The product strategy playbook that powered growth at Tinder & TripAdvisor — Ravi Mehta 

 So, you know, you've written and shared some different ideas about this, but I wanted to start at the top by just asking the question of in your eyes. What is product strategy, maybe? Why does it matter? And what did people often screw up as it relates to product strategy?

 Yeah, definitely. So, um, I think about product strategy as the connective tissue between what a product team is doing day to day and what the ambitions of a company are. And so there's really three pieces there. The first one is having a very clear understanding of what is the mission and the strategy of the company that you're a part of.

Uh, increasingly as companies have gotten more and more product oriented and product centric, you know, product strategy accounts for a really big percentage of the overall company strategy, but it's not the whole thing. A product strategy?

needs to fit really nicely into the broader ambitions of the company.

It needs to plug into what's happening on the [00:01:00] marketing side, on the sales side, on the ticket. Um, and so it's one piece of a broader puzzle, um, in terms of that overall ambition that the company has. And then there's the day to day execution. There's the roadmap and the, and the goal setting. Um, and oftentimes what I see in companies is actually that those two can be somewhat disconnected.

Uh, teams can get very much in the mode of, we need to hit our OKR is we need to achieve our goals. Um, you know, some of that can be, um, you know, performance review related and oftentimes. Drive to hit goals, teams focus too much on the goals and not enough on the strategy and whether or not they're making progress on that strategy.

And so the product strategy is really the connective tissue between the two, and it's meant to tether those two together. So that. As a team is making progress on its goals and creating roadmaps that it's doing it with, um, insight into the broader objectives and in a way that's making progress against those [00:02:00] broader objectives.

And so, um, that really highlights one of the key, most common failure modes that I see for teams, especially today when there's so much data to work with. And there's so much emphasis on goals is an overemphasis on goals and an under emphasis on strategy. And we can, we can get into this a little bit more, but I think oftentimes teams conflate the two.

Um, you know, if you ask someone what's your strategy, you'll sometimes hear our strategy is increase revenue by 5% or increase retention by 10%. And that's not really a strategy that. A goal. Um, and it's great to achieve that goal. Um, but only if it is actually a creative to the strategy that the company is trying to advance.

And so, um, you know, I often see teams get into a mode where there's doing anything and everything to move the goal, and they sometimes lose that check. Um, and you know, might actually head in the wrong direction from a strategic standpoint in terms of creating long-term value, um, with the goal of trying to hit their short term targets. 

 So let's say you're the [00:03:00] CEO of a hundred person company, you know, there's some level of product market fit and scaling. what is their self diagnostic that they're running to understand if they potentially have a product strategy?

 There's a number of ways in which product strategy problems surface, and they don't surface as it at a strategic level. They actually serve. At an execution level. Um, so one of the most common things I see is that teams have a hard time prioritizing. Uh, there will be, uh, as part of the roadmap, a question of, should we Do feature a, or should we do feature B um, and teams have a hard time making that decision, not because of any sort of opportunity sizing around those features, but because there's no context within which they're making that decision.

So the first thing that I look for is, uh, individual teams that are having a hard time prioritizing. You can sometimes track that back, often track that back to a strategy problem. [00:04:00] Um, the second thing that I see very often is a muddy user experience. And so, um, when teams are really optimizing for goals at the expense of strategy, There comes this sort of tendency to want to put more and more into the products to, um, really, you know, pull the user's attention to the things that are the most important things in terms of those goals.

And you end up in some products getting sort of a Vegas effect where there's just so many flashing lights, so many signs, so many things for a user to pay attention to because each team in its own isolated way is trying to grab the user's attention, um, that ultimately the overall product experience doesn't hang together and doesn't provide a clear, elegant experience that is thoughtful about where, um, they want the user's attention to be, so that they're getting maximum value from the product.

Um, there's other things like difficulty opportunity sizing, um, that are also symptomatic, but oftentimes, you know, when a [00:05:00] company is trying to diagnose that, um, the important thing is not to go high level, but really go deep and understand. What are the teams doing? How are they making decisions? How are those decisions manifesting in the product?

