Chandra Janakiraman: recommendation

Transcript context

…Yeah, so the strategy sprint is the heart of the process. This is sort of where you make the decision. If you recall, the definition of strategy is it forces choice to deploy resources into a few areas for maximum impact. The core of strategy is really picking those areas and the areas you're not going invest in. That happens in the strategy sprint, so really it's the heart of the process. Typically, it's like a three to five day process. The first day is the share out date. Everybody has done some great work. They go in, they share what they've collected, what they've sort of learned. It brings everybody in the working group to the same state of understanding, the same state of consciousness on the state of the union. That's a great process where what I encourage people to do is write down things that you are, 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 suboptimal for the business. People take a lot of notes during that time and the people who are presenting are sharing everything they've learned. That's really day one. It's just absorbing a ton of information and writing down a ton of notes so people can kind of understand where all the problems are. 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. Once people have that common awareness, shared knowledge of all the problems, day two is literally the most important day in the entire 8 to 12 weeks because that's where you actually make the choice. The way to flow through it, it's actually really important to flow through it correctly. The first step is really generating a whole bunch of problems, because people have been taking notes the previous day. You start the day with, "Hey, let's collect everybody's thoughts on what the problems are that are holding us back." It's a free flowing session. Everybody throws out their observations on what's holding us back, and you just capture all of that in a Google Sheets, for example. Over even an hour, you start to see these patterns emerging of like, there's these clusters of problems that are really holding us back. The next step is you do a joint clustering of related problems and you create these potentially, typically in my experience, I've seen about 10 to 15 clusters form of very related problems. The beauty of it is each of those bigger cluster, you actually know what the sub problems are within that cluster because you sort of generated it very organically. Then you have, let's say 10 to 15 clusters. What you then do is you, because remember, because it started as a problem 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. Let me give you a couple of examples. started as a problem 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. Let me give you a couple of examples. Let's say there's a bunch of problems around 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 a certain feature or a certain experience. There's let's say a lot of problems in that area, so difficulty finding things becomes the cluster, the problem cluster and discovery becomes the opportunity sort of framing of it. It's sort of the more positive framing of it. Another example could be that people get a lot of content that they don't like. They see a lot of stuff that they don't like, and so they disengage with the product. The opportunity framing of that would be relevance. It's basically stuff that really matters to me. Maybe if it's a social product, then maybe people are finding it difficult to find friends and they are lonely because of that. The opportunity framing would be social connection. Flipping all of those problem clusters into positive framing and opportunity framing is the next step. Then you're in a great spot because now all you have to do is you have to down select from those 10 to 15 opportunity areas into ideally three, maybe five, but I would recommend three because it creates more clarity and focus. The way to do that is really sort of ranking them on, I would say four or five key dimensions or criteria, and the first is expected impact. Let's say you actually tackle that area. What is the expected impact to whatever matters to you as a company, as a business, as a product? 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 really hard data, sometimes you have more anecdotal evidence, and so the confidence really depends on how big the problem's sizing and frequency is. Expected impact, certainty of impact. The third one is also very important, which is clarity of levers. 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, okay, 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 people. I can recommend friends so that people can form friends quicker on the platform. You should have a sense of how you would solve that particular space. Is there clarity on levers? That's the third dimension. The fourth dimension is super important, which is are the levers unique and differentiated to that particular team or company? Which is that if another 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. It's a combination of sort of like, is there a lot of impact here? How confident are we of the problem? Do we have a sense of the solutions? t's probably going to be pretty generic once you launch it. It's a combination of sort of like, is there a lot of impact here? How confident are we of the problem? Do we have a sense of the solutions? And basically, are we the team or company that has the capabilities and the skills to uniquely build it where other teams cannot? Once you have that, and sometimes what happens is you don't have too much data, and so it's okay to have qualitative scores on this like high, medium, low, T-shirt scores, whatever that is. The key is you're doing it together as a strategy working group, and you're debating the scores and you're reasoning why it should be higher versus lower. There's a ton of alignment and collision that's happening when you're doing that, which is very healthy for the eventual outcome. Once you do that, basically you can do a simple sort of addition of the scores and a sort, and what you have is basically the top three and you have the remaining 7 or 12 that are basically not the focus. That's the core of the process, is getting those opportunity areas and getting to a shared sense of how do we prioritize them and why?…

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