 Hi everyone, and welcome to Product Schools webinar on strategy and tactics in product management. My name is Angkor, and I've been an engineer, banker, and an entrepreneur before I was ever a product manager. My last experience at Amazon was essentially as a senior product manager technically. Before we begin to dive into strategy and tactics, we need to understand that strategies and tactics are just a means to an end. The end is usually a goal, a milestone, or even a mission. During this presentation, I will give back examples of strategies and tactics with real world companies and their missions. Let's jump straight into it. It begins with missions. All companies at some point were just an intent to do something. Teams that understand the mission of a product or a company are greatly at an advantage because they can set goals, smaller goals, that bring them closer to their overall mission. If you consider this pyramid here, if the mission is the why we do what we do or why we exist, then the goal is the what, as in what do we want to achieve. And strategy is the how, why do, sorry, how do we, how do we want to get that? Tactics are a way to execute a strategy, and operations are the processes of implementing tactics. Product managers operate at pretty much every level of this pyramid, although they tend to focus more on goals, strategies, and tactics. Coming back to the mission. Here are missions from some of the largest companies in the world. If you think about the products and services that they offer, you will find that they align very well with their overall mission. For example, Airbnb is all about belonging anywhere. This includes the obvious staying in the home, accepting wherever you go, but it also includes the less obvious experiencing local cultures and activities. So having Airbnb experiences as part of the overall product portfolio makes absolute sense. Here's another example. Meta is all about bringing communities together, people you know, people with common interests, and maybe setups that you love or like. A straightforward strategy for them to increase revenue is just to get more people on their products. To do this, they acquire Instagram and WhatsApp, and they consistently invest heavily in Facebook as well as Messenger, but they make money through ads. When Apple launched enhanced privacy settings, Facebook lost over a billion dollars worth of revenue, and they couldn't do anything about it. They need to be able to set the rules of the platform on which they operate, and they can do this with Metaverse, which incidentally is also a way to allow people to virtually connect with each other. That might explain why they're so invested in making the Metaverse a huge success. Without their own platform, they're at the mercy of other platforms that they operate on. I mean, things like Android, iOS, machine and iOS, Windows, as well as Mac. Do you have browser restrictions coming in? Metaverse up a little bit more. Now that we have some degree of understanding of how missions work and how they drive decisions for products as well as companies, let's add another medium, the product lifecycle journey. On this graph here, the y-axis represents the product's growth, while the x-axis represents the passage of time. Take a second to think about where some of your favorite products are in their life cycle. I'll take an example of one of my favorite products, we call it Netflix. This is the quarterly revenue mapped over the last 13 years for Netflix. It's hard to say exactly where it is in its lifecycle, but I think it's easy to see that the growth in the quarterly revenue is declining. As a means to counter this, they increase subscription costs, which is effective in the short term to boost growth for a couple of months, but it has not sustained long term growth. There have been localized attempts by Netflix to clamp down on account sharing across area boards. Me and my sister live in different countries. I personally face where she couldn't access the Netflix account. I actually have an account form within my subscription, but she was unable to use it. And the idea behind this was that they expect the people because they can't access it will essentially end up buying their own subscriptions and gain more paying customers. I think the strategy is a hit on this. It really depends on where they implemented, but in places it might have done more harm than good. So there are other ways to increase their growth on this graph here. So what other ways can they make more money? And the answer is ads on Netflix. That sounds like a nightmare for people who are subscribed, but it might be just what the company needs to sustain growth a little longer. In this particular case, they plan on doing this by introducing an ads supported subscription to you. Basically a cheaper version of Netflix subscriptions where you might see a few ads. In this example, the goal for the company is to keep the revenue going and the strategy is to implement advertising in product. Excuse me. There's also a customer strategy in here somewhere. And the customer strategy is that we might be able to address a new customer segment that isn't on Netflix yet. Somebody who might be willing to pay a little bit less with ads as opposed to the only two options that we have today, pay full price for Netflix or to be on Netflix. Interestingly, this brings me to my next point. Strategy isn't just for products. It is also for customers, competitors, sales, marketing, technology, people, what have you. Product managers need to consider these facets depending on the context of the product or the industry that they're in. You also notice that depending on where the product is in its lifecycle, product managers need to apply different types of strategies. In fact, in some cases, product managers may have to apply a combination of two or more strategies. Because there is no accurate way to tell where a product is exactly in its lifecycle. In the Netflix example, I would say the product was essentially between rule and maturity, approaching mid-maturity, but it's hard to tell exactly. So each strategy listed in this slide can have multiple tactics, can have multiple approaches. And you might be compelled to put a combination of these