Um, and does it feel like those decisions are aligned towards that short term? Or does it feel like they're laddering up to a long-term objective?

 Do you think about the idea of product strategy differently depending on the company's maturity or the tenant's identical? If you're three people building your first product, or maybe a thousand people with seven products.

 I think the tenants are the same, the cycle time is different. So um, you know, the core elements of product strategy, I think starts with a very clear understanding of a company mission and company strategy, and often for a smaller company, this is where the smaller companies Excel, because, you know, at the time that you're starting a company, there's not a lot of data to work with.

There's not a lot of customers to surface. There's not, [00:06:00] um, you know, specific metrics that the team's responsible for moving, um, for, you know, a quarterly board cycle or, uh, or quarterly earnings. And so teams at that point have both, you know, the luxury and the necessity of focusing at that high level, you know, what is our vision of what the world will be.

Um, if we change the world with our product and what are the things that we need to do strategic. In order to do that. Um, you know, when a company is small, the only way you can really win and disrupt in a space where there's a lot of incumbents is to think strategically and think about your relative advantages.

Um, and then, uh, the next step is really to understand, okay, now we know what we're trying to accomplish from a mission and a company strategy standpoint. How does our product fit into that? What is the product strategy? How do we sequence that over, over time? How do we measure whether or not the hypothesis that we've made are the right ones?

And so the overall process is the same. Um, but the [00:07:00] rate at which companies go through that process and change it, um, can be, can be pretty different. Uh, and so at a startup where you're accumulating a lot of information very quickly about who your customers are, what the user value is that you're trying to solve for.

Um, then, you know, it makes sense to continually revisit, uh, the mission and the strategy to make sure that it's the right one based on what you're learning. Um, and then as companies get bigger, there's more of an established process. There's an established culture. Um, you know, there's oftentimes quarterly business reviews.

So then the strategic process, you know, fits within something that has a cycle time, more on a quarter or half year, year basis. Um, but I think the fundamentals are the same. It's really the speed that is different.

 So you hinted at this a little bit, but let's talk about, your idea of the product strategy stack and kind of your answer to, what are sort of the pieces of, uh, a great product strategy. Maybe we could sort of start by walking through them.

 Yeah, that [00:08:00] sounds, that sounds great. So, um, I think a starting point is that strategy is often misunderstood. Uh, everyone is, you know, strategist a little bit like growth. Everyone wants strategy, everyone wants, wants growth. Um, and because of that, um, as a result, uh, teams, aren't always crisp about what, what do they mean by strategy and what are the different components of strategy?

Uh, and so one of the things that, um, I've thought a lot about is, you know, How do you divide the different elements of strategy into distinct concepts that interrelate, um, and create a system that people can use, um, to go through that process of defining mission and then ending up in a clear set of goals that are framed by that mission.

And so the product strategy stack is, uh, our attempt at Reforge to do that. Um, we published an article, um, I think about a year ago, uh, that defined. The product strategy stack in terms of five elements, the top element is the mission. So the mission is ultimately the change the company wants to bring to the world.[00:09:00] 

Uh, some companies use both a vision and a mission. I tend to think about those as, um, as similar. And so they, they operate at the same level within the staff that really set the framing, um, then is the company strategy. And so that is the very logical well-reasoned plan that the company has, um, to turn that mission, uh, into being, I think as an industry, we put a lot of emphasis on goals and things that are measurable, um, and strategy is actually much more of a logical process.

And so it can be measured, but it's also important to appeal, to a sense of reason to be really clear about what are the advantages that a company has. Um, and how are you going to use those advantages to accomplish what you need to, especially in, um, really competitive markets. And so. The company level mission, the company level strategy, work together to provide that overall framing.

Um, and once you have those in place, then you've got the context you need to have in order to define the product strategy. And the product [00:10:00] strategy is really the plan for how our product, um, will drive its particular part. The company strategy. So how does, it fit within that overall ambition that the company has and then flowing from the product strategy is the next level of the product strategy stack, which is the roadmap.

And so the roadmap is the sequence of specific features or initiatives that implement the product strategy over time. And an important part of product strategy planning is making sure that the roadmap is sequenced in a way, um, that the company learns as quickly as possible and is able to drive impact as quickly as possible.

