Chandra Janakiraman: evaluation

Transcript context

…That's right, yeah. And also I think ask them for their favorite or better ideas. It's actually what I've found through this process is a lot of leaders have these better ideas, they just feel shy to share it because they don't want their teams to think of them as micromanage-y. They 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, they welcome this because one, it's actually a more fun conversation for them than the other meetings that they have in their day because they're getting a little bit of their creative juices going, and they actually feel happy that somebody actually asked them what they're feeling and thinking about. And so it's actually very, very positive energy when you ask leaders just what they want. 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 fruit story in mind, I want to just 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, they can do it for you. If there isn't, the PM should do it themselves. And basically the idea is you try to understand who are the comparables or the competitors in the space, and you sort of build a little bit of a head-to-head and sort a stack chart of where's everybody going and what are of the angles of investment for different people based on the explicit signals, which is what are they releasing? 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's sort of competitive analysis. And bigger companies, there's also another important input, which is adjacent roadmaps. Are the teams adjacent to you and what are they investing in? Because oftentimes that can have a rub-off effect on your team, and if you're not aligning with other key teams, it's going to be important. So adjacent roadmaps and a summary of that. And last but not least, is what I call user observation. So I like the strategy working group to actually either interview a user or watch a video and report key learnings. And the idea is not to action those insights, it's really to build empathy. When you get somebody in the 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... ... their own preconceived notions of what to build, what the strategy should be, and it humanizes the whole process. heir own preconceived notions of what to build, what the strategy should be and... ... their own preconceived notions of what to build, what the strategy should be, and it humanizes the whole process. That I think is the purpose, but you still give them the homework of writing down what they learned because it's a little bit of a forcing function. The output of all of this is what I call the comprehensive preparation readout. 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 stack charts, you have the adjacent roadmaps, and you have a section on user observations. It's a lot of work, but to your point, it can be done in parallel with your day jobs. You can multitask, and that's why you take about four weeks to do that. 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. Yeah, I have a million questions, but I'm going to keep myself contained. Just to quickly summarize. Basically you kick off, we're going to start developing strategy for this product, and you were going to touch on this, but it may help just to talk about this right now. I know you have big S Strategy, small S strategy. This process, what's an example of the level of product scale that this process is for? Because I know you have another approach for a larger scale of a product, basically for a company. What's the best way to think about small S strategy, which is what we're going through?…

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