AMA: Meta Director of Product - Horizon Worlds Platform, Mike Arcuri on Product Strategy

Three ways: Writing strategy docs Collecting strategy feedback from other people Monitoring your product metrics to track if your strategy is working Writing will help you clarify your thinking and give you a draft to "test" mentally against different frameworks and criteria (see my other answer about what makes for a good/strong product strategy). Feedback: Organizational and company leaders can give you helpful feedback (formally in group reviews, or informally on your drafts). Coworkers with ...Read More

Most situations don't have "one right" product strategy. Some market/product situations have several strong/good strategies. In other situations there may be no winning strategies for your company/team. But "how should we validate that our product strategy is good?" Let's look at 3 examples: (1) validating a new strategy you're considering, (2) validating a strategy the team is executing against but without market feedback yet, and (3) validating a strategy for which you can gather real customer ...Read More

Ultimately, our job in product management is to make products that succeed in the market. So to me, that's always been the high order bit in prioritization and planning. If you're not delivering value to your customers, or the business model isn't sustainable, your product and team will fail. But the teams we work with also depend on having exec support, buy-in, and sponsorship. So you can't ignore this. You have to ensure that your exec stakeholders understand and agree with the team's strategy ...Read More

User requests are the kind of thing you should always be monitoring, but always consider in the context of your overall behavioral metrics and product strategy before reacting. A good phrase is to "take feedback seriously, not literally." You might be receiving very skewed data in user requests. There could be a selection bias in the customers who write feedback or leave reviews. The needs of your loudest power users might not match the most important problems and opportunities for your overall ...Read More

Trends tend to be high risk, high reward. You have to be careful not to assume too much. There's a long list of heavily-hyped social media trends that turned out to be pretty niche and unimportant over a 5+ year timeframe: Vine's 15s videos, Clubhouse and audio social media, Anonymous social networks like "Secret" from 2014. But sometimes there are huge opportunities due to shifts in the market. New regulations like GDPR created market opportunity for a lot of companies, The decline of Twitter/X ...Read More

At Meta/Facebook we're lucky enough to have really good internal infrastructure for setting up experiments and evaluating results. So in recent years I've come to rely on these internal tools. At other companies, I've used analytics and optimization services like: Google Analytics/Firebase Optimizely Mixpanel ApSalar (now Singular) I would also expect great things from Statsig, but haven't used it yet myself. A few other points about planning experiments and your iteration strategy: Learn about ...Read More

When you're launching a new feature in an existing app, you clarify your goals for the launch. Some example goals could be: To validate that the new feature fully solves the "user problem" it was designed to solve To learn about demand for the new feature To test relevance of the feature to particular sub-audiences To improve your product's key metrics overall (increase engagement, improve retention). To resurrect churned users To convert more users from free to paid To grow your product's users ...Read More

This really depends on the maturity stage for your product. For 0-1 work in startups (new products, not-yet-released), I recommend the models explained by Steve Blank (e.g. customer development process, business model canvas). There are so many unknowns and intertwined hypotheses for brand new product ideas that all need to be validated, iterated on, and improved until the whole product concept and its acquisition and retention funnels are working. The business model canvas helps clarify the sco ...Read More

Each person in a leadership position has a unique personality and skillset. It's important they find ways to continue to offer their strengths to their team and product while also doing the job of a leader: providing direction and clarity, supporting team members of various skill levels and seniority, coaching team members, and giving them opportunities to learn and grow. In my case, I love thinking through potential visions and strategies, breaking them down into tactical plans, and actually ge ...Read More

When it comes to customer behavior, you usually detect that a problem exists before you figure out why that problem exists. "What people are doing" shows up every day in your metrics. "Why are people doing what they're doing?" is a harder question that often requires research techniques to nail down. In a small scrappy company, these techniques can involve click recording and watching replays, getting out of the building and talking to people, surveys, diary studies, usability studies, market aw ...Read More