Chandra Janakiraman: belief

Transcript context

…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. Such a great point. Just a strategy sitting there in a doc is worthless, where the worth comes from, is it actually having impact and being successful. Makes me think about a product manager also, just a PM is not worth anything until they help you drive impact. I think an important, to trickle down from that point, is that you don't want to spend too long just thinking about strategy, you want to spend as little time as possible to get to a strong hypothesis, basically to start learning if this is the right path. And so I love that your approach is like this middle ground between give it real time, but don't spend three, four or five months working on this one document that just maybe one day you'll use.…

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