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

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“And then the next step is the document writing. And 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. Like if you remember, there's a ton of user insights, a ton of behavioral insights, a ton of competitive analysis. There's the three strategic pillars. How might we use winning aspiration? There's a whole bunch of illustrative concepts. So, you know, oftentimes like product leads have this sort of creator's block. That is solved here completely because you have a ton of great material. But I have to tell you, it doesn't make the job easier. You still have to, there's sort of like, you still have to weave together a good story. That's why I think it takes a week or two. And I think it's really about combining connecting and editing. And at this point and like telling sort of a cohesive story from all those components. But I think the building blocks are really solid.”
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
“This is what you're going to build at the end of the day with the strategy. And so the more generative, the better. And 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 sort of sharpening of things. But the goal here is not to build feature-ready designs. It's more to generate concepts. And so once you have that, basically the design sprint and the different flavors of design sprints, which I won't go into, and sort of like you can lean on sort of your design lead to decide what's the appropriate way. But the output, 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 sort of illustrative concepts to explain each strategic pillar. So you could almost have a section where you talk about each strategic pillar and insert those concepts in that section. And that's the idea.”
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, so the next phase is the design spread. And the design sprint can be led by the design person who's in the strategy working group. If you remember, there's like engineering product design and data. So the design person can lead it and the PM can sort of take a bit of a back seat during this process. So the input to the design sprint is the sort of the three strategic pillars and the how might we associate with it. And the goal of the design sprint is not to sort of come up with, oh, these are the features we should build. That's not the purpose of the design sprint. The design sprint is to generate a lot of illustrative concepts that bring the strategy to life because a picture is worth a thousand words and oftentimes even though you might have the right words in your strategy doc, people might still scratch their head like what do you exactly mean? What are you going to build? And so the illustrative concepts really sort of give people something to latch out to, oh, okay, I get 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
“I would say it's not a sort of an empirical study, obviously, because of the small sample size. But I would say that it's really open sort of people's eyes and it's led to like really good alignment and eventually like good results. And even when it has not, it has led to like good organizational buy-in on sort of like why and how we are approaching things.”
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
“A very good question. So we'll speak about an example that I had in Meta where typically during the strategy sprint, like you don't change it once you go through the strategy sprint. But eventually there are sort of a lot of signals you get through execution where you sort of have to course correct. And we'll talk about one very interesting example of how that sort of changed things.”
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, this is a great progress on strategy because now we have the three strategic pillars, we have the how might we associate 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? And you also have the winning aspiration. So it's great progress. Team's done a great job. I think now we sort of move on to the design sprint.”
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. Like, more tactically, what I typically do is I put them all on a slide and you start, it's almost like a word cloud and then you start to see these common words. And the men's not the final winning aspiration. And then you try to create a nice statement out of that. So it also like symbolically everybody sees their own statement on the sort of the deck and that's how you get to the final one.”
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
“We did this process for Privacy team, you know, when I was at Meta, and one of the sort of the aspirations was around really like the strategic pillars were around a lot of sort of features that we would build. But the winning aspiration was really like, hey, could we move like consumer trust? And the newspaper headline is something like Facebook has moved the needle on consumer trust by investing in these areas. And so that's like how you sort of create sort of the bigger impact”
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 you have to get to the key benefit that ultimately the impact it has on the world, like, you know, those kinds of themes come up often. And so 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 sort of mash them together and create the sort of the winning aspiration, which is ultimately what does sort of progress on the strategy look like in a couple of years time. And that comes from the working group. It's not like one person writing.”
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
“Two years because that's the typical time horizon of a smallest strategy is like 18 months to 24 months. So imagine in two years, 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. And I want you to imagine the progress on all these strategic pillars and what the headline of that newspaper article looks like. So it's called the newspaper headline approach. And basically everybody generates a newspaper headline in parallel. And it's interesting because you often see there's these common themes that sort of form when people generate these headlines. And the forcing function with the headline is also that it has to be somewhat simple and like plain speak. It's not like too technical. You have to sort of get to like a more sort of simple layperson's language.”
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, exactly. And 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. And then the third day is when people are a little bit refreshed, we get to winning aspiration. So winning aspiration is super interesting because it's a very creative exercise. So you basically imagine”
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 then the third day is like it's good to start fresh. Like, you know, so the teams accomplished a lot. So this was all.”
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, that's awesome. It's also something that designers are familiar with. Lenny, so it like flows really well. It does sort of a design spread.”
