16+ Years of Product Strategy in 50 Minutes (Using AI)

0:00 Product strategy is the most important skill for product managers in 2026. AI has made the cost of delivering features go nearly to zero. You're going to be stuck on a treadmill if you're just focused on features. You need to rise to the level of strategy. But strategy has totally changed with AI prototyping tools like lovable replet and bolt and vibe coding tools like quadcode and cursor. How do you incorporate these tools into your AI strategy? How do you build a great strategy end to end? I'm going to share my exact process that I shared with over 500 people live free in this video without the $1,000 conference ticket. Other people have been gatekeeping this knowledge. I'm giving it to you totally for free. After 16 plus years in product management, rising to a VP of product, I have perfected the strategies to building a product strategy. So, I hope you enjoy. If you click on settings and go to credits for Fortnite, they have, you know, those rolling like movie titles. Because my name starts with AA, I'm the first person listed.

0:59 It doesn't mean I contributed the most to Fortnite. There are some gameplay engineers who spent 100 hour weeks for seven plus years. then I worked at a company called Affirm, which is a public company, and Apollo.io, which is a sales, tech, B2B SAS company. What's interesting is all four of these companies saw three or 4x's of their valuation while I was working there. Generally, my title was something like lead product manager, VP of product at the end. And so, I wanted to show you guys that not all career journeys are straight lines, right? For me personally, I started as a product manager in 2008. Then I was a founder for a while. Then I joined as a growth lead. I became a director of growth at Thread Up. Thread Up was like a $ one half billion dollar company. When I moved to $15 billion company, Epic Games, actually went all the way down to producer. Then I worked my way up to lead PM at a firm. I became group PM and head of product. Then finally at Apollo, I reached VP. So I wanted to show you guys this because careers aren't straight lines. Maybe you're doing your masters right now. Maybe after your masters, you might take a little bit of a level dip, but in the long run, you're going to make it. And what this trajectory has helped me learn is how to do product strategy at all different levels. And so that's what we'll cover.

2:22 And some of the content that I'm going to be talking about today, it actually comes from my newsletter and my podcast. And so if you look at my podcast, for instance, all of our biggest episodes just happened in the last month. We're growing super fast. The newsletter, it's been around for three to four years. But through both of these activities, even though I'm not a product manager anymore, a VP of product anymore, every day I'm talking to heads of product.

2:50 >> So, here's a task for you all right now. Put your pull your phones out. You can scan this QR code. You can take a photo of me and you can post it on LinkedIn. I will like and comment, and I guarantee you, you'll get something like 100 followers. So if you want to jumpst start your LinkedIn growth, go for that. Have like 245,000 LinkedIn followers. So that's where I started. >> And now I want to get into the meat of it all.

3:17 I have read a lot of product strategies and most of them aren't worth the paper they were printed on. And one of the big things that's happened in 2025 is who can tell me what these tools are? Just yell these out. What are these? The logos of >> cursor top middle. What else? >> Replet top right. Lovable bottom left. What else? Bolts in the bottom right. And in the top left we have Vzero by Versel. These five tools are changing the game. I recommend that you try out all five of these tools. And I'm going to show you exactly how to use these tools to develop your product strategy today. But you know what? Bolt, it's at 40 million ARR and it launched in October.

4:06 Cursor two years old, hundred million ARR. Lovable, $30 million ARR in a year. These are some of the fastest growing products and companies of all time and they're having a huge impact on PMs and product strategy. Everyone keeps talking about AI, AI, AI. So I want to break it down into three important effects as it relates from AI to product strategy. The first is who is AI really making more efficient. It's really helping engineers with tools like GitHub copilot with tools like cursor. If you look at it there was a recent tools report of what engineers are using. Almost 60% of engineers nowadays are using cursor.

4:54 That's how amazing it is. And what it what cursor does is let's say you had to go to Stack Overflow before and copy 50 lines of code or go to documentation and learn something. Now it's just a text prompt like you prompt Chad GPT. And so engineers are more productive than ever. And designers, they too can now prompt things and get standard designs, especially if they have a design system in place. They can get a version of their design in Figma with just a prompt.

5:24 What does it mean if designers and engineers are so much more productive, right? They need better direction on what to build. They need to make sure that they're solving the right problem, the problem that moves the business forward. That's where product strategy comes in. So that's the first effect I see of AI. The second effect I see of AI is PMs traditionally, we've kind of been mired in meetings and documents, right? Our whole day is just stuck in these tasks.

