YouSaid · the spoken record

Chandra Janakiraman

lines on the record: 101
first: 2025-01-26
most recent: 2025-01-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“A reasonable choice would be LinkedIn to reach me. And I'd 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 sort of the community owns it ultimately. And it's not sort of, doesn't belong to an individual. That's what would make me super happy.”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 at a unique time when they were like incredibly 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 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's also a big Beatles fan. So that picture is actually an interesting blend between And then a bunch of books that are more memorable over the years. You'll see creativity there. You'll see the 10 phases of innovation, all of that.”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. I've been playing this cute little game for the last few days. It's called Kapi Bura Go. It's a tab-based strategy RPG game. It's got really humorous writing and this cute Capi Bara 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 sort of playing recently. I've also been poking around Blue Sky. Blue Sky is interesting. I haven't gotten into a habit yet, but it's super interesting concept of empowering the community with these community generated feeds. It's like very different experience. But it's also interesting there's a trade-off with the simplicity of the product and what do you get for the additional complexity. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out, how it scoss.”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, we watch a lot of animated films with the kids, but a couple of good movies this year. We really liked if imaginary friend, it's about sort of growing up and like forgetting sort of these memories of your younger sort of days is a really nice movie. And then, of course, we enjoyed Dune 2 as well. It was a fun watch. But most of our time is dominated by the kid's sort of animated films at home or in the cinema.”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Brain work like way ahead of its time. The other classic is Ed Catmole's creativity inc and talks about all the negative forces that eat away at creativity in an organization. How do you sort of as a leader have to keep them at bay and make sure the team can innovate? And then there's this probably less popular book, but really good one from Tom Kelly of IDO, which is the 10 faces of innovation. It talks about different archetypes that you need on the team that are essential for creating something special. And you actually need like, you know, I think there's the devil's advocate. You need the researcher. You need the ethnographer. You need sort of 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.”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love books on creativity and innovation, Lenny. And some of my sort of classic favorites are Waldisney'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 Waldisney actually loved the theme parks more than the movies. And the reason for that was he could actually like tinker with the theme parks. Like he could make changes to where the rides were. He could change rides in and out. And then he could observe like real sort of changes to reactions of people flowing into the theme parks, which he couldn't do with the movies, you know, because it was once it was produced, it was done. Like it was out of his control. And it was interesting, like he was basically AB testing long before the term was coined. And it's just a fascinating look into how his”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get there, and it takes about eight to 12 weeks. There is a big S process that focuses on an aspirational future is future backward. And typically has a three, five, ten year horizon, also a five-stage process, and can be ongoing up to a six month sort of period to give it sort of enough space to generate something exciting. And the roadmap for the company or the team is built from a combination of small s and big S work, which is like building a bridge from both sides of a river. And ultimately any strategy is”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think sort of 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 sort of the frequency selection and resonance as an analogy. And it ideally includes three components. A handful of areas to focus on, which we call strategic pillars, and several areas that are explicitly not the focus. 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. What I call present forward, and it typically operates in a two-year horizon, we use a five-stage process to get.”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think there is a crossover point where the sort of the human judgment will be inferior to sort of something that's able to process multiple signals simultaneously. There's an element of sort of lateral thinking as well here. And I'll sort of share a simple example for those who drive Tesla cars with the fully self-driving capabilities. When you make a turn, humans have sort of this fairly sort of narrow field of vision. So you have to sort of 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. And so there is this crossover point where some of the”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. And so then the question becomes hey, what is our job? Like, our job becomes architecting, you know, bigger and bigger pieces of the product to take advantage of these agents, right? And there will be a sequential increase in the complexity of workloads that get automated over time. Onboarding is probably relatively on the easier side in terms of complexity of workload. And you get into deeper sort of experiences, eventually AI will get there. Funnily enough, when that happens, like some of the manual processes I described above 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.”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, right? Like the different variations that you test, even though the experimentation framework is very sophisticated, the variations are still human generated. Now imagine if those variations could actually be generated by through generative AI and could be plugged into the advanced sort of experimentation frameworks, the possibilities become infinite. And really, you might be surprised by what you find is the winning sort of onboarding experience that you couldn't even have humanly imagined. And it might be different for every user, different for every sort of territory, et cetera.”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of the model that resonates with me is sort of the multi agent model, which is sort of 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 like a engineering agent. And these can communicate amongst each other to sort of cycle through results and iterate. And I think Armand Ruiz from IBM has some good definitional frameworks on some of the stuff. You know, 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, right? 