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AMA: Patreon Product Leader, Sandeep Rajan on Product Strategy
February 23 @ 9:00AM PST
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Patreon Product Leader, Sandeep Rajan on Product Strategy
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Sandeep Rajan
Patreon Product Lead, Member Experience • February 23
I encourage my teams to start by understanding their objectives, plans, assumptions & approach to risk management. We listen carefully and figure out where the gaps and opportunities lie and how impact & success is defined & measured. Then, as we develop our strategies, we share early & often –......Read More
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Sandeep Rajan
Patreon Product Lead, Member Experience • February 23
We leave it to each team to figure out what helps them balance flexibility with clarity to achieve their maximum speed of execution. We do our best to have a common language around goals, strategy & measuring progress, but largely leave it to teams to figure out how best to build & ship given t......Read More
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Sandeep Rajan
Patreon Product Lead, Member Experience • February 23
The only stakeholder that must have buy-in for your product strategy is the one accountable for the results of your org or area. That may be a C-level exec or VP or GM or a discipline lead. Once they believe in the strategy as the best path to hit their goals for the business, what remains is lar......Read More
787 Views
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Sandeep Rajan
Patreon Product Lead, Member Experience • February 23
I generally don't believe in investing in differentiation for differentiation's sake – if the feature doesn't solve a core customer need then I'd have a hard time prioritizing it over a feature that does simply for the purpose of checking a box on a table unless there's a strong belief (preferabl......Read More
760 Views
1 request
Sandeep Rajan
Patreon Product Lead, Member Experience • February 23
If your execs are pushing your product in a different direction from your customer & market input, try to understand why that is. They may be trying to pivot the business, or they may have a vision for where the market is going that doesn't quite map to where the market currently is. Or there may......Read More
348 Views
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Sandeep Rajan
Patreon Product Lead, Member Experience • February 23
I generally believe product strategies should be evaluated more frequently the earlier a product is in its lifecycle. A zero-to-one team I worked closely with found the right pace to be testing a new direction & goals every month or so, whereas a scaled team I led had sufficient visibility to est......Read More
833 Views
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Sandeep Rajan
Patreon Product Lead, Member Experience • February 23
A product that is working well for its users will show strong user retention metrics and very positive qualitative feedback from users. If you're retaining the vast majority of your current userbase with some signs of user-driven growth or upsell activity, your core product is probably on solid g......Read More
958 Views
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Sandeep Rajan
Patreon Product Lead, Member Experience • February 23
First, define "right" by establishing clear goals – is it product-market fit? Is it growing an existing product to a certain milestone? These will help you determine the right form of validation to apply to each stage. For products that haven't yet achieved market fit, early & rapid customer fe......Read More
398 Views
2 requests
Sandeep Rajan
Patreon Product Lead, Member Experience • February 23
This sounds to me like your sales team doesn't believe the target market is big enough and/or the right market. It's hard to believe in a product strategy unless you agree on who it's for, so the first thing I'd do here is to get everyone aligned on who you're building for & why, and then articul......Read More
751 Views
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Sandeep Rajan
Patreon Product Lead, Member Experience • February 23
The more differentiated & sticky your core value proposition is, the less you'll need to worry about market trends, as you'll have more and more of a market all to yourself. Make this your goal. Few companies find themselves in that position. For the rest, market trends give us a better sense of......Read More
873 Views
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Sandeep Rajan
Patreon Product Lead, Member Experience • February 24
I think of this in two ways best conveyed through a sports metaphor: learning new plays I can add to my playbook, and building reps so that I can figure out what the right play is for a given scenario. For the first, I enjoy reading about strategy – lots of Stratechery, various strategy books, ......Read More
866 Views
1 request
Sandeep Rajan
Patreon Product Lead, Member Experience • February 24
What I've enjoyed about being in tech is entire industry lifecycles happen within a few years because the pace of innovation is so fast: you can identify new customer problems, build innovative solutions, and scale entire businesses that transform a given market – all within a year or two. This i......Read More
783 Views
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