And then the final, the foundation of the product strategy stack, um, are the goals. And those are the outcomes of the roadmap that measure, um, whether or not you're making progress on strategy. And so a controversial point here is, uh, we say as part of this product strategy stack, Goals should actually come from roadmaps rather than roadmaps coming from goals.

And that's opposite to the way a [00:11:00] lot of companies work. In many cases, companies say our goal is to increase retention by 10%, and then the team will develop a roadmap to try to achieve that goal. But common pattern that I've seen with teams that do that is they end up focusing on the things that will move the needle the most in the short-term, rather than the things that are the right, uh, long-term decision for the business.

And so, um, we recommend people come up with a roadmap and then figure out the goals that are aligned with that roadmap and an analogy I like to use to help illustrate that point is if, uh, we say, you know, we want to go on a road trip from Los Angeles to. Vegas. Um, our destination is Vegas. One of the goals, one of the key progress indicators that we'll have on that trip is the number of miles driven, but that's not sufficient in and of itself for us to reach our destination.

We can move 200 miles in the right direction, but we can also move 200 miles in the wrong direction. Um, and so in [00:12:00] both cases we've achieved our goal, but we haven't necessarily made progress, um, on the ultimate outcome that we wanted. So it's really important to make sure that goals are well-defined relative to the strategy and that the company or the team doesn't, uh, overly focus on those goals at the expense of that longterm destination that the company wants to achieve.

 how does your worldview fit into sort of the conversation that you hear a lot recently, which is the idea of focusing on inputs versus outputs.the ideal way to approach company building is to be much more focused on controllable inputs as opposed to being obsessed with outputs.

 Yeah, I very much believe that, uh, that is an important approach. Um, you know, I like the, this idea that the score takes care of itself, that if you focus. On the fundamentals and doing those fundamentals well, um, then the longterm trailing indicators, whether it's growth, revenue, retention will flow from that.

But if [00:13:00] you overly focus on winning the game, sometimes you can miss the, the important details that are necessary, um, in order to actually get the team to the point where they can win the game. Um, and so we actually referenced in the product leadership program, um, the, the score takes care of itself book as a way to, to highlight that, um, the inputs are really important.

And one of the things, the product strategy stack is trying to solve for people, um, is to take the emphasis away from the goals away from. The outputs and the outcomes and put it more on, um, you know, what exactly is the team trying to achieve and How do you put together a plan to achieve that? And that's the reason that goals are at the foundation, um, rather than at the top.

Um, and so the mission, the company strategy are these incredibly important inputs into, um, that process. They provide the context and the guardrails. Um, and what we want to ultimately do is measure our, um, you know, measure our progress [00:14:00] against that, um, using the goals rather than treat the goals or the, those measurable outcomes as the destination themselves.

 How do you think this, model works? when you're a mano product company, it sort of makes sense how this might work. How does it fit into multi-product or multi business?

 Yeah, it's a really good question. I tend to think at a high level, from a corporate strategy perspective, companies can think about themselves in three different ways. You can think about yourself as. A product company, um, oftentimes Amano product company. And in that case, you know, the mission and the company strategy are really clear.

They're, they're very similar to the product strategy. The next step is to think about the company as a portfolio. Uh, and in that case you have a portfolio of distinct products, which I think are ideally trying to accomplish different elements of a mission. And so then the mission is defined really nicely relative to the goals of that portfolio.[00:15:00] 

Um, and so as you know, as a tech industry, I actually think too many companies focus on a product strategy and not enough on a portfolio strategy. Um, I think a good example of a company that's done a great job with a portfolio strategy is match group. Uh, match group is the owner of Tinder hinge, uh, OkCupid, plenty of fish match.com, um, international dating sites as well.

And so the company. Years ago, made a bet on the online dating sector and said, ultimately more and more people are going to meet online. There's lots of different use cases to solve there. The right way to approach this market is not to create the ultimate Uber product that is going to solve all of those things, but to craft very thoughtfully, a portfolio that solves for different use cases in different regions, with different business?