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”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Vast number of areas. So basically, if you remember, like the core of strategy is really like to be very targeted and to be very sort of focused. So these mock strategies become an interesting input and the burden is still on the team to downselect into the sort of the most important areas for investment. And 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”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mock strategies. And I know Claire at your summit spoke about this. And I think this is absolutely right and should be a critical input into the strategy process, which is asking these tools for a mock strategy. And I call this a mock strategy because it's sort of like kind of almost the answer, but not quite the answer. And so what I found is that these mock strategies, like let's say, I support VR chat 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 surprised, one surprisingly good. Like it's incredibly sort of well informed and sort of well articulated. And I've also found that its biggest strength is also somewhat its weakness, which is it tends, these mock strategies tend to be pretty comprehensive and extensive. And there's an investment recommendation in a”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And for example, you could do trend analysis from a vast library of competitors, release notes. And you can sort of say like, okay, like what are the sort of themes of investment of a competitor's release notes? Or you could do sort of a reviews analysis of a competitor product and sort of understand like what's resonating for users, what's not. And you could also do a sort of ask a tool like ChatGPT to do a head-to-head comparison between like a few players on a certain dimension and really give you sort of a heat back of sort of like how they all stack up. And you could also ask an open-ended question like, hey, why is this new product so successful? Like, why is it getting so many users? And there's some good hypothesis that you usually get. So really ton of leverage in sort of the preparation phase from a, you know, competitive analysis standpoint. The second one is in this idea called generating.”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 sort of strategy formulation. So what I'll share is what resonates for me in the context of strategy formulation with AI. So right away, I think the basic idea is everybody should be using assistance in the strategy formulation process with the basic tools that we have. And there are two ways to get AI to assist you in the strategy formulation process. The first is to support the preparation phase in terms of research, right? And this could be like competitive analysis.”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, and the first testing of the prototypes is with UXR. So it's more sort of concept testing or prototype testing with like a handful of users. And then you use that to synthesize into like a live product test.”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who are good integrators, who are good sort of who connect the dots, I think is critical for these to be successful. And in some ways, like low ego, because it's not like they do get to sort of introduce their own ideas, but like truly it's about bringing the team together. And so that's the skill that you should look for for these leads. And then the third piece is I would say that I would just approach these with a little bit of a lighter touch and more playful sort of approach because it's an intensive process. 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 and making it feel like more tolerable for the people going through it. So those are some thoughts about either of these processes.”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But with anything in life that is like very deeply satisfying at the end, they have a ton of challenge, frustration, and dead ends while you go through it, where you kind of get like a lot of self-doubt, like, hey, will you ever reach the end? And I just want to sort of normalize that. Like that's actually like normal. And I want people to expect that as they go through it. And I think that's what makes it even more rewarding when you get to that sort of point where you start to see things connecting. 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 sort of keep it all hanging together. And so in terms of like picking people who have that skill.”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. I'll end on like one short sort of note on how this all feels when you do it. And then we can segue into AI. So I think that this, whether it's big S or small S, these are like incredibly satisfying sort of processes to go through.”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Smallest work, and the design team is leading the charge on the biggest work. And it's really exciting stuff. What's coming out of both Workstream is really exciting and really different. And so we were building kind of the bridge from both sides. And both Workstreams 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.”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 sort of understanding if it works from a scalable standpoint. And this whole thing is typically led not by the sort of the PM team, but by design and UXR. And intentionally, it's a little bit more open-ended and greenfield. And it actually is a very sort of different sort of mind space that people have when they approach BigS. So the roadmap is really built through a combination of smallest and big S work. And for example, at VRChat, we are doing both small s and big S work, Lenny. And they are sort of run as parallel work streams. The product management team is leading the charge of”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And once you generate those distinct features, you actually generate prototypes with sort of 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 sort of often produced for inspiration and to potentially take some part of them, like maybe a technology or a feature, and that is brought into mainstream production. So think of these prototypes as these concept cars that really sort of drive inspiration and potentially give you some small nuggets that you can run with. And then you start doing research with them with sort of potential users. You answer key questions. And you uncover certain elements that resonate with people. So you eliminate a whole bunch of stuff, you combine a whole bunch of stuff, and you establish.”