Likes Portal.

Transcript context

…At Meta there's this fascinating example, which I think illustrates a different point, which is... Basically I was standing up the product strategy for a couple of product growth teams in Reality Labs, Oculus, which was coming up with the Quest II at the time. This is a standalone headset, and then Portal, which was our video conferencing product. And we stood up these teams to go after product growth, which is basically driving hardware sales through software features. And we went through this process that I just described. We stood up strategic pillars, and the strategic pillars were fairly similar for both Portal, which is our video conferencing product, and Oculus. I love Portal by the way. I was a big fan of... Sad that it's no longer around. And that led to features that are known to everybody, like the Oculus Referrals Program, the Portal Memories Integration, where you see one of your Facebook memories on the Portal, sponsored ad in your Facebook feed. And also we had this section on the Facebook app, which is also from Facebook at the time, and then eventually also from Meta, which is these other products from the Facebook ecosystem. And all those came out of that effort. And about 18 months into it, they actually had very different outcomes. So on one hand the Oculus effort was incredibly successful, and we graduated it into the VR division at Meta, and till today it continues to be an incredibly successful effort. The Portal effort actually didn't move the needle as much as we wanted to, and we sunset it, and we basically redeployed that team to other initiatives. And that's super interesting. Basically it was like the same strategy process. We got the nearly identical strategic pillars, but eventually completely different outcomes. And I think that that illustrates the most important point about strategy, which is intrinsically strategy has no business value. It's basically a document with a few words. And I think it starts accumulating value as you generate business impact and results. And that happens when you actually test strategy with execution. And so ultimately any strategy is only as good as the results it produces. And so one has to have the intellectual honesty, and the humility, and the courage to say when it's working and when it's not. And sometimes what happens is parts of your strategy might work, parts might not, and you have to pivot away from some and double down on some. But I do think there's that evaluation that's really critical and testing strategy with execution.…

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