5:55 AI is actually allowing us to get into product building. And I'll give you three specific use cases. Use case number one, AI prototypes. Like I just said, you could build the first version of a feature. Use case number two, iterating on product copy with the AI and then say, "Hey, let's do a quick test and change this copy in this certain way." And use case number three, who knows what an eval is? one person. So I want to define this term to people, eval. Because if you want to be an AIPM, you need to know what an eval is. So an eval is an evaluation.

6:34 So what's the big problem with using chat GPG for your homework? It hallucinates things, right? It doesn't properly site its sources, right? It might choose things outside of context or not right in the voice you want. For all of those problems, if you're building chachi into your product, you need the right AI evals to evaluate what solution the AI is generating. So AI evals are a very critical part of building AI products and PMs should be writing those AI evals. So prototypes, copy, eval, PMs are getting closer and closer to product. But here's the final thing. Has anyone ever tried getting a product strategy written by Chad GPT? It's horrible. It does. It can't do the job quite yet. Even if you use a clawed project, let's say you load it up with all of your context and everything, it still can't replicate all of the context you have, talking to customers, meeting with your CEO regularly, reviewing with your VP, reviewing with your engineers and designers, looking at all the past features that have and haven't worked.

7:43 And so my fundamental contention is that true product strategy is still done by humans. But because designers and engineers are more productive than ever, there's more and more of a burden for PMs to actually be doing a great job on their product strategy. So here's what's changed in 2025 outside of AI because everyone's always talking about AI, right? We used to have very static product strategies. We'd write them once a year in our annual planning process. Now, if designers and engineers are so much more productive, we should be learning more stuff 3, four, 5 months in. And so, we need to continuously iterate on our strategies. We used to have a lot of documents. The traditional strategy I would see is like a nine-page document.

8:34 Now, we're moving to visualization first. We want prototypes, mock-ups, videos, and we're moving away from those annual cycles to being informed by the latest data. So today, let's talk about how to build strategy in 2025 and perhaps most importantly in less time than it will take to watch a movie. The reality, as I said, is that most people are generating these long long documents. The expectation is clear direction.

9:08 Unfortunately, most content keeps driving us towards these long documents. If you go read any product strategy how-to article out there, it's helping you with your mission vision and coming up with this long document. The problem is long documents don't lead to clear direction. Nobody reads the document. Nobody remembers the document if they read it. And so I call this the strategy crisis. We are drowning in documents, but we are actually starving for direction. If you go ask any engineer or any designer out there, hey, what's your team's product strategy? Nine out of 10 of them aren't going to be able to articulate that to you. That is the strategy crisis. If you're a product manager, you should be striving for your engineers and designers to be the type who can clearly articulate your strategy.

9:58 And this really matters when you think about how expensive product teams are. In the US, software engineers do not come cheap, right? The average software engineer, their compensation is roughly around $200,000. Of course, maybe what they're actually getting paid is like $150,000, but then you add in social security taxes, paying for their office, paying for their other benefits, you're getting to a fully loaded cost of $200,000. If you have five engineers on that team, that team is already costing you a million. You add in a product designer, typically fully loaded, cost of $180,000. You add in a PM, typically fully loaded, cost of 190,000. You get to $1.4 million in cost.

10:41 The goal for a great PM is how do you bring back $1.4 million in profit for your company, right? That's what you need to do. And a strategy is how you outline that path to get there. So, what makes product strategies fail today that I've seen? Because I said they're not worth the paper they're printed on. Number one, they're way too long. So, we'll talk about how to make them shorter. Number two, they're too vague. So, there there are things that we all can agree on. You know, we all can agree on the strategy for this conference that we want to have a conference that attendees find valuable.

11:19 that doesn't make it a strategic choice that we made about this conference, right? And so it has to be specific. They're often too detached. So the product strategy is out there, but then the product teams don't even need to refer to the product strategy to do their work. That means it's too detached from their regular execution. And then it's too static. It's never updated. The better way is to create a very simple visualized strategy and that matters for both PMs and leaders. Cuz I know some of you are thinking now, hey, Marty Kagan said product strategy that's developed by leaders.

11:59 I disagree. Do any of you guys follow Lenny's newsletter? So Lenny just published an article called strategy blocks by this guy Chundra Janikumar Raman who had worked at Meta and different things and he created this distinction between little S strategy and big S strategy and I think this is a really smart distinction. So I wanted to borrow that and bring this into the talk for you guys today. Big S strategy is driven by CEOs and GMs and Marty Kagan is right.