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most exciting version of that view. And basically, take all of that input and cluster it into, I would say, like three cohesive holes. And what I mean by that is three at least fairly distinct descriptions of the future. So to give you a sort of almost like a very sort of simple example, imagine you're sort of doing Big S for the future of travel. You could have a future that is talking all about sort of fully autonomous travel, you know, where sort of 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, like across the world that is really fast. You could talk about a third where there is no travel, it's virtual travel, and you sort of, you still have the feeling of travel and you accomplish the same goals. But those are different futures. They have like different properties, like different sort of elements to them.”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like this is a little bit more fluid in how you build the big edge strategy. And it typically takes longer, potentially up to about six months. The approach is a bit different from small us. 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 sort of like leadership interviews, but with a different goal of generating like long-term futures. And some of the questions you can ask during these interviews are what is a day in the life of a user look like in sort of five years? What does the product look like in sort of five to ten years? Why is the world better in like 10 years? And what is”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yeah, I think everything we've spoken about so far is what is what I would call small S. And it's very problem focused, right? It's basically what I call present forward. It's like you have something, you have a product out there, it has a bunch of problems. How do we make it better? Or 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 sort of company like big or small. And there needs to be an aspirational and cool component to strategy. And I call this sort of big guest strategy. And I'll sort of run through this at a higher level because I think”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, and there is room for like a six month process, which we'll get to in a moment. But for small s I wouldn't recommend more than like two or three months.”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Strategy is only as good as the results it can produce. And so one has to have the intellectual honesty and the humility and the courage to say when it's working and when it's not. And 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 sort of evaluation that's like really critical and testing sort of strategy with execution.”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The portal sort of effort actually didn't move the needle as much as we wanted to, and we sunset it and we basically redeployed that team to other sort of initiatives. And that's super interesting, right? Basically, he was sort of like the same strategy process. We got to nearly identical sort of 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 sort of a document with a few words. And I think it starts accumulating value as you generate business impact and results. And that happens when you actually test strategy with execution.”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 sort of sponsored ad in your Facebook feed. And also we had this sort of section on the Facebook app, which is also from Facebook at the time. And then eventually also from Meta, which is these other products from the Facebook ecosystem. And all those came out of that effort. And, you know, about 18 months into it, they actually had like very different outcomes. So on one hand, the Oculus sort of effort was incredibly successful. And we graduated it into the VR division at Meta until today, it continues to sort of be an incredibly successful effort.”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At Meta, there's this fascinating example, which I think sort of illustrates a different point, which is basically I was standing up the product strategy for a couple of product growth teams in reality labs, Oculus, which was coming up with the Quest 2 at the time. This is a standalone headset. And then Portal, which was our video conferencing product. And we stood up these teams to go after sort of product growth, which is basically driving hardware sales through software features. And we went through this process that I just described. We stood up strategic pillars. And the strategic pillars were fairly similar for both portal, which is our video conferencing product and Oculus.”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, right? Like 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 sort of applied that strategy. And so it was a net new muzzle I had to develop, you know, when I got to headspace.”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In revenue, and it worked really well until the environment changed, right? And sort of 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. You know, once sort of that shift happened to mobile.”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Games in a very network agreed away. So for example, I was at Zynga San Diego and we took the company into NetNo game genres like Action Strategy, Match 3, 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 And all these things worked sort of in harmony to enhance those strategic pillars and reinforce it. And it worked really well. The company, if I remember right, got to a billion dollars. It was the fastest to get to a billion dollars in the history of sort of companies. At the time,”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was very, very clever. So that was again very common across all the games. And then the third was network cross promotion. 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 sort of like the Zynga network was the most important thing and not sort of an individual game. And those were sort of the three big in our parlance now, strategic pillars, right? And there were non-focus areas. Like 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. You know, Facebook platform afforded strong support with social graph and channels. And basically the game studios contributed through different”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be successful and play. It was very like tightly and fictionally integrated into sort of the core of the gameplay. That was the first one. The second one was there was this idea of like paying to complete sort of things. So you're not necessarily paying to skip a whole sort of like 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 like different percentages of sort of a progression task or a sort of a part of the gameplay. And you only had to pay the rest to get through the experience. And it was this interesting sort of experience where people put a lot of investment into it and they didn't mind sort of paying for the last like 20% or 30%, which was very interesting because it created this market for like different elasticity of spend, different times that people had in their lives.”