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Chandra Janakiraman

Chief Product Officer & EVP

VRChat

🎯 Product Strategy (2)🚀 Career & Leadership (1)

Key Takeaways

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

#'small#playbook#strategy
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🎯 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.
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"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
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🚀 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
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