12:28 Leaders drive big ass strategy. small strategy should be done by individual PMs, lead PMs, group PMs. And that's why it showed you my career trajectory because in those roles when I was an IC, I feel like I should have been doing even better small strategy. Small S strategy when done right really unlocks your team. So, we've talked a lot. Let's get into the tactics of this all. actually before we get into the tactics, who knows what a feature factory is?

13:04 Okay, so one or two people. So a feature factory is the big boogeyman in the product management world. Everyone, if you go to the product management subreddit and you go find somebody who says, "I hate being a product manager." They always say, "I'm in a feature factory. My CEO is telling me exactly what features to build. My boss is telling me exactly what features to build. I don't actually do any strategy work. That's like the big complaint. And when you look at the data, something like 50 to 60% of PMs are in these feature factories. They often think I shouldn't be building strategy. My argument would be if you want to go to your boss and say, hey, let's build let's not build feature X, you need to tell them, let's build feature Y. and to tell them let's build feature Y, you need to have a strategic justification for feature Y. And so that's why product strategy is important for all sorts of PMs. Whether you're in a feature factory, which often for instance PMs at Amazon and Apple complain, I'm in a feature factory, or you're in an empowered environment, environments like Meta and Google. So let's get into the tactics. Now, this is your sevenstep framework and I really think that this is a powerful framework and sequencing. I took this from Ed Biden who is a CPO at v various companies and he wrote this up in my newsletter and my podcast. So, what are the seven steps here? You start with what challenge are we responding to? That's your objective. You move into your users. Who are we serving? What do they want? You move into your superpowers.

14:44 What are your unfair advantages? You go through your vision, your pillars, your impact, and your road map. And I we've portrayed it here linearly, but it's actually a very continuous iterative process. And I'm going to break down all seven of these steps for you now. And why are these seven steps so powerful? I said you could do this in less time than it takes to watch a movie, right? That's the one day snap strategy. And you guys will be surprised. I'm going to show you an example of a one-day snap strategy that I built. Often these strategies are 80% correct. And so it's very powerful as a PM to build this muscle of being able to write a snap strategy where you just go through those seven steps. Literally, you write down step one, you fill it in, you write down step two, step three. If you write all that down, it gives you a really good canvas to iterate on, to share with others, to get feedback so that in one week you can share it with your whole team. They can help you uplevel it with what they've learned.

15:46 And then in one month, you can share it with the whole company, your CEOs. You can put prototypes in front of your customers and you can get a really solid strategy. Some people say you should spend 3 4 months building strategy. I think it's total overkill and I'm going to show you how to build it in just one month. Step one, you need to create a great objective. And I think that people tend to over complicate the objective. I would say it's a very simple formula. Mission plus measure. A good objective might be increase 30-day retention from 18 to 22% by Q3.

16:25 I'll tell you a story about this. So I was sitting on the team of product leaders, the top seven product leaders at a firm and we were working with our CEO, Max Lechin. He's the founder of PayPal and we were working on what are our top priorities. He's a pretty good product guy, right? He started PayPal. He started a firm $15 billion company. He comes to us with this list of 14 different priorities. We debate them, we reorganize them, and then we publish them out to the company.

16:57 The problem was it led to very almost no ability to focus actually because if you looked at the credit analytics team, they chose the three objectives that were most relevant to them. Objectives 7, 8, and 10. And then you look at the growth team, my team, we chose the objectives most relevant to us, 1 2 3. And then you go look at the core product team on consumer. They're looking at 4, 11, and 13. Everybody's focused on different priorities. And really then none of the product teams are working together. They're all just going after certain priorities within this long list. Even worse, the marketing team was just going after a certain random number. The sales team after a certain random number. There was no alignment between the different functions of the business. So we came back to him the next half 6 months later and we said Max we have got to simplify this list. We simplify it to three objectives and it really was an unlock. So, one of the biggest unlocks for me as a leader was headcount planning, right? So, I'm deciding, okay, I have six six product managers. Where should I put them? Maybe two here on this, one here on this, one here on this. Or maybe I'm thinking, hey, my friend over there, the other director of product, he has 15 engineers. How do I say, we only have five engineers. How do we take three of his engineers over to mine? Well, we go look back at those three priorities. And we can all agree these are the three priorities. And so headcount decisions, focus decisions between teams all greatly improved. And as a result, our growth immediately accelerated.

