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Sandeep Rajan

Product Lead, Member Experience, Patreon

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How do you plan releases? What development methodology does your company follow?

Sandeep Rajan

Patreon Product Lead, Member Experience • February 22

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

647 Views

What role does market trends play in figuring out your product strategy?

Sandeep Rajan

Patreon Product Lead, Member Experience • February 22

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

556 Views

How often do you revisit your product strategy? What is your framework for reevaluating it?

Sandeep Rajan

Patreon Product Lead, Member Experience • February 22

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

535 Views

Which stakeholders need to have buy-in for your product strategy, and how do you approach creating alignment?

Sandeep Rajan

Patreon Product Lead, Member Experience • February 22

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

524 Views

For an industry that changes daily (AI, web3), how do you think about building a product strategy around it? Do you think it’s important to win in this space for creators?

Sandeep Rajan

Patreon Product Lead, Member Experience • February 23

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

519 Views

How do I protect our product strategy from sales pushback? Our sales team doesn’t focus, and is trying to make our product easy to sell to anyone, rather that our target market.

Sandeep Rajan

Patreon Product Lead, Member Experience • February 22

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

518 Views

How do you balance investing in competitive differentiation with building for customer retention?

Sandeep Rajan

Patreon Product Lead, Member Experience • February 22

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

512 Views

How do I know if we have a product strategy problem or a go to market problem? Our product isn’t growing as fast as we’d like.

Sandeep Rajan

Patreon Product Lead, Member Experience • February 22

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

476 Views

How do you develop your product strategy skills?

Sandeep Rajan

Patreon Product Lead, Member Experience • February 23

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

421 Views

How do you get the exec team on board with your product strategy?

Sandeep Rajan

Patreon Product Lead, Member Experience • February 22

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

391 Views

Credentials & Highlights

Product Lead, Member Experience at Patreon