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 totally right, Lenny. And those three that are at the top of that pile are basically our strategic pillars. So we sort of gotten our strategic pillars. And they basically hold up the strategy. That's why they're called strategic pillars. And the idea is once you have the strategic pillars, we basically translate that into a few how might we. So how might we do, you know, 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 sprit. So 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 somehow might we's for each of them, maybe two or three for each strategic pillar. And then you're done with that stage.”
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 once you do that, basically you can do a simple sort of addition of the scores and assort. And what you have is basically the top three, right? And you have the remaining seven or 12 that are basically not sort of focused. And so that's the core of the process is like getting that sort of those opportunity areas and getting to a shared sense of, okay, how do we prioritize them and why?”
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
“Or company, which is that if another sort of team or company could build it better than this particular team or company, then it's probably not that differentiated. It's probably going to be pretty generic once you launch it. So it's a combination of sort of like, hey, is there a lot of impact here? How confident are we of the problem? Do we have a sense of the solutions? Basically, like are we sort of the TB or company that has the capabilities and the skills to uniquely build it where other teams cannot? And so once you have that, you know, and sometimes like what happens is you don't have like too much data. And so it's okay.”
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
“On how baked the problem sort of sizing and frequency is. And so expected impact, certainty of impact. The third one is also very important, which is clarity of levers. Like, do you actually have an idea of how you would solve it? If you don't, it's going to be really difficult to move the needle on it because you should kind of know that, oh, okay, like I can imagine these solutions could actually move the needle. I can actually launch this sort of nudge system that can help people find things. I can recommend sort of people. I can recommend friends so that people can form friends quicker on the platform. So you should have a sense of like how you would solve that particular space. So is there clarity on levers? That's the sort of the third dimension. And the fourth dimension is super, super important, which is all the levers unique and differentiated to that particular.”
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 you're in a great spot because now all you have to do is you have to downselect from like those 10 to 15 opportunity areas into ideally three, you know, maybe five, but I would recommend three because it creates like more clarity and focus. And the way to do that is really sort of ranking them on, I would say like four or five like key dimensions or criteria. The first is expected impact. So let's say you actually tackle that area. What is the expected impact or whatever matters to you as a company, as a business, as a product? And the second dimension is certainty of impact. Certainty of impact is basically how concrete is the evidence that this is a problem? Sometimes you have like really hard data. Sometimes you have sort of more anecdotal evidence. And so the confidence really depends.”
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
“Area. So, difficulty finding things becomes the cluster, the problem cluster, and discovery becomes the opportunity sort of framing of it, right? And it's sort of the more positive framing of it. And another example could be that people get a lot of content that they don't like. You know, they see a lot of stuff that they don't like and so they disengage with the product. And so the opportunity framing of that would be relevance, right? Like it's basically, oh, like stuff that really matters to me. And or maybe like if it's a social product, then maybe people are finding it difficult to find friends and they sort of like are lonely because of that. The opportunity framing would be social connection. And so flipping all of those problem clusters into positive framing and opportunity framing is the next step.”
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
“These potentially, like typically, in my experience, I've seen about 10 to 15 clusters form of very related problems. And the beauty of it is each of this bigger cluster, you actually know what the subproblems are within that cluster because you sort of generated a very organically. And then you have, let's say, 10 to 15 clusters. What you then do is, because remember, because it started as a problem sort of 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. And so, for example, let me give you a couple of examples. So let's say there's a bunch of problems around, you know, people don't really know where to find different things in our product and they don't really know where to go, where to find sort of a certain feature or a certain experience. And just let's say a lot of problems in 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
“Entire, like eight to 12 weeks because that's where you actually make the sort of the choice. And so the way to flow through it, it's actually really important to flow through it correctly. So the first step is really generating a whole bunch of problems because people have been taking notes the previous day, you know, you start the day with like, hey, let's collect everybody's sort of thoughts on what the problems are that are holding us back. And so everybody just like it's a free-flowing session. Everybody throws out their sort of observations on what's holding us back. And you just capture all of that in a Google Sheets, for example. And over sort of like even an hour, you start to see these patterns emerging of like, okay, these sort of clusters of problems that are sort of really holding us back. And so the next step is you sort of do a joint clustering of sort of related problems and you sort of create”
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
“To do is write down things that 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 like suboptimal for the business. And so people take a lot of notes during that time and the people who are presenting or sharing sort of everything they've learned. And that's really day one. It's like just absorbing a ton of information and writing down a ton of notes so people kind of understand where all the sort of the problems are. And 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. And so once people have that sort of common awareness, shared knowledge of all the problems, day two is like literally the most important day in the end.”