18:37 Step two, you need to understand your users. So have you guys built customer journey maps? Not that many of you. So the customer journey map is the first tool you want to learn when you're thinking about understanding your users. And the reason I say journey map instead of user segmentation which is where most people start is the demographics of hey 25year-old 50k household income living in Boston is a lot less relevant than pursuing a master's aspiring product manager needs solutions to actually get an interview.

19:16 You see the difference there? How the demographics are a lot less important than the journey the customer is on. So it's not just about who they are but then what they want to do. So the customer journey map is tool one to understand your users. Tool two to understand your users is the jobs to be done framework. Have you guys heard about jobs to be done? Okay. So 20% of you have heard about jobs to be done. So I want to tell you a quick anecdote.

19:43 Sonic. You guys have heard of Sonic? It's a drive-thru chain. They do shakes. When does Sonic sell the most milkshakes? >> Just yell out sometimes. >> Who said morning? Why? >> Exactly. So, this is mind-blowing, right? People are drinking an,00 calorie 80 g of sugar horrible for you drink in the morning for breakfast.

20:21 What? So the founder of this framework, Clayton Christensen, he was a professor of business at Harvard Business School, decided to sit at Sonic all day and watch and see what people are doing. And what he realized was if you have a long commute, what's the problem with the donut? It might just fall. You also finish it really fast. What's the problem with bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich? Very hard to hold while you're driving. What's the problem with dal rodi? How are you going to scoop up the dal, right? Milkshake all of the sudden. Okay, I'm getting my calories. It's doesn't melt all the way over one hour. It's a perfect sidekick for a long commute. So, the job to be done was being the sidekick for your long commute. So, the product that features that they shipped for their milkshake was actually they changed its melting point so that it melts more slowly so that it works better for longer commutes. Sales went up. This was a product of the milkshake where sales had been flat for many many years. They had tried more sugary shakes, more fatty shakes, fruit shakes, chocolate shakes.

21:39 What does it turn out like? Understanding the melting point because you understood the job to be done of customers. That's the power of this jobs to be done framework. You should fill out this canvas. I wanted to make this talk very tactical for you, right? So, as you're filling out this step, fill out this canvas. Who is the job performer? What are their aspirations? What are the related jobs? Then what is that target job? Let me map out the job steps. Let me talk about the emotional and social aspects, the outcomes it drives, and the job differentiators.

22:08 This will very tactically help you understand your users in a way that you can actually make product changes. >> I think a great example of this, it's a little bit old now, but I thought all of you could relate, right? We used to all use email 10 years ago. Now all of you guys are going to go be PMs at companies where they use Slack or they use Teams, right? How did Slack get all this market share from email? They didn't compete on building a better email. They competed on being able to communicate with your co-workers. And so it's again about understanding the job to be done. We had Marty Kagan on the podcast. He said, "If you understand the customer's needs deeply, the solution becomes obvious." And that's the importance of this point.

22:56 So step three, obviously Black Panther and Superman, they have different superpowers, right? So they're going to go to their fight differently. They're not going to approach the fight the f same. Obviously Batman, he doesn't even have superpowers. He's going to approach the fight a little differently. In the war for customers wallets, you have to approach a fight based on your unique advantages. My favorite framework for using this is by this guy named Hamilton Helmer. Have you guys heard this or should I explain this? So you guys haven't heard it, right? The seven powers framework is in my opinion the best framework to understand which superpowers you should be relying on. So he breaks it down into scale economies, network economies, counterpositioning, switching costs, branding, cornered resource, and process power. And instead of just reading off this table and defining it for you, let's look at an example. So let's look at something that all of you guys know about Airbnb.

23:59 >> What are their superpowers, right? So I'd argue they really have three superpowers. They have network effects. They have brand and counterpositioning. So what's the network effect? If you have more Airbnbs listed, more guests are interested. If you have more guests on the platform, more people will list Airbnbs. a wonderful network effect brand. It's like a verb nowadays. They say like are you going to use an Airbnb on that vacation they don't say are you going to use a time rental or something like that right? So it's become a verb and then counterpositioning. It's still positioning against hotels which are a much much bigger industry. It's kind of a me product. There's certain segments of users that they're not going to love the hotel experience. It might not be at the location you want. It might not be at the price you want. might not have the kitchen that you want. So, all these different elements.