together to work effectively. So let's dive into some examples here. I'm going to cover some of these strategies and discuss the tactics that lie within them. So the first strategy is a product launch strategy. And here's some tactics within the product launch strategy. The first one is niche to broad. You've seen this very popularly with Facebook. They focused on the academia of power, then moved on to different countries across, sorry, different colleges or universities across the country, and then eventually segmented out to different continents. Today they cater to everything. There is no restriction. But this approach of niche to broad created a demand for it. It created an acceptance that, hey, people that are really smart, people that understand socials and people that are in universities, the cool head kids, they're using the product. I don't know if anyone uses cooler head than you. The idea is that, hey, there's a segment that has already shown acceptance and adoption of this product. This might be, if you can package it differently, it's likely that another segment of the market will be able to adopt it. Just following the course. Tesla was actually launched in sports car initially. And Fitbit was launched for athletes. And fitness enthusiasts. The second one is limited edition things. Or as I like to call it, the luxury segment syndrome. It's because it's actually used primarily in the luxury segment to jack up large enterprises. Ferrari, Mont Blanc, Air Jordans, all known to have limited edition products and all known to get sold like hotcakes, despite their excessively high prices. The third one is limited to supply of the product. It's very similar to the limited edition tactic, but they will make the supply available after the demand goes up. So Hershey's released a three and a half pound version of Reese's candy, or Thanksgiving specific. 3,000 units also not in two hours in the recent next batch. This ensured that they weren't left with leftovers. In case there was no demand. I believe that limiting the supply actually may have increased the demand because of the urgency of Thanksgiving coming up in the next week or so. Finally, we have the early board incentives. Every concert, stand up, comedy show, conference or sports event that you've ever attended would likely have had this incentive. Typically used to drive up sales ahead of events or front launches to ensure enough runway to deliver the product. You know, think a similar concept that we have is crowdfunding. It's not exactly the same thing, but you can essentially subscribe to a service or product at a low price. And it gives the founders or the organizers enough of a runway to deliver their products. The second step in the product lifecycle focuses on securing for the product. And it becomes scaling rapidly across users, transactions and or sales. Anything that can generate long-term revenue or result in long-term sales. The first one in this case are paralyzing development and monolith to microservices. It's a little bit more technical. Some of you may not understand what this is, but essentially what it says is that when you're creating a product or developing the product, design it as a collection of small independent components instead of one large monolithic system. This helps reduce bottlenecks in naval parallel development because you've got separate sections coded as separate applications. It makes issue identification easier, identifies bottlenecks more easily because one system is broken and opposed to the whole engine and also encourages integrations because all of these small systems are already integrating with each other. You can simply build on that philosophy and integrate with third-party applications. All of these things that I've described are useful for scaling a product. The second option that we have is economies of scale and it allows market leaders to lead into things. Selection and price. Both Amazon and Walmart are known to be able to offer the lowest rate of customers in some specific areas and they own a significant portion of the market in their respective fields. Then we have cross-platform operability, which refers to the availability of a product on multiple platforms. The most common everyday apps like Word, PowerPoint, Calendar are almost seamlessly integrated with hundreds of other apps and services. That's why it's an easy choice for people like me because I don't have to worry about things like Calendar me being compatible with my other calendar. Just kidding, I used to. And then we have product systems. Once the product goes through its entire life cycle, people begin companies' products debate to lose users and customers. This is a special tool for non-critical products, things like Facebook, Netflix, PlayStation, subscription. I think Facebook has already seen it. There's news articles all over saying that Gen Z and Millennials don't use Facebook anymore. Well, we do. Anyway, but in order to keep users engaged and tied to the platform, product managers use systems. It's hard, but it can be effective. The game for State 4 is a really bad headache, but it describes the phenomenon in the app. Apps like Pinterest, Spotify and Facebook increase user retention by tying them to the platform with data. Your friends, the groups that you follow, the pictures that you posted, the apps that you installed, your specifically curated feed, for Spotify, its playlists, artists that you follow. Recommendation is personalization, your state of personalization on your data. The second one is building a new business line. Amazon began as a bookstore. Expanded to selling everything up to the sun, then expanded to providing cloud services to AWS. Along the way, they've used Firestick TV, movie production studios, household devices, phones, games, you name it. One of these new business lines now brings in an overwhelming majority of Amazon's revenue. That's AWS, just in case you were wondering. That's one way to discover how to keep your growth persistent. And then we have the final additional tiers. So, for example, and I think we saw part of it earlier with Netflix's App Deal. Spotify's family tier is not the way to maximize revenue from the sub-server to manage the customer segments, but it's