Ravi Mehta

Your ideal goal is to lead in a scalable way, which means you feel really confident about the direction of your team and your team has the autonomy to move in that direction. There's another really effective way of leading, which is selective micromanagement.

If you don't feel confident in the direction that your team is moving, the right answer is not to be hands-off and to let them go in that wrong direction. The right answer is to micromanagement, but do it in a very tactical and a very temporary way.

The strategy doc wouldn't be complete without wireframes. When you talk about strategy in words alone, everyone takes away a different interpretation of that strategy, whereas when you actually can show people wireframes of what the product will look like when that strategy is implemented, it creates much more alignment.

If you just describe your strategy in words, people might come up with one nav bar that's completely different than another nav bar. And as a result, you then find that the moment that you're implementing your mobile app, that there's completely different perceptions of what's valuable to the company.

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.

The strategy is the logical plan that your company's going to use to bring that mission into being. And so it's got to be very specific, it's got to be very rigorous, and it's basically the approach of the plan that the company will use to make progress on achieving its mission.

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.

I think what happens too often when people start with goals and then create the roadmap is that the goal takes precedence and there's no context, there's no principles that are ultimately driving that.

Oftentimes there's things that come before that that need to be addressed ahead of time so that you can really understand what the plan for meeting those outcomes is going to look like. And so I refer to that as the frontier of understanding.

What we found was actually it was very different than what we had assumed. They weren't earning any more than the average Tinder user. They just had a much more intense use case. They wanted to meet someone. And 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.