@chandra-janakiraman
CPO at VRChat; expert on product strategy for communities and network effects.
Ask your leaders what they want before you build strategy. It's amazing how few people do this. Senior leaders welcome it — it gets their creative juices going. And it's not a sign of weakness. It's a sign of strength and humility.
Small S strategy = present forward, 2-year horizon, PM-led, problem-focused. Big S strategy = future backward, 5-10 year horizon, design/UXR-led, aspiration-focused. Build your roadmap from both — like a bridge built from both sides of a river.
To rank your strategic opportunities, score each on 4 dimensions: (1) Expected impact, (2) Certainty of impact, (3) Clarity of levers — do you know how you'd solve it? (4) Are your levers uniquely differentiated vs. what competitors could build?
The single most important day in the entire strategy process is Day 2 of the strategy sprint — when you actually make the choice. Generate all the problems, cluster them, flip them into opportunity framings, then rank and down-select to 3 pillars.
The goal of the design sprint in strategy is NOT to define features to build. It's to generate illustrative concepts that bring strategy to life — pictures that help people understand what you mean. A picture is worth a thousand words in a strategy doc.
Most leaders have pet ideas they feel too shy to share — they don't want their teams to think they're micromanaging. But when you ask them directly, they always have one. Just ask. It takes the mystery out and gives them a creative outlet.