An operator’s guide to product strategy

Chandra Janakiraman, CPO at VRChat with prior product leadership roles at Meta, Headspace, Zynga, and Amazon, walks through a repeatable playbook for building product strategy. The conversation covers the difference between a two-year 'small s' strategy and a longer-horizon 'big S' aspirational strategy, the five-phase process, and how AI can assist the work.

01Key learnings

• Treat product strategy as the layer between mission/vision and the roadmap; it should name a few focus areas (strategic pillars), explicitly list what you won't do, and explain why.
• Budget roughly 8 to 12 weeks for a small-S strategy, since it can be leveraged for about two years and the upfront investment is small relative to that payback.
• Form a strategy working group of engineering, product design, and data (plus research or marketing if available) so the strategy is co-created and carries built-in alignment.
• Interview leaders early about what success and failure look like and what their favorite ideas are; this avoids frustrating late-stage reviews and makes them feel invested.
• Prioritize ruthlessly: turn 10 to 15 problem clusters into opportunity framings, then rank them on expected impact, certainty of impact, clarity of levers, and whether your team can uniquely win; aim for three pillars.
• Use 'how might we' prompts and a 'newspaper headline' winning-aspiration exercise to convert pillars into bold, plain-language future outcomes the team can rally behind.
• Treat the strategy as a hypothesis: real defensibility and value come from execution results, so test, double down on what works, and pivot away from what doesn't.
• Pair small-S work with a longer big-S process (future-backward, three distinct futures, concept prototypes, user testing) so the roadmap blends near-term problem solving with aspirational bets.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.