Um, and today, uh, something like 80% or more of the revenue within online dating is generated by match group because of that really thoughtful portfolio. Oriented approach. [00:16:00] And so you have a product oriented approach, a portfolio oriented approach, and I think the final, um, and most powerful approach, um, is a platform approach.

Um, so with the portfolio approach, you're really saying you as a business are going to be responsible for creating the portfolio of products, um, that ultimately drive, uh, progress for the business or growth for the business. Uh, and then a platform approach approach, I think is the most scalable where you're saying, you know, ultimately we're going to create a platform where other people can actually add value to the products that we're creating.

And of course the biggest companies are the companies that have done a fantastic job of creating platforms, whether that's apple or Google or, or others. And so, um, you know, that, that process of thinking about, you know, what is our company strategy. Product approach a portfolio approach or a platform approach is really important.

Uh, and ultimately that's a key thing that will determine, um, product strategy and help people understand, you know, where should we be investing? Because oftentimes [00:17:00] when you're implementing a portfolio approach or a platform approach, um, the right thing is not to optimize for short term goals that can actually undermine, um, that long-term approach that you're trying to create. 

 So, so just to go off this tangent for maybe a couple minutes, and then I want to come back to the product strategy stack. Um, I'm just curious, When you talk about platform portfolio, et cetera, why do you think so few companies are good at executing a multiproduct multi business unit kind of strategies as they scale.

And I'd say what you tend to see is whatever the main thing was when it was a six month old company with early product market fit tends to kind of be the main thing seven years later. And at the same time, when you reverse engineer, the generational companies, they either build or buy. Their way into multiproduct multi business unit.

And then there are just the most incredible examples of like Microsoft [00:18:00] and others that have done a bit of both. But when you actually look at the business, it's actually quite diversified and in its terminal state, it almost tends to look more like a conglomerate. Um, but so few companies are able to get past their first product and end up sort of being this some version of a one trick pony.

And I'm curious, kind of what your observations there have been.

 I think, and this is kind of off the cuff, but I think that this has to do with, um, the, the culture around founders, uh, and how we think about founders. And so oftentimes the founders who get rewarded, who are able to grow early, have a specific idea of the thing that they want to build. And so their intuition is really tuned to building one thing in particular, rather than can creating a conglomerate.

Um, and you, you see that pattern repeat itself. And it's an incredibly successful pattern that the, the founders that have a fantastic intuition about the product that they want to build are [00:19:00] very successful, but. Intuition the rewards that drive that intuition the inputs into really growing that intuition into the biggest possible business.

Um, don't necessarily lead to a founder saying, okay, now I need to focus on the next thing. Um, and I think this happens even with, with companies that are very big. Um, when I was at, at Facebook, um, mark still spent the majority of his quarterly business review time. Focus on, on Facebook and not as much on Instagram and WhatsApp when it was increasingly clear that Instagram and WhatsApp were big and fast growing parts of the Facebook portfolio.

And so it took the company a very significant, um, shift to go from being a product oriented business, to much more of a part portfolio oriented business. And that was pretty late. Um, Facebook was always already very large at the, at the time. Um, and [00:20:00] so, you know, I think the founders that have been the most successful in terms of creating portfolios can grow creating conglomerates.

Um, their intuition is not entirely tied to the product that they want to create. Uh, it's entirely, it's tied to the way that they think. And so I think the very best example of a portfolio driven company and ultimately a platform driven company is Amazon. Um, and so Amazon has. Basically throughout the culture, um, taken Jeff Bezos, his intuition about how to think about product problems, um, and embedded that into, into the culture.

And so rather than individual teams being tied to one person's ultimate vision for the product, um, they are tied to a way of thinking, um, and that has enabled them to grow their portfolio very quickly. And so I think for founders that are looking to make that shift from being product centric, to being much more portfolio centric, um, it's important to understand their role in creating the [00:21:00] culture and, and really facilitate.

That culture to start to think differently about, about growth outside of the context of the product. Um, and in order to do that really good founding CEOs, like you need to be very thoughtful about how they think and helping, um, other teams in the company think in that way, rather than being, you know, ultimately the, the decider, um, on key matters, if one person is the decider on key matters, um, oftentimes that leads to a single product mentality. 