24:53 Now, let's move into step four because I want to keep this fast-paced and tactical for you guys. You want to show the future and keyword here, show. Too many people in their strategies, they're like, "Oh, well, I didn't have design resources or I'm not a designer." And so then they want to shy away from actually showing what the future is like of their strategy. The most common actually is that the designer gets mad about this. They say, "Hey, you're predetermining exactly what we're going to build. We haven't even had time to explore this space." So I do need to caveat that it's really important when you show these things to tell people.

25:32 Like when I show these things, I often say design not final in big red letters at the bottom right or something like that just to show. But you have to show people because there's something about seeing the user experience that turns the light on. You know, as they say, a picture is a thousand words. I'd say a prototype is 10,000 words. And so here in this example, you know, if you're going to improve your product detail page, if you said in if you're in your strategy document, you're saying, "Yeah, we're going to add more information.

26:03 We're going to add social proof. We're going to add new payment methods." Okay, but if you show me, I can just remember this picture. Okay, our product detail pages are going to start to look like this. And so there are four major types of visuals that you should consider building. And since you guys are aspiring PMs, I think you should be capable at creating all four. And so I I would create a plan for yourself. Out of 1 to 10, how good am I at creating these four things? And of the four that I'm weakest on, let's go improve it.

26:35 Storyboards, prototypes, videos, and mock-ups. I love the example, and we're going to continue to talk about Airbnb because you all know about it, of Airbnb's Snow White project. Have you guys heard of this one? >> No. Right. So great. So in 2016, they actually hired a Pixar designer to work with them on storyboards for every moment in Airbnb's experience that they wanted to sculpt. And what they did is they thought about if we had no technology constraints, what would this experience look like? What would the future version 20 years from now of Airbnb look like? Right? And so they built all this out and that singular vision guided the company from 2016 to 2020.

27:24 And you don't need a Pixar designer. Going back to what I said at the very beginning, in 2025, product strategy has really changed. You can use those tools that we w talked about to actually design this stuff yourself. You don't need designer bandwidth. That was always my biggest frustration actually when I was a lead PM for instance it was like okay I want to work on strategy okay I need to create some tickets in Jira and block off a week for my designer to do a design sprint now as we know most PMs were doing a lot of our IC work in the evenings 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. or whatever it might be, right? When we don't have meetings, you can just run these really quickly. And I want to show you a demo of exactly that.

28:08 So, here it is. I pasted a PRD into this tool called bolt.new. You guys should all write that down. Bolt. And watch it coding. It is coding thousands of lines of code. What is this PRD? This is a PRD for a new interface for chat GPT that I created. So I'm just assuming that I'm a product manager at OpenAI. And as you see, it created an interactive prototype of new version of chat GPT in less than a minute. That's the power of these tools.

28:42 And so how should you use these tools and which tools should you use is the next question most people ask me. So think of the decision three in this way. Do you know how to code? And do you want to code on this project? Then you're eventually going to want to use cursor. The next thing is do you want to build a full functioning app with actual database capabilities actually deployed that people can actually use. So if for instance you're at a small startup and the prototype you create you want to ship actually to production as the first version of the app use replet.

29:18 Now if you're more in the prototyping space then you have three good options. Lovable v0ero and bolt. Lovable is the most userfriendly. And if you're not tech technical, you should use that lovable.dev. If you're a little bit more technical and want a little bit more capability, use V0ero. That's from a hosting company called Versell. And so you get a lot of hosting capabilities. And if you want a little more power, if you want to build a mobile app or something like that, use Bolt. So that's how I think about using these tools. And specifically the way to use these tools is as I as I showed you in the demo from PRD to prototype takes one minute right.

30:00 So what you want to do is you want to create lots of these prototypes. You want to first the first set of prototypes I would personally create if let's say I was a lead product manager still at Epic Games would be to share with my team share with my designers and my engineers maybe my analyst maybe my data scientist happened to be at a firm that my legal person she was really great at product so share it with her too right you share it internally you start to get feedback you start to create that buyin for the strategy then I'd go share it with real customers or prospective customers. If you guys haven't used this website, usertesting.com, I highly recommend it. Very easy for you to put up a few demographic questions and then be able to put a prototype in front of a new customer and then you get to watch them use that prototype and you get to improve your solution. So, what you should do is you should come up with like three divergent solutions. Put 10 users to try each of those at usertesting.com. That'll cost you $450.