largely targeting a broader segment of the market because your primary segment is the one who longer yielding benefits. Oh, and the last one we have is the product reinvention tactics. Product reinvention isn't just used when products have maturity. They can also be used when the growth is slow or products are failing. Let's take a look at some of these tactics here. The first one is a broader value chain tactic. Netflix went from renting TV to owning their own production house. Steam went from producing single game titles to being the most used gaming platform on earth. Google and iOS went from stock phone software to building a career economy or phone apps called the Play Store. All of them discovered a broader opportunity within their industry and they reached to capture it. The narrow depth refers to products that have achieved such an immense expertise or convenience in their field that they become synonymous with the service that they provide. Isn't the exact opposite of going broad? Google, Xerox, they're more common examples of the narrow depth tactic. But you know what, there are lasagna past the sheet millionaires in this world as well. They specialize in creating one ingredient of a dish that can be made at home. And that's about as narrow as it gets. And then these products are successful too. Not symbols that fit a particular type of bathroom here. There's no replacement. That does the job. And the third one that we have is, well, it's a catch-all. I've used Meta and Nokia here with Meta trying to capture the Metaverse platform. One might say that they are pursuing a broader value chain tactic, but it's also attempting to reinvent online social interactions. So there's definitely a reinvention component there. I think Nokia is more of an example of a company that did not reinvent at that time. They got pounded by iOS and Android. All right. So we've come to some product strategies. You can see the download, scale, sustain, and reinvent. Now let's talk about some customer strategies. These are also very critical because more often than all your products have customers, interestingly, there's a huge overlap between the strategies and tactics that are presented. Just the lengths will change a little bit. So let's jump right in. The first segment that we're going to talk about is early-stage products again. They need high conversions. They're very, very focused on growth. And we have three broad tactics for this segment. First is reduce sign-up friction. I use Google Facebook and LinkedIn because you can use these apps to sign into any app these days. If an app forces you to send an email and a password, and they'll give you an email confirmation link, excuse me, they're likely going to lose you in the sign-up process. So sign-up friction reduction, great tactic to increase adoption. Second one, shortened viral use. This is a common example. I think Amazon's one-click buy or sharing TikTok reviews with people who can see them without signing up for TikTok. Both these things reduce time and effort needed for people to do what they need to do. By shortening the viral loop, you are reducing the time spent on the heavy lifting, creating value for people exactly where they need it. It keeps people on the platform, makes them want to use the platform work. I have a TikTok user that started using it without an account and actually signed up for it. And third one is third-party integration. This is a huge reason for the success of both Slack and Calibri. Almost every single user that uses Slack in Calibri is experiencing using plugins or integrating with their own calendars. And these users know that these apps will just work with the account set up easily. They don't have to put in a lot of work. The second stage in the product scope results in the need for a customer. So a product from the growth stage of a device type loop depends directly on the growth of its user base. With that said, here are some ways PMs can do exactly that. The first one is importing network contacts. Airbnb and LinkedIn use this method to scale it in their users. Airbnb displayed craigslist listings on its website, but it did not have enough volume of properties on its own website. And then that led to more options for Airbnb users, which resulted in an increase of the number of people joining the website. LinkedIn asked its current users to import their contact list. They had tools built to make this extremely easy for them. Everybody, so far later, was guilty of sending a LinkedIn invite to say, hey, come join my professional network on LinkedIn, and they have sent mobile emails to their contact list. The next one I want to talk about is automation. Automation is not just used in these companies. In fact, these companies produce some degree of automation for almost every other company. But when I talk about automation, it can refer to customer conversion from automation, automation of language translation, automation of development, or anything. Almost every single product will have its own automation opportunities and projects. And it's a great way to support the growing customer base. Finally, we have the marketing strategy. That's right. I said strategy as a tactic. It's an effective marketing strategy. It can be a really great growth tactic. Real-life examples of this include products that show up for a short time on Dragonstone and end up growing like three or 10 minutes overnight. So I just want to call out here, right? Strategies and tactics, they depend on the context. I'll cover this a little bit more specifically towards the end of the presentation. But a strategy can be a tactic, a tactic can be a strategy. Don't get caught on the news. Thirdly, we have customer engagement. This is typically for companies that are in their maturity stage. Customer engagement tactics have minimized children from these companies and products as a large area of focus for visual problems. It is definitely great to have customer engagement at every stage of product licensing. PMs can provide customer engagement through gamification. A good example includes things like adding points, premium services, or some assets on your account, metals, achievements, sharing with your friends. Here's the idea. Starbucks sits on hundreds