certainty of Impact, Clarity of Levers, and Uniqueness (can we do this better than anyone else?).
  • 6Use 'Mock Strategies' generated by AI to get a comprehensive list of potential investments, then apply human judgment to down-select.
  • 7Strategy is worthless until tested by execution; be willing to pivot if the 'Resonance' isn't there (as seen in the Portal vs. Quest example).

📚Methodologies (3)

The 'Small S' Strategy Playbook

by Chandra Janakiraman

🎯 Product Strategy

A structured 8-12 week 'Present Forward' process that derives strategy from existing problems. It utilizes a cross-functional working group to synthesize data, cluster problems into opportunities, and visualize the future state.

Core Principles

  • 1.**Phase 1: Preparation (4 Weeks):** Form a 'Strategy Working Group' (Eng, Design, Data) to compile a 'Comprehensive Prep Readout' containing behavioral insights, UXR meta-analysis, competitive stack charts, and leadership interviews.
  • 2.**Phase 2: The Strategy Sprint (1 Week):** Move from 'Problem Clusters' (what's wrong) to 'Opportunity Frames' (positive framing). Down-select to 3 pillars based on Impact, Certainty, Levers, and Uniqueness. Create 'How Might We' questions for each.
  • 3.**Phase 3: The Design Sprint (1 Week):** Do not design features. Instead, generate 'Illustrative Concepts'—visual artifacts that bring the strategic pillars to life so stakeholders can 'see' the strategy.
  • +1 more...

"Strategy forces choice to deploy scarce resources to generate maximum impact."

#'small#playbook#strategy
View Deep Dive →
🎯 Product Strategy

A 6-month, design-led 'Future Backward' process that looks 5-10 years out. It focuses on creating distinct, divergent futures and prototyping 'Concept Cars' to inspire the organization and uncover long-term trends.

Core Principles

  • 1.**Generate Distinct Futures:** Based on trends and leadership interviews, create 3 cohesive, distinct descriptions of the future (e.g., for travel: Autonomous vs. Speed vs. Virtual).
  • 2.**Concept Car Prototyping:** Build prototypes designed for learning and inspiration, not immediate commercialization. These are 'Concept Cars' that show what is possible.
  • 3.**Live Product Testing:** Take winning components from the prototypes and test them in the live product to validate viability.
  • +1 more...

"Life's got to be about more than just solving problems. There needs to be an aspirational and cool component to strategy."

#future-backward#strategy#product
View Deep Dive →
🚀 Career & Leadership

A pre-emptive interviewing technique used during the preparation phase of strategy work to extract the implicit preferences and 'pet ideas' of senior leaders.

Core Principles

  • 1.**Ask Before You Build:** Do not bring a mango (strategy) to a leader who hates fruit. Ask them what they like to eat first.
  • 2.**Extract Success/Failure Definitions:** Explicitly ask leaders: 'What does success feel like?' and 'What does failure look like?' regarding this product area.
  • 3.**Uncover the 'Pet Idea':** Leaders often hide their specific feature ideas to avoid seeming micromanage-y. Explicitly ask, 'Do you have a specific idea you've been thinking about?' to clear the air.
  • +1 more...

"Imagine if you just asked the reviewer, 'Do you even like fruits?' How much better the experience would've been for both parties."

#'fruit#interview'#stakeholder
View Deep Dive →
← Browse All Episodes