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 strategy sprint is the heart of the process. This is sort of where you make the decision. So if you recall the sort of the definition of strategy is it forces choice to deploy resources into your sort of a few areas for maximum impact. So the core of strategy is really sort of picking those areas and the areas you're not going to invest in. And so that happens in the strategy spread. So really it's the heart of the process. So typically it's like a three to five day process. The first day is the share out day. So everybody has done some great work. They go in, they share sort of what they've collected, what they've sort of learned. And so it brings everybody in the working group to the same state of understanding, the same state of consciousness on the state of the union. So that's a great process where what I encourage people”
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, so the deck is an output of the first phase, and then it flows into the second phase, which is a strategy sprint. So you don't share the deck with anybody yet. But in the strategy sprint, it's like a key 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, 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 sort of the time horizon aspect and the sort of the aspirational component, which we'll get 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
“To your point, it can be done in sort of parallel with your day jobs. You know, you can sort of multitask. And that's why you take about four weeks to do that. And 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.”
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
“Those insights. It's really to build empathy. When you get somebody in a room with a user, it just changes their mind. It softens them a little bit. It gets them out of their own preconceived notions of what to build, what the strategy should be. And it humanizes the whole process. So that, I think, is the purpose, but you sort of still give them the homework of writing down what they learned because it's a little bit of a Forsyg function. So the output of all of this is what I call the comprehensive preparation readout. So 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 sort of stack charts. You have the adjacent roadmaps and you have sort of a section on user observations. So it's a lot of work.”
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
“Explicit signals is what are they releasing? Because 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 sort of competitive analysis. And bigger companies, there's also another important input, which is adjacent roadmaps. Like are there teams adjacent to you? And what are they investing in? And because oftentimes that can have a rub-off effect on your team. And if you're not sort of like aligning with sort of other key teams, it's going to be important. So adjustment roadmaps in a sort of summary of that. And last but not least is what I call sort of user observation. So I like the strategy working group to actually either interview a user or sort of watch a video and sort of report like sort of key learnings. And the idea is not to action.”
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 somebody actually asked them what they're like feeling and thinking about. And so it's actually very, very sort of positive energy. You know, when you ask leaders just what they want. And so, and it's also not a sign of weakness. It's actually a sign of strength and humility to ask your leaders what you want. And so keeping that sort of fruit story in mind, like I want to just sort of 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 like they can do it for you, if there isn't, the PM should do it themselves. And basically the idea is you sort of try to understand like who are the comparables or the competitors in the space and you sort of build a little bit of a head-to-head and a sort of a stack chart of like where's everybody going and what sort of like what are the sort of the angles of investment for different people based on 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
“Exactly. Okay, cool. That's right. Yeah And also, I think ask them for their favorite or pet ideas, it's actually what I've found through this process is a lot of leaders have these pet ideas. They just feel shy to share it because they don't want their team to think of them as micromanagee. They don't 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 sort of like they welcome this because one, it's actually a more fun conversation for them than the other meetings that they have in their day, you know, because they are getting a little bit of their creative juices going and they actually feel”
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 actually stopped beating apples last year. And so you're disappointed. Again, you go back, you bring a banana. Like 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, you know, 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. 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?”
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
“Of all of that into one sort of very actionable and synthesized deck on all the sort of 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. I sort of like have this fun like story of the fruit with like leadership strategy reviews, which I want to share. So imagine like this is sort of like how sometimes strategy reviews go, which is you bring a fruit to the sort of the reviewer and say, hey, here's a mango. Like, you know, 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,”
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
“Potentially also sort of feature launches and how they've done so all kind of analytical analysis. The ask is really to create a meta-analysis of all of the analysis. So the data sort of person on the strategy working group has to sort of scan the historical archives at the company and sort of synthesize and condense that into a very sort of digestible sort of 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 sort of soft, hard signals about users not just based on research that's run by user researchers, but also potentially from the customer service team, you know, social channels. And basically a meta-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
“Typically, the PM is sort of 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 sort of like pulls the team together, talks about sort of the purpose of the process, lays out the different phases, and gives everybody a feel for what's going to happen in the next like eight to 12 weeks. And basically then creates a list of very discrete action items and deliverables for each of the sort of the stakeholders in the working group. So specifically, there's an action item around sort of aggregating all the behavioral insights that the team might have around the product. And usually this is a combination of previous analysis that the team has run on the data side.”
