Context
Ravi Mehta was previously CPO at Tinder, Product Director at Facebook, and VP of Product at Tripadvisor and taught product strategy at Reforge. Currently, he’s co-founder and CEO of Outpace, a coaching platform designed to help people reach their professional goals.
Ravi has a long career in the tech industry, beginning with coding on an Apple TC computer in the mid-’90s. He started a gaming company in high school and college before joining Microsoft, where he was part of the initial Xbox Live team. After six years at Microsoft, he attended business school and briefly tried management consulting, but ultimately returned to the startup world.
You can also see the episode transcript and Ravi’s references.
Differences between working at an established tech company vs. a startup ▶️
Ravi has gone through some mind shifts since he started his own startup. Primarily the difference between speed and latency: “I think about velocity as sort of the quantity of work, and latency is how quickly you can go from an idea to actually being able to test that idea and learn whether or not that idea was the right one.” According to Ravi, startups should:
- Focus on latency, not speed. The ability to have an idea, test it the following day, and validate the hypothesis quickly is what sets startups apart.
- If a car is going really, really fast, it can’t turn as quickly. Startups have a really tight turning radius, and bigger companies have a really high rate of velocity.
- Move forward with conviction, then learn and adjust. Startups cannot rely on experimental approaches because they do not have a large user base, so what’s left is just conviction. If you don’t make the right decision, latency helps you quickly shift direction.
Why founders should network with “early-stage” folks ▶️
- Build your early-stage network ASAP. Plug into entrepreneurship, building products, growth hacking, and startup investing communities, which thrive on building from scratch and moving fast. Ravi recommends Indie Hackers and Everything Marketplaces.
- Larger company network = startup network. Your Google or Facebook network may not translate to help when building your startup. Senior leaders at big companies want to go deeper into their craft, not start over.
- Build relationships with early-stage founders. Early-stage founder life is lonely and grueling, so having other founders in a network builds a sense of camaraderie and support, and VC folks help create such communities.
What the product strategy stack is and how to use it ▶️
Difficulty prioritizing is often a strategy issue, not an execution issue.
Product strategy stack is a:
system that helps people understand what framework they’re using in order to make decisions and what’s going to drive value for the business.
It unbundles concepts like goals, roadmap, and strategy that are often conflated.
- Company mission: The world your company sees and the change it wants to bring to that world
- Company strategy: The logical plan you have to bring your company’s mission into being
- Product strategy: The logical plan for how the product will drive its part of the company strategy
- Product roadmap: The sequence of features that implement the product strategy
- Product goals: The quarterly and day-to-day outcomes of the product roadmap that measure progress against the product strategy
The five pieces all work together as a system where, 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. And so if you’re having trouble meeting your goals, it might be because the roadmap isn’t set up so that it can help move those goals forward. If the roadmap isn’t right, it might be because the product strategy hasn’t been really clearly articulated.
- Mission is what you’re trying to achieve, e.g. Google’s mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
- Vision is the resulting world. Vision, on the other hand, can be considered the world your company aims to create after achieving its mission.
How Ravi developed his strategy framework at Tripadvisor ▶️
The product strategy framework originally started when Ravi was at Tripadvisor and had to figure out how trip planning works.
We wanted to work top-down, define what do we want to achieve, how we’re going to achieve it, and what are the incremental steps we’re going to use to get there.
Wireframes create better alignment in strategy. When discussing strategy using just words, everyone may have different interpretations. Including wireframes made it easier for everyone to get on the same page and understand the intended direction.
You would never work with an architect that didn’t provide you a blueprint of the house… Everyone will come away from that with sort of a different interpretation of what is needed. But once you can see the blueprint, and the blueprint doesn’t need to be high-fidelity, it’s a conceptual framework that shows you how things are laid out.
Why PMs should understand design, UX, and UI ▶️
Having that ability to think at a conceptual level about how UI and UX works is, I think, a critical part of being a product manager.
- Being able to visually conceptualize UI and UX is critical. Even without advanced design skills, sketching out ideas on paper can visualize your product vision and help you work better with designers, where something is better than nothing. Don’t depend on designers for every visual thought—empower yourself, e.g. by using Balsamiq.
Examples of the product strategy stack in action ▶️
Hinge’s mission to be “designed to be deleted” led to key product strategy differentiation compared with Tinder, despite serving the same underlying need. Tinder’s mission to make single life more fun led to it being viewed as a continuous-use app, whereas Hinge was temporary.
- Build a product experience tailored to your mission. While Tinder and Hinge shared some similarities in monetization and goals, Hinge deliberately avoided using Tinder’s swiping mechanism and instead focused on profiles and conversations to match their mission of relationships and being deleted.
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- Tinder resisted adding filters to maintain a lightweight, serendipitous experience. By not giving users the ability to filter potential matches by various criteria that may limit connections, Tinder ensured that people could meet others and have unexpected connections. Their product philosophy centered on getting to know each other through conversation rather than treating the app like a “search engine for people.”