31:01 your company will be able to pay for that, right? And then you have 30 sessions of people using your prototypes. After you watch those 30 sessions, your next prototype is going to be so good cuz you're going to learn so much. Then you take that prototype and you go socialize it with your CEO, your VP of product, your director of product. You get more feedback and you create the final prototype. That's how you visualize strategy in 2025. This is what I have not seen anybody talk about anywhere else.

31:34 Here's a good example of a video. I used to work at Epic Games, right? It's a little bit laggy for some reason, but this one minute video is going to show you everything you need to know. You are the new world.

32:16 >> >> This is how we at Epic Games used to create our strategies. Look at that. There's even a preview for what's happening mid-season. So, when I was a product manager at Epic Games creating a new season of Fortnite, I would work with the team of what we call technical artists and we'd work on this 1 minute video that would be our one month strategy sprint. That video included all the new movement, all the new guns, all the new map features, literally the entire road map for the season. And because it's produced at this level, it gets everybody really hyped up to build it. Because with Fortnite, we were guiding 5,000 designers and engineers to create each new season, right? How do you create alignment with 5,000 people? You can't even build a prototype for each of those features. There were like 200 features.

33:21 But what if you create a futuristic demo video? And so that's one thing you can also learn from the gaming industry is to create videos to visualize your strategy. Let's move into step five because again I want to keep this super tactical so that you can go do this in your job when you have that next internship or co-op. You want to choose your battles. You want to have two to four big bets. And what I mean by big bets are features that have a lot of design and engineering required. Like it might take months for people to build but then also you believe they will have a huge impact. And so I always think about pillars, like three to four pillars here.

34:04 Here's an example. We all know Netflix. We all use Netflix. We all pay them too much money, right? I think it's what my bill at Netflix is like $25 last month. Crazy, right? So in 2009, we've gotten to know exactly what strategy they had thanks to this man named Gibson Bidd, who was actually chief product officer back then. He published their strategy. They just had three elements and they sound simple, honestly. transition from DVD to streaming, expand device support, improve content licensing. It's like that's it. But look at what they said no to. They said no to social networks, gaming, news, live sports. It's only now in 2021 when they started doing games in 2023 when they started doing sports. So, it's all about focus and we can learn from our guru, right?

34:54 He's the best product manager of all time. >> >> He built the most successful products of all time. I think the iPhone is still generating what 2-3 $300 billion in revenue a year somehow long after his death. And I love what he says, right? People think focus means saying yes to the things you've got to focus on, but that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred good ideas. Step six is to quantify your impact. And I haven't seen the other strategy frameworks. If you go look at strategy blocks by Lenny, for instance, that have this step. And I want to emphasize to you guys how important this step was personally for me in my career. When I look back and I wanted to ask for more PMs on my team, more engineers on my team. I remember those conversations with Max Lechin at a firm or Tim Zang at Apollo.io. They always came back to Akash, you've done a really good job quantifying the impact that if I give you four more engineers, you're going to work on these three or four things that are going to give this impact to the top and bottom line. So what does that modeling look like? I want to show you guys both on the revenue side and on the cost side. On the revenue side, you might have a metric like we want to increase activation by 5%. You might use a correlation to say as we increase activation rate over time, retention rate improves by this much. So 5% increase in activation improves retention 3%. You can then use something called a growth model which is an Excel spreadsheet with many tabs connecting these metrics to your topline ARR. Then you can go use your team's financial model which is typically owned by the finance team to connect that to your earnings before interest tax depreciation and amortization EBID dot.

36:46 So you're connecting your product metric of activation rate to the top and bottom line. In addition, let's say you're working on cost. This is what I always hear like, hey akosh, I'm an internal tools PM. I'm a platform PM. There's no way for me to connect my metrics to what matters for the business. I would say there is. Let's say you're working on decreasing build time. That was one of the initiatives I actually worked on at Fortnite. Did you guys know that to build a Fortnite season package on a l on a computer that cost $100,000 used to take 15 hours?

37:22 We take that build time to 15 hours to 13.5 hours. That was one of the initiatives I worked on. Well, that should improve developer productivity by 5%. And then we can make an assumption that that should reduce the need for extra gameplay programmers by 5%. And based on the cost of how many new gameplay programmers we had in our headcount plan, that should save us $1.5 million per year. So it's these types of connections that really help PMs in those discussions with CEOs and CFOs to get resources for their strategy. And here's that ROI, right? We started with product teams are expensive.

