(2023-01-19) Building Your Product Strategy Stack Ravi Mehtatinder Facebook Tripadvisor Outpace

Lenny Rachitsky: Building your product strategy stack: Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace). I'm Lenny. Today my guest is Ravi Mehta. Ravi was chief product officer at Tinder, the product director at Facebook, VP of product at Tripadvisor, and now he's co-founder and CEO of a company called Outpace

he also helped create and teaches the Reforge programs on product leadership and product strategy

I've been in the tech industry for a long time, so I will date myself. I started in the mid-90's.

my first role out of school was Microsoft, and so I joined Microsoft at a really interesting time when they were making a pretty significant investment in games. And so I joined as one of the first few people on the Xbox Live team

straight after Microsoft, I went to business school, dabbled a little bit in management consulting, but decided I really wanted to build things and so I went back into an early stage startup right after business school. I started as employee number one at a FinTech startup

my most recent few roles have been product leadership roles at Tripadvisor where I was head of the consumer product team, product leadership role at Facebook, and then I was the chief product officer at Tinder

I spent about 18 months working with Reforge as an entrepreneur in residence or an executive in residence

18 months ago, I decided to start Outpace, which is a company focused on making elite expert-driven coaching available to everyone. And we're using a combination of really focusing on the product, using a lot of systems and content to structure the coaching process. We're also using AI to make coaches more efficient with the goal of making expertise-driven coaching a lot more accessible for folks.

the speed that startups have is not really about velocity. Bigger companies can always get more done, they can always spend more

The advantage a smaller company has really is in latency. You can have an idea one day, you can test it the next day, and as a result you can have this really short cycle time between an assumption or a hypothesis and being able to validate that hypothesis. (agility)

If a car is going really, really fast, it can't turn as quickly

took some adjustment in terms of thinking about how to boil down what would've been a pretty big ambitious plan at a larger company into something that has much smaller pieces and where you can iterate towards things and get data every day or every couple of weeks rather than have a bigger project that might take a quarter long to execute. (maybe the bigger company should have broken down ideas, also)

a lot of really effective companies today that have large audiences get to rely on an experimental way of making decisions (A/B test)

At a startup, you can't do that. You just don't have those users to test with. And I think a lot of startups make the mistake of trying to use an experimental approach too early where it just takes either way too long to get statistically significant results, which reduces that latency

do we just have enough data to have informed conviction and we should move forward and stop digging, move forward in a particular direction, and then see whether or not that turns out to be the right one?

I think two of the best communities are the indie hacker community. What I really like about that is it's a lot of people who are thinking about how do I build something solo?

Another really good community is Everything Marketplaces http://everythingmarketplaces.com

The goal of the product strategy stack is to help people take a set of terms that are normally conflated together, like goals, roadmap, strategy, and separate them into really clearly defined parts

if a PM is looking to define strategy, they can work top to bottom, and if they're looking to debug strategy, they can actually work bottom to top

I think about vision as part of mission.

I also know that you're a big believer in the vision when you think about a vision and define a vision, making it very visual versus just like a doc.

This framework originally started when I was at Tripadvisor and we had to develop a plan for what we wanted the strategy to be for trip planning.

one of the things that we said with stake that we put in the ground was the strategy doc wouldn't be complete without wireframes. This was the first time that we were doing that in the context of strategy. And the thing that we were really trying to solve for is the fact that oftentimes when you talk about strategy in words alone, everyone takes away a different interpretation of that strategy

there's always going to be a limited number of pixels on the screen. (Smells dysfunctional - too granular too early)

I've also, time and time again throughout my career, I've gone back to Balsamiq, which is a really good wireframing tool.

coming back to the product strategy stack, can you share an example

the article itself has an example, which I won't go through now, of Slack versus Discord. I think that's a really interesting example because the products are so similar and yet the company strategies and the missions are so different

I think a really interesting example from my past life is comparing Tinder versus Hinge.

Hinge's mission is almost created in response to Tinder. Hinge's mission is designed to be deleted.

versus Tinder's mission is really to make single life more fun.

So Tinder was always interesting in terms of product discovery. We did a lot of focus groups

we noticed that there was a small set of Tinder that were spending a lot on Tinder

our hypothesis was these must be high net worth people that are looking to flaunt their wealth and they don't really care about the money.

your average ARPU might be $30 and a whale is spending $200 or $300

what we found was actually it was very different than what we had assumed. It was essentially people saying, "I really want to meet someone." They have a use case

what they were framing the cost of Tinder on was not the cost of other subscriptions. They were framing it on the cost of dating.

Yeah, so there were two things that came out of those conversations. One is Tinder Platinum

And the other feature that came out of that is it's almost like a super swipe. It's the ability to, instead of just send a super like, you can send a super like with a note. And so it costs a lot more than a super like does, but it essentially allows you to break another rule of Tinder, which is you can't chat with anyone before you match

you also have some really interesting insights on just how to come up with goals and best practices for aligning and setting goals.

I've been at multiple companies that have put OKRs into practice and had a really hard time with that

ultimately, a PM needs to measure their success based on whether or not they generate valuable outcomes for the business. But that doesn't necessarily mean that in this quarter we need to commit to a specific outcome or that we should commit to a specific outcome that we may or may not know how to move.

it could be actually we don't know what moves retention. If you ask me to remove retention, I can brainstorm 10 experiments, but I don't actually know why people are continuing to use our product. And so then it doesn't make sense to commit to a retention goal because you're going to sort of throw a spaghetti against the wall, have a bunch of experiments

if you don't understand how to move a particular metric, then the right goal is to set a goal to increase your understanding not to move that metric

So we want to hit 20 experiments this quarter, and if you can hit those 20 experiments, you'll know that you're executing really, really well

the term is frontier of understanding

four buckets

understanding risk

dependency risk,

execution risk

strategic risk

we can think about it as two by two matrix. On one axis of the matrix you have, did we hit our goals? And on the other access we have, do we know why?

too often teams get so focused on the goals, they get less focused on the learning

I had on my notes that you've been doing some stuff with AI in your coaching work

this year's been incredibly exciting with the advances that we've seen from OpenAI and Stable Diffusion and Midjourney and all of these different models

And so we've actually accelerated a lot of our roadmap around that

we provide both content as well as the coach.

we've got text content from all of the participants in Outpace where they're providing very specific answers to very specific questions. We're using that content to prompt, in this case, OpenAI, to give suggestions to the coach.

And then the coach can go in and tailor that based on what they know about that person

we've been able to simulate different styles of leadership by using different types of prompts. So we can have suggestions that are really action oriented that provide lists of next steps

(Tools they like:) Airtable has been amazing. It's such a powerful tool. We just rebuilt our accounting system in Airtable. Webflow, we're using constantly. It's really changed how we think about building products. We now ask, do we need to build code or can we do something in Webflow? We're using Superhuman. I spend most of my day in Superhuman. It's an incredibly fast email client, so I love having it on my team. A lot of the team today is using Descript or Descript to edit videos. They found that to be something that works so much better than prior audio and video editing solutions. And then I've always loved Balsamiq.