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 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 as engineering product design and data, because design in some ways represents both sort of product design and user research. So you do get the sort of the voice of the user from that perspective.”
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 correct, Lenny. And I think you, if I forget, remind me that sometimes there is pressure, right? There's just business pressure like, you know, the CEO might still want a strategy in two weeks, how do you respond to that? And I think we can sort of find some clever shortcuts there. But I think to the extent possible, the leader should push for this period to make something really great.”
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
“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.”
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 sort of want to first explain this concept called small s 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 eight to 12 weeks anyway. So it's good to start with sort of 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 pe-lear, I think the investment is relatively small.”
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
“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 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 sort of the three components. That's really 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
“There is this concept called resonance. And the concept of resonance is really interesting. And it's actually like very close to sort of the concept of strategy. So the concept of resonance works as follows. When you apply a certain frequency to an object and you get pretty close to its natural frequency, you see a disproportionate increase in sort of the amplitude of how that object vibrates. And so it's very interesting, you know, 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...”
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
“Let's start with some basic definitions, which is, as you ask, what is product strategy? And if you think back to the headspace example, this sort of comes to life as well. So strategy, product strategy strategy sits between the mission and vision and the plan. It could be at the company level or at the team level, but it's usually sitting between the mission and vision and the plan. And the plan, you can call the plan the roadmap, which is basically an ordered list of things that you want to get done. And the mission and vision is basically sort of the purpose of existence. What does sort of like it look like when you achieve sort of your purpose of existence? So it sits between the two and it forces choice to deploy scarce resources to generate maximum impact. And I want to borrow an analogy from the world of physics.”
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
“You know, just in terms of sort of like the battle tested nature of it, I personally use this playbook about five to six times, tweaking and optimizing it each time based on sort of 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.”
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 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 sort of texts like the art of war, from Sunzu, all of Michael Porter's work, good strategy, bad strategy by Richard Rumelt, who's been on your podcast, playing to win, you know, Laughley and Roger Martin. So there's a ton of extensively researched and well sort of founded materials out there. So the way I would think about this is it's more of an operator's interpretation of all the stuff that's out there and an endeavor to package it into something that's friendly and repeatable, particularly for product people who think they are weak at strategy or perhaps have received such feedback.”
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
“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 sort of the haves and the have nots and make this sort of capability widely accessible through a procedural approach? And I have news for you. You know, the answer is yes. Anybody can build product strategy through a clear understanding of what it is and through a friendly and repeatable playbook.”
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
“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 a out of body way, observe the process of like, okay, how did we put this thing together? And what actually went into it? So what really started as a almost a personal sort of crisis moment of finding this sort of 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.”
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
“We built the first sort of written product strategy for Headspace. And that and the subsequent actions on the product led to a complete reimagination of the product. And basically, we were able to create a new product, which we called it the next generation headspace, which on one hand, it could support a comprehensive library of content, not just meditation, but non-meditate 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”
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 spoke to a few people. I sort of wanted to understand it a little bit deeper, what's happening 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. Some soul searching and sort of basically Was lucky because there was actually a board member of Headspace who had a product background. Of knew what could look like, and sort of, you know, I came to the conclusion, hey, we needed a strategy for headspace. Sort of extensive work”
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 a very interesting story. Back all the way 10 years ago. Remember it vividly like it happened This amazing compan That the founders had laid Come in and establish sort of goals for the team in terms of our key metrics. Sort of button Map in my mind that sort of fed into that company mission. Feeling pretty good about sort of how things were shaping up On sort of a particular Monday, the founder seat. Me aside, and in his usual disarming style, Of made a short but profound Hearing that a lot of people Really understand We are working on what we are working. It that was really sort of like the extent of what he shared. A little bit of a bubble bursting moment for me because we obviously Time building the plan, and I was feeling relatively good about”
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 this is true of every sort of company. There needs to be an aspirational and cool component to strategy. What does the product look like in sort of five to ten years? Why is the world better in 10 years? And what is the most exciting version of that view?”
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
“Terms of what product strategy is, there is a smallest flavor of it which focuses on solving problems. 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 8 to 12 weeks. The reason I think this process works is there is a ton of alignment built in. It goes back to human psychology of just something that comes from you feels a lot more familiar and easy to accept.”
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