 Yeah, with Amazon, it's also, it's impressive how much they built themselves versus someone like Facebook, who, who has backed into a multi-product strategy, but is, is, is almost entirely through acquisition as kind of another interesting sort of difference between someone like Amazon and someone like, uh, Facebook.

And I guess, I guess the lesson there is both can work, but it certainly, you know, Salesforce is another example of a company who's bought their way into an incredible portfolio of products and just done such a good job at that. Um, but it is [00:22:00] different and, and kind of all the more impressive what Amazon, um, and, and I I'd argue also what Microsoft has done over the last 20 or 30 years is probably, uh, is probably maybe more underappreciated as it relates to building kind of a diverse set of revenues.

 the other difference I noticed. During my time at match versus at Facebook or, uh, other companies like TripAdvisor, is that the, the way in which the CEO is think about the business and their interface into the business is different. Um, you know, at Facebook, the CEOs and executives interface into the business, and this is true of most tech companies, um, is primarily oriented around product metrics.

Um, whereas at match and at IAC, the interface into the business was primarily oriented around financial metrics. Some of which were of course, you know, driven by, by product metrics, but there was this like subtle shift in what are the things that we talk about. And as a result, there was a shift in how do you optimize for those?

And if you're really focused on product metrics that leads you [00:23:00] to think about the solution in terms of the product that you're working on. If you're focused on financial metrics that leads you to think about, you know, what are the things that we can do to, um, expand, not just a single product business, but expand that portfolio. 

 So looping back, coming back to the product strategy stack that you outlined in terms of company, mission, company, strategy, product strategy, product roadmap, and product goals. Could you bring it to life and kind of tell us a story about what this looks like when it's done really, really well.

 definitely. So the, the thing that starts to lead me to defining these ideas in the way that they relate together, um, was a project that we worked on at TripAdvisor, um, in around the 20 15, 20 16 timeframe, TripAdvisor had gone through, um, a few different strategic, uh, transitions, really as part of a sequence of moving from a very review oriented content driven business to much more of a [00:24:00] transactional marketplace.

And so TripAdvisor had added the ability to book hotels directly on the site had 

 you mind for those that aren't as familiar with TripAdvisor? It's, it's a pretty fascinating company, but maybe talking a little bit more detail about what it started out as in terms of reviews and that just so that people have that, that base level context.

 Yeah, absolutely. So TripAdvisor is one of these interesting examples of a web one business that has just had, you know, fantastic, um, durability over, over the years. Um, the company was started, um, in 2000, right before, uh, right before September 11th, um, and was founded on the insight that, you know, people were going to start to, um, you know, go less to travel agents and make more of their travel purchases, um, online, um, The company went through a really tough time after September 11th, similar to, to the pandemic where the travel industry can drafted really quickly.

Um, and so Steve, the CEO and the founding team needed to figure out like, what is the really unique [00:25:00] problem that we can solve for people. And they had an insight that if you go into a travel agent's office, um, and asked to book a hotel, you're going to get three brochures. They're going to be different prices, but all of the pictures are going to look the same because every single property is going to be presenting themselves in the best light.

And there's almost no signal about, you know, why one property is more expensive than another, every single one of the brochures is beautiful and glossy. And so Steve's insight at the time was that. The internet will allow us to make that decision, not just based on what the hotels say about themselves, but based on the reviews and opinions of travelers all around the world.

And so TripAdvisor shifted to building assists one of the original user-generated content systems that allowed anyone to review any place that they visited when they were traveling. Um, this also turned out to be. [00:26:00] A fantastic driver of SEO. Um, people were creating content on the TripAdvisor platform that TripAdvisor was then indexing through Google.

Um, and that led to a massive amount of organic traffic coming into the platform. Hundreds of millions of people, um, still come to TripAdvisor, um, every, every month, uh, to read those reviews and opinions, the way that the company monetized was, um, by essentially selling leads to the online travel agents like Expedia and booking.

And so during the history of TripAdvisor, it was actually acquired by Expedia. And so this business model worked really well with Expedia. They had TripAdvisor as a way to get top of the funnel traffic and that ultimately, um, they could take that traffic and convert it into hotel bookings. Um, In, uh, I think it was 2012.