of millions of advanced dollars that the customers spend on them to buy points for their loyalty or to buy money on their app. By having this money in advance of the actual spend, they generate millions of dollars for the customers. The second one is activating the reward center. The dopamine hit that we all do the chasing. You want the next photo, you want the next reel, you want to read that next post, or you just go to school indefinitely. The third one is the infinite information tactic, which is actually a variant of the reward center tactic applied to text, articles, news. In fact, it is so popular that news apps use similar models to see an increase in their daily news consumption, effectively making news predictive. That is the principle. Finally, we have maximally dependency on product. Things like Google Translate and Maps. There's no competition for that. I know if I need translation service, I'm still going to translate. Windows free tier approach for years has allowed Microsoft to break into millions of homes, small and medium businesses with the operating system as well as the office. The last one is during the decline. Customer retention is the key metric that everybody is tracking. I think it's a key metric that people should be focusing on even in the early stages, but you will certainly see founders and product managers focus on this towards the end of the journey just because that's the only way to keep the company alive on the product line. There's three key ways of doing this, but I think ownership of digital assets and lifetime data are fairly similar. They're very similar in that they're unique to every single user and they hold some key value for them. Digital assets usually represent things like websites or files or patents. That may provide monetary benefit as well. Shopify is a very unique case. Things have crypto wallets and you tend to lose your accounts but you're not closing as long as you have money in there. Lifetime data is just your friends and photos, stuff that you posted for years and years and years. You might not be an active user, but I see very few people going there and saying, let's use my account. It definitely has a little bit of a click there. The second one is maximizing dependency. We've seen this before. We've seen the exact same examples, but dependency is also a product lens and it's also a customer lens. It drives both retention as well as engagement. So it's easier to notice how the tool might be related, right? So this is one of those examples which tend to be a really high impact. They tend to affect more than one strategy at a time. So you want to look out for more of these as we go forward. Now this covers some real-life examples of actions, product teams and companies take to achieve specific outcomes. One thing that is common in all of them is that they are all rooted in strategy. All right, so we're almost at the end. Let me take a few minutes to call out some important aspects of what we've covered. Depending on who you are speaking to and the goals that they want to achieve, the definition of a strategy or a tactic may change. A scale of tactic like using microservices instead of mono lens from a product perspective might be a microservices strategy from a technology perspective, which may consist of several tactics to implement microservices. How do you implement it? So the change in perspective changes exactly what we're talking about. It's also important to note that a strategy can be a part of a tactic and a strategy can be a part of another strategy. So again, because this is fluid, don't get caught up in creating these distinctions. When you have the large star in front of you or you have the bold in front of you, it's easy to tell the difference between what strategy is and what tactic is. The second column or the second outcome is what works for one product does not always work for another product. I'll show you the example of TikTok and Instagram. There is one minor difference between these two applications. Excuse me. I apologize. Instagram is meant for people to connect with friends, family, interests, things that you're already sort of related to or have a relationship with. While TikTok is meant for people to get popular by posting TikToks or it's meant for people to discover popular content. Unfortunately, for Instagram, science shows that discovering new content is more rewarding to people than seeing the updates of friends with family. With such a minor difference, Instagram's strategic approach to trying to become a content discovery platform completely backfired when there's a tendency to back off the platform during loss of their phone. I'm not sure if you've heard about this, but essentially Instagram has search function, which is where you get to discover and they have a home function, which is curated for you. TikTok also has something similar. They have a for you and discovery session. But the difference is that TikTok lands on discovery, whereas Instagram lands on your curated feed of your friend and family. They try to switch that to make it a more of a discovery platform, and that's essentially what they do. I think there's articles on this if you just Google it. It's really an interesting phenomenon. The last outcome that I'd like to talk about is as the product manager, you will have constraints on what all you can pursue. You may have 10 great options, but you will need to choose based on your time and your resource constraints. Priority is those strategies and initiatives that deliver a high impact or a multi-planned impact or magnifying impact. A good one is everything depends here. It does have an impact on the company's business, on the customer's business, on the customer's experience and what happens. This is important. This is the heavy lifting of the product manager. Thinking about what are our different options? What can we combine? What should we not do? What should we do? And coming up with a mean high impact roadmap. That's what's important. Well, thank you so much for attending the webinar this afternoon. I really appreciate your attention. If you would like to see more content from me, please connect with me on LinkedIn or follow me there. Have a great recipe day, everybody. Thanks again.