An operator’s guide to product strategy | Chandra Janakiraman (CPO at VRChat, ex-Meta, Headspace, Zynga)

**Chandra Janakiraman** (0:00)
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** (0:16)
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** (0:22)
In terms of what product strategy is, there is a smallest flavor of it, which focuses on solving problems that are 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** (0:49)
Let's talk about Big S strategy. When should you approach strategy this way?

**Chandra Janakiraman** (0:52)
There's this interesting quote by Elon Musk, which is, Life's got to be about more than just solving problems. I think this is true of every sort of company. There needs to be an aspirational and cool component to strategy. What does a product look like in five to ten years? Why is the world better in ten years? And what is the most exciting version of that view?

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:15)
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. 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 get him on the podcast. Chandra is a student of strategy, and has spent his career developing what he calls an operator's guide to strategy, which essentially pulls together the best ideas from Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, Playing to Win, Michael Porter, and others to create a very clear, reliable, and easy-to-follow five-step process to develop a great strategy and a set of next steps for your product and company. After hearing Chandra walk through this in our conversation, I'm basically going to now point everyone who wants to get better at strategy to this episode and Chandra's method. Strategy is at the heart of every great product and team and business, and it's also the source of so much pain if you do it badly. This episode is meant to help you avoid that. A big thank you to Karthik for making this connection. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Chandra Janakiraman. This episode is brought to you by Epo. Epo is a next-generation A-B testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp and DraftKings rely on Epo to power their experiments. Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of new features. And Epo helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous, deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most was our experimentation platform, where I could set up experiments easily, troubleshoot issues and analyze performance all on my own. Epo does all that and more with advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks off experiment time and accessible UI for diving deeper into performance and out-of-the-box reporting that helps you avoid annoying, prolonged analytics cycles. Epo also makes it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team, sparking new ideas for the A-B testing flywheel. Epo powers experimentation across every use case, including product, growth, machine learning, monetization and email marketing. Check out Epo at getepo.com/lenny, and 10x your experiment velocity. That's geteppo.com/lenny.
This episode is brought to you by Airtable Product Central, the unified system that brings your entire product org together in one place. No more scattered tools, no more misaligned teams. If you're like most product leaders, you're tired of constant context switching between tools. That's why Airtable built Product Central after decades of working with world-class product companies. Think of it as mission control for your entire product organization. Unlike rigid point solutions, Product Central powers everything, from resourcing to voice of customer to roadmapping to launch execution. And because it's built on Airtable's no-code platform, you can customize every workflow to match exactly how your team works. No limitations, no compromises. Ready to see it in action, head to airtable.com/lenny to book a demo. That's airtable.com/lenny.