- Leverage different customer acquisition strategies based on audience. Hinge used TV ads to reach an older audience more aligned with their mission, while Tinder focused on influencer marketing and events to reach a younger audience looking to make single life more fun.
- Focus on decisions that differentiate based on mission not just copy competitors. While video chat was added by both companies, Hinge deliberately built a different product experience from the start. Use your mission and strategy stack to determine when to leverage competitor moves and when to forge a unique path based on your differentiation.
Monetization features at Tinder and the “whales” who spend the most ▶️
Tinder’s monetization model: Tinder has two main components to its monetization model—a subscription called Tinder Gold and a set of à la carte products like Super Like and Boost. Tinder Gold allows users to break Tinder’s rules and see who has swiped right on them, making it an important and highly sought-after feature.
“Whales” in Tinder: Similar to social games, Tinder also has some “whale” users who spend hundreds of dollars a month buying à la carte microtransactions like Super Like and Boost. These users were found to have intense use cases, like looking to meet people while constantly moving, often not being wealthier than the average Tinder user.
- Reframing the cost of dating: These users frame the cost of Tinder products within the context of dating expenses. They consider spending hundreds of dollars on Tinder features as a small investment to efficiently meet people they want to date, comparing it to the costs of going on actual dates.
By talking to these big spenders, Tinder realized their assumptions were wrong.
We were also able to recalibrate and understand what those people were solving for. They’re really solving for the utility of meeting people more effectively and not having to spend as much of their time to do it. And they were framing the price in very different ways than the average user.
How customer feedback led to new features at Tinder ▶️
Develop premium product tiers to monetize high-value users. Ravi and his team noticed a demographic of high-value users who were willing to pay much more for Tinder’s features, which led to Tinder Platinum.
Break traditional product rules to provide additional utility. Ravi’s team found value in allowing users to send Super Likes with notes, letting them chat with someone before matching. Despite costing more than a regular Super Like, it increased the likelihood of a match and improved retention.
Build fulfilling, impactful products that support different communities. Tinder’s lightweight design allowed it to cater to the LGBTQ community better than other dating products.
When Ravi was at Tinder, these stories made his work meaningful.
I’d be in an Uber, and the Uber driver would tell me, “Oh, I met my boyfriend or girlfriend, or I met my wife or my husband, on Tinder.”
Lenny:
Wow, man. Fulfilling, impactful, interesting, surprising. What a role. Actually met my wife online on a defunct dating site app called howaboutwe.com.
Why goals come after roadmap in Ravi’s framework ▶️
Goals should enable the roadmap, not the other way around. The roadmap provides context for the goals and helps ensure that the goals align with the desired destination. Without this context, goals can lead the product in the wrong direction.
As Ravi said,
The analogy I like to use, it’s a little bit like taking a road trip and starting out by saying, “Hey, we need to drive 250 miles.” It’s like, no, if you’re going to take a road trip, you first decide where you want to drive to. If you’re in L.A., you might take a road trip to Vegas. And so our destination is Vegas, and we’ll know whether or not we reach there if we’ve driven 250 miles. Because that 250-mile goal is in the context of a destination.
Tripadvisor’s strategy for increasing bookings ▶️
- Focus on long-term strategy ahead of short-term goals and metrics. Tripadvisor initially optimized their roadmap and features based on metrics that drove immediate bookings. However, this ended up undermining their larger strategy of becoming the primary site travelers used for trip planning. After that, align metrics and KPIs with your strategy, not the other way around.
The four buckets of the frontier of understanding ▶️
Lenny: And there's four buckets that you just described of types of goals.
- Understanding risk, which is we have something that we want to do but we don’t really understand what the levers are.
- Dependency risk, which is we understand what we think the levers are, but we may or may not have the tools that we need in order to make progress.
- Execution risk, which is we have all the resources that we need, we have a really strong hypothesis, and then we may or may not be able to execute against those hypotheses.
- Strategic risk, which is we have a hypothesis and it might turn out that that was not the right hypothesis.
The product management competencies framework ▶️
The framework consists of 12 competencies in four different areas.
- Product execution. This involves creating functional specifications, delivering the product from those specifications, and ensuring the end product is of high quality from multiple perspectives. As a product manager becomes more senior, they should consider how to create systems that enable teams to excel in these areas consistently. “An APM is going to think about product execution in terms of their day-to-day individual contribution. But a CPO is going to think about product execution in terms of the systems that they create to enable teams to define really good specifications.”
- Customer insight. To decide what to build, product managers need to understand customer needs. Use available data to make well-informed decisions, engage in conversations with customers, and practice user experience design to think beyond functionality and consider overall user experience.
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- User experience design. A fundamental part of being a really good product manager is the ability to think about the user experience in a very detailed way to make sure that you’re not just defining functionality, but you’re really clearly understanding how that functionality turns into user experience.