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the first example I wanted to talk about is at Zynga. I sort of was at Zynga a very long time ago and this was sort of the heyday of social gaming on Facebook. The thing that I was extremely impressed about Zynga was the strategic clarity and strategic encoding at the company. And this was not attributable to me, by the way. This was already there when I got there as sort of an 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 sort of all the games, there were sort of three elements that were very common across all the games, you know, sort of the first was viral game loops, right? Like these game loops that just sort of required you to have a social, an active social network to”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So hopefully there isn't sort of too much misalignment when you roll it out. And I have seen that workout. The second is there's just better results. Like you get to better sort of problematic. You get a better strategic pillars because there's just more mines on it than like if it were just sort of a product lead. And the third thing is you have clearly defensible criteria and outputs. And if you want to change it, like I said, like you have to go back to the criteria and like the scoring and then say like, okay, why do we believe this has to be changed? 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, you know, it has to be tested. with execution and that's that's the most important thing”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. I think there's just a sort of three quick notes to close off this This process, and I'll share the two examples, Lenny. So the reason I think this process works is the first is because there is a ton of alignment built in, sort of within team alignment and leadership alignment built in. And it's not seen as, oh, this PM went off and wrote this strategy talk. And I don't agree with most of it. And part of this is actually very sort of it goes back to human psychology of just like something that comes from you feels a lot more familiar and easy to accept. So this doc is actually not from the PM. The PM is kind of facilitating it, but it's actually from the sort of the strategy working group. And the strategy working group are the leads of the team. And so it's actually, and the leadership sort of inputs have been baked in. So it's actually very sort of team representative.”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I actually don't recommend thinking about resources in the strategy phase because what you're saying is these are the areas of focus and the resourcing question becomes more relevant from a roadmapping standpoint because then you say, okay, what percentage of our engineering do we put on strategic pillar A versus B versus C? And what are the specific things we build? So it becomes a roadmapping question as opposed to a strategy question.”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 sort of the leadership interviews. So you kind of know what the manager is looking for from the effort. And then once you sort of get to the strategic pillars on day two of the strategy sprint, you probably want to just like quickly pre-flight it with the manager and say, hey, look, this is how it's trending. And this is probably, these are the things we are probably not going to do and like any sort of issues with that. And then eventually you actually want your manager to sort of support you in some of these bigger meetings so you sort of endless their help. So I would say that it's probably like each individual style, but I would keep them pretty aligned through the process. But you don't have to be like too heavyweight, just be super lightweight.”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then it's okay to reconsider it. I've not seen it happen in my sort of like five to six attempts, but it's theoretically possible.”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then there's probably a rolling sort 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 like about eight to ten people in each sort of session. So people feel more comfortable to ask questions. And it's more sort of like conversational. And so the purpose of the stage is to land it, is not to like see too much feedback. So it's a delicate balance. At the same time, you don't want to appear just sort of being too inflexible. So it's a very delicate balance. Like, you know, when people ask questions, you can clarify it and you can add clarifications to the doc. But I wouldn't change the most important thing on the three strategic pillars. I wouldn't change that. I would sort of defend it using sort of the framework. But if people are like, there's really good arguments about the criteria that led to, you know, your ranking.”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, exactly. And then there's a larger group of sort 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 sort of a group review.”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's exactly right. Yeah. So I think you're probably in the last two to three weeks of the process. And pretty important sort of final step is the rollout. And I would start with what I call gatekeepers. And these are people who are absolutely like you have to get their one-on-one sort of alignment and blessing on this before it moves forward. And it's probably not too many, like probably like two or three people. So I would sort of pre-flight it with them and get the alignment.”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's not too long. I would say probably like three, three to four sort of 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 sort of a desire to from leaders to sort of say like, okay, like what are we building next? And it's important not to include like a roadmap as part of a strategy doc because a strategy doc is meant to be separate from the roadmaps, meant to be a companion to your roadmap. And even though there's interest, maybe sometimes you can include an illustrative roadmap in the appendix, but I would try to keep it clean and try to keep it focused on just the strategy.”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would minimize sort of pulling them in because they've all contributed so much to the process already. So I would say that at the end of it, obviously, once you have sort of a draft, it's good to share with them. But I wouldn't like tab them their cycles too much at this point because they've sort of given a lot already.”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 talk. And that's what we used to roll out.”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you could almost take the building blocks as a little bit of a sort of a steer for the template. So you start with sort of the broader context, like where you talk about what the leaders kind of want from this sort of overall effort. And then you get into key insights and analysis where you have sort of user insights, behavioral insights, competitive analysis. And then you get into the sort of the strategic pillars and you explain them you also explain why. So that it creates that framework for alignment in the subsequent meetings”
2025-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source