38:02 You show that, right? You show your metric and you show the profit and then you show the return in one year. In one year it's 15%, actually in 2 years it's essentially 215%. And so these initiatives then have a very high ROI that your CEO is willing to support. Step seven, and I think this is missed. Like so many strategies, as I said, they don't connect to the actual work that people are doing, is to plan your path.

38:30 And I know that it's fancy for product gurus and product influencers to say future factories suck, future road maps suck. My point would be actually you should try to model out your big things, but you should do it based on problems and outcomes. So the bad version of this is features plus dates. The road map. That's a Gant chart. And does someone want to volunteer? Why does the Gant chart so bad?

39:02 Because we never hit our date, right? If we think about a construction project on your home, it always takes longer than they tell you. The same is true of building software. It always takes longer than they tell you. And you know, I just had my house stained. Okay. What did they learn when they started staining? Oh your wood is sealed. We need to sand all your wood before we can stain it, right? They You always learn things once you go and build the thing. And so that's why that doesn't work. Features and dates, that's how we used to do product management when I joined in 2008. That is not how you should be doing product management now.

39:39 So around 2012 2015 time frame, we used to do themes and time frames, right? We used to do now next later. Jana Bastto became famous for now next later. I think the 2025 best version of this is problems and outcomes. You have an objective, a key result, a problem. That's what you're committing to in this step seven. So, I said you could create this in less time than it takes to watch a movie. That's your day one strategy. You draft your objective. You list your key user needs. You identify your superpowers.

40:14 You sketch your vision elements. and you choose your pillars. Here's an example. So, people always ask me, Ankash, how did you become a VP of product at a unicorn? I developed this little document in 2 hours after I did my first three interviews with the CEO, CPO and VP of engineering. I just spent 2 hours and I sent this document to them. So you can see I have my vision, I have my growth model, I have my key pillars and I have my features under those pillars as well as estimated impact of those features. That's how I got the job. And you want to know something funny? One and a half years into the job, we were still working on the same strategy. Like I said, the day one strategy is surprisingly accurate.

40:57 It's usually 80% accurate. So then you go into the week one strategy. You test the objective with stakeholders. You validate user needs with five to eight interviews. You assess your competitor's response. You get feedback on your vision. And you estimate your impact. I really recommend a strategy sprint to organize this week. So day one, you do your prep and context. Day two, you do your problems and opportunities. Day three, you do your strategic options. Day four, you validate and refine. Day five, you valid, document, and communicate. This is exactly how I recommend you plan your week. and you plan like 80% of your time on this. In fact, I used to tell my executives, "Hey, I'm not coming to any meetings.

41:36 I'm not responding to any Slacks. I'm not responding to any emails. It's strategy week. You need to stay focused." Then you get into the one month and this is where you can do some design sprints where you map the challenge, you sketch competing solutions, you decide on the best approach, you build a prototype, and you test with customers. next. And so that's the one month spread. It's not more complex, it's more validated.

42:08 And then you need to take that strategy into multiple formats. For executives, I recommend you guys create a one-pager all about impact. Like I said, that's what worked for me in my conversations with executives. Then for your teams, create a visual road map with the problems you want to solve. This is for your designers, for your engineers to have buyin. And then for your customers because don't forget about them. You want to talk about the future benefits and your outcomes that you're creating out of your strategy. And then you need to tell the story of your strategy. Too many people, they just take those three documents that they created and they email them out to people.

42:45 Great strategy must be repeated. Melissa Perry was on the podcast. That was the point she made to me is you got to keep repeating your strategy. And I recommend this framework which is a storytelling arc. What is the current reality? It's kind of how my presentation went today. What is the current reality? What is the opportunity? What is the approach? And what's the destination? If you tell it as a story, people are way more likely to remember it because as I said, nobody remembers your strategy. That's the problem with old version of doing strategy. We want to make people remember.

43:17 Now, I want to talk about the hot topic of the day. Everyone's been talking about founder mode. Have you can you guys raise your hands if you've heard of it? >> Right. So half of you have heard of founder mode. Founder mode was created by Paul Graham who was the founder of Y Cominator. He observed how Brian Chesy at Airbnb, we've been talking a lot about Airbnb today, operated. And what he said was, "Hey, founders need to really drive the strategy." And people took this as, hey, that means PMs and product leaders, they don't drive the strategy. I tend to disagree, right? Because if you read his article carefully, what he's saying is whatever founder mode consists of, it's pretty clear that it's going to break the principle that the CEO should only engage with the company via his or her direct reports. That's the reality is now your CEO's getting involved in your strategy work.