- Product strategy. This breaks down into three things:
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- Own business outcomes. It’s important to move away from thinking about product as shipping features to driving business outcomes.
- Product vision and roadmapping. It’s the ability to take the individual pieces of work that you’re doing for a product and put those together into a coherent vision and roadmap that allows you to build toward the product strategy and the company strategy over time.
- Strategic impact. It can be thought of as a sequence of business outcomes.
- Leadership. Product managers need to work with various stakeholders, and thus it is crucial to have strong influencing skills. Engage stakeholders, align them around a product’s vision and goals, and be transparent with progress updates. Cultivate the ability to listen, communicate effectively, and adapt to different perspectives.
The exponential feedback framework ▶️
The problem is that folks provide feedback that’s very surface-level, focused on particular symptoms but not root causes.
- Exponential feedback focuses on underlying behaviors for compounding returns. Focusing on the underlying behaviors and root causes helps the individual grow, diagnose their own performance effectively, and improve consistently over time.
- Applying the competencies as a lens for feedback gives actionable insights. Using the competencies framework to categorize areas provides clearer direction for growth.
Why you should ask for feedback—and graciously accept it ▶️
- Ask your manager to evaluate your performance. Your manager will almost certainly have some impression of your performance, and helping them get it down on paper and getting it more specific can be a really good way to start that conversation.
- Invite feedback and give permission. Encourage your manager to provide feedback in real time without worrying about wording it perfectly. “Look, I’m really looking to level up. Please give me feedback whenever you see something. You can give it to me in real time. Don’t worry about wordsmithing it. I just want to make sure that I’m getting better.”
- Show gratitude for feedback. No matter how the feedback makes you feel, express genuine thanks to the person providing it.
When you get feedback, no matter how it makes you feel, whether you’re melting inside or not, just be very enthusiastically, “Thank you so much for that. That was really helpful.” —Jules Walter
How to determine the right amount of leadership your team needs ▶️
- Two major extreme failure modes are micromanaging and hands-off leadership. Some leaders struggle to strike the right balance, and they may micromanage to the point where team members feel as if they lack autonomy, leading to trust issues, or take a completely hands-off approach, leading to wasted efforts and poor guidance.
- Ultimately, as product builders and product innovators, the details matter, and sometimes you need to zoom into what the text on a particular button says, and you might have a strong opinion on that. And so it’s okay to engage at that level.
- Think about leadership using a matrix—scalable leadership vs. selective micromanagement.
One is the degree to which you’re aligned with your manager, and the second is the degree to which your manager has confidence in you.
- If there’s a high degree of alignment and a high degree of confidence, you have the full support of your manager. In cases of low alignment, having your manager’s confidence can still provide permission and support to push in a different direction.
- Either change the approach to align with your manager or build their confidence in your ability to choose a new path.
Lightning round ▶️
Recommended books
- Hooked shows an effective model to create engaging products.
- Working Backwards is useful for understanding Amazon’s unique product-building approach.
Favorite podcast: The Ezra Klein Show is appreciated for its contrarian thinking.
Favorite recent movie/TV show: Andor for science fiction that reflects on the present and expands the universe in new and interesting ways.
Favorite interview question: “Tell me about a product that you love.” This question can reveal a lot about a person’s values and product sense. It can be unpacked further by asking why they love it, what they think others love about it, and what features they’d like to see in the future.
Five SaaS products Ravi Mehta’s team uses
- Airtable for its powerful and versatile database capabilities
- Webflow for changing their approach to building products
- Superhuman for a fast and efficient email client
- Descript for video and audio editing
- Balsamiq for wireframing and user experience solutions
Tips for finding a coach: When talking to potential coaches, ask about their background and experiences relevant to your specific challenges. Also, ask about their coaching style and approach, ensuring alignment with your own preferences and learning style.
- When deciding if a coach is a good fit, ask them to tell you about the client they’re most proud of helping, the challenge they faced, and how they helped them meet that challenge. This question provides deep insight into their values, where their pride comes from, and how they engage with the people they’re helping. Compare their response with what you’re looking for in a coach to determine if it’s a good match.
How Outpace uses AI to assist in coaching ▶️
Use AI to amplify coaches and make them more effective. Outpace uses OpenAI to provide coaches with suggestions on how to respond to participants’ inputs. Instead of replacing human coaching, AI serves as a support tool to improve the efficiency and quality of interactions with the participants.
Simulate different leadership styles using AI. Outpace leverages AI to generate various types of prompts that emulate different leadership styles, such as action-oriented, sympathetic, inquisitive, and informative. This enables coaches to provide personalized feedback and tailor their approach according to individual needs.
This is a human edited summary of the podcast episode with Ravi, by Gaurav Chandrashekar (@cggaurav, productscale.xyz). To listen to the full episode, go here.