44:11 So is that any different from how it always was though? My point is our expectation about strategy was writing a document but the reality always was strategy was about driving alignment with your CEO and your VP of engineering and your VP of design. So how do you do it? So we had Anodati on my podcast. He was the SVP of product at Swiggy. If you guys have heard of it, it's the biggest fast delivery player in India for 7 years, right? He also worked at Flipkart and a bunch of other amazing Indian startups. Here is how he says it.

44:46 He calls it the 4B framework. So what you do is you outline all your initiatives into big bets, brilliant basics, bread and butter and breaking bad. And then you see how I've colored these. So basically what you do is you show different options like hey CEO we have two options, blue and red. Red very focused on Breaking Bad, just a little bit of big bets, medium amount on brilliant basics and bread and butter. Blue very focused on big bats, almost no breaking bad. And this showing people intentionally what you're not doing is going to save you so much.

45:26 Because what always happened when I created a strategy, 3 months later, marketing comes to me and says, "Why didn't you have this? Why didn't you have that? You go back to your 4B slide and say, "Hey, we thought about that." The CEO and I decided, "No, we're not intentionally going to do that." Going back to what Jobs said, Steve Jobs, our guru, you have to say no. 4Bs helps you tell people what you said no. So, I've talked a lot about strategy. I want to end it with you guys on some concrete example. This was Tesla's entire strategy for the first 10 years, guys. It was this simple. Build a sports car. Use that money to build an affordable car. Use that money to build an even more affordable car while doing above provide zero emission power. And that worked for 10 years after which Elon finally created their next strategy which was also so simple. So going back to all the way where we started simple is better.

46:23 When you're at a startup, it's going to be very focused on product market fit. Since we're running on time, I'll go quickly on these. When you're at a growth stage, you're going to focus a lot on scaling efficiently. And when you're at an enterprise, this is when the millions of reviews and product reviews that we all hate are going to come into the picture. It doesn't matter where you are. I want you guys to apply this 5-second strategy test. If your team, your designers, your engineers can't explain the strategy in 30 seconds, if they can't make decisions based on it, and if it doesn't help them say no to things, you haven't passed the 5-second strategy test.

47:03 Avoid focusing on outputs when you develop your strategy. Like I said, the bad version is the Gant chart. Avoid having analysis paralysis. Like I said, 3 to four months on strategy, in my opinion, is overkill. One month enough. Don't focus on pleasing everybody. It should be the case that your marketing and sales team say, "What about this? What about that?" But you should have intentionally made the choices not to do those things. And then don't do it annually. That's way too slow of a cycle.

47:35 So, it's your turn. I want you all to take 60 seconds. You guys have those little notepads. Let's develop your personal strategy. Write down your mission in one sentence. Write down one metric you want to move. Maybe you want to get three more PM interviews in the next 6 months. Maybe you want to crack an offer in the next four months. And your biggest pain point. So just do it right now. And that's your snap strategy. I hope that that helps you all in your personal lives because I don't think product strategy needs to be this mystical concept that only applies to product management. It should apply to your life, too.

48:11 Everyone says AI is going to replace strategic thinking. I had Claire Vo on my podcast. She says product management is dead. She says AI is pretty good at product strategy. I disagree. I think that you should be using AI to help you think. You can even get feedback on your strategy, but it's not going to be able to have that context for you. Everybody says strategy needs to be more complex. As you hopefully learn today, simpler strategy is better.

48:38 So remember these five things guys after this 1hour talk. Strategy is about clear choices about what not to do. Remember our fourbs framework from Anodraati. Start simple, validate quickly, show don't tell, visualize, visualize, visualize. I do not want to see any of you guys publishing 15-page strategy docs. Measure outcomes, not outputs, and communicate constantly and start tomorrow. As I said, block two hours, create your day one strategy, share it with one stakeholder, iterate based on their feedback, and send me a message on LinkedIn about how it goes.

49:15 Thank you guys so much. If you want to subscribe to my newsletter or my podcast to watch more, this is how I hope you enjoyed that episode. Finally, do check out my bundle at bundle.ashg.com. akashg.com to get access to nine AI products for an entire year for free. This includes Dovetail, Mobin, Linear, Reforge, Build, Descript, and many other amazing tools that will help you as an AI product manager or builder succeed. I'll see you in the next episode.