Um, TripAdvisor was actually rolled out independently from [00:27:00] Expedia. And so as a result, TripAdvisor could start thinking about its strategy as an independent company, rather than as part of the Expedia group. Um, and. Became quickly clear that one of the things TripAdvisor could do to drive even more growth was, um, to not be so reliant on Expedia or booking.com or others, um, for people to book hotels, but actually to enable people to book directly on the platform.

And so when TripAdvisor rolled out as an independent company that led to, um, a multi-year transition from. A review oriented, lead oriented company at the top of the funnel to, um, the, the company building out a transactional marketplace where you could go all the way from early consideration on your travel plans to booking, not just hotels, but also flights and restaurants and, um, attraction.

So a really interesting example of how, [00:28:00] um, changes in competition changes in ownership, uh, can lead to two very different strategies. And so, um, you know, at about the time of this case, uh, around 2016, when we were really doing a lot of work to define the product strategy map, um, one of the teams was responsible for developing.

The trip planning functionality on TripAdvisor and trip planning was this notoriously difficult problem. There were many startups that tried and failed to create great trip planning software. Um, what seemed like the case was no matter how much value you provided to people when they were planning their trip.

Um, their instinct was to go back to just, you know, their notebook or, you know, their Google doc and plan their trip that way. And as a result of people, uh, basically planning. Off of TripAdvisor or, you know, not in any sort of central place. Um, Google was really the intermediary during a person's travel planning process.

And so people would type in a search result, come into TripAdvisor, read some [00:29:00] reviews, then go back to their trip plan type in some search results, uh, and, um, come back to TripAdvisor. So we were seeing people come in and out of TripAdvisor through Google four or five times a day and not, um, really retaining to the product.

And so Google was intermediating a lot of the usage of the product. And so what we wanted to do from a strategic standpoint is create a trip planning product that would enable people to plan their trip on TripAdvisor and get them coming back. Um, direct this also dovetails really nicely with, um, the company's mobile strategy, but we also knew that it was a really difficult problem.

And so as part of solving for that, we, uh, Initially, we're very clear about what was the, what was the company strategy? Where was the company going? Why was it going in this direction? What were some of the key factors around changes in SEO that were driving? What were some of the things that we wanted to solve for in terms of ongoing engagement with TripAdvisor?

And then that framing was something that the team [00:30:00] ultimately used to develop the product strategy. And before we develop the roadmap and the goals we as a team took about six weeks to say, look, we're going to develop, rather than going straight into features, we're going to develop a product strategy document.

That's going to be our deliverable. And we put together a cross-functional team that included design engineering product, uh, and they put together about a 40 slide deck that included high level wire frames of exactly what the trip, the trip planning, um, experience should look like. Not today, not in the next six months, but in a three or four year time, time horizon.

Um, and by doing that. Things in that way, we were able to craft a longer term vision that actually turned out to be much better informed, much better tied to what the company was trying to achieve. Um, then we would add if we had just kind of jumped into the roadmap and started trying to get more people to plan their trip on TripAdvisor.

 So in that case, can you help me pick apart the difference between. The product strategy [00:31:00] there and the product roadmap, or another way we could kind of explore this is if we, if we use TripAdvisor as a case study, can you walk through what mission company strategy, product strategy, product roadmap and product goals looks like in, in terms of this kind of real-world example?

 Yeah, absolutely. So um, so if we had, I think taken the normal normal process, the instinct for the team would have been to, um, look at how people were saving places, um, and try to get people to save more places. Um, and then try to ladder that up into people, being able to take those safe places and create trip itineraries.

Um, and so what it started from a very bottoms up, um, sort of approach that, you know, may or may not have laddered up to a clear, um, useful strategy that actually solved for the underlying use case that, um, people needed when they were planning a [00:32:00] trip by starting at the company strategy level and the product strategy level, we took a step back and rather than just jumping straight into.

Let's work on this problem. Let's start committing to goals and moving those goals. Um, we spend a lot of time talking to customers. So we did, um, a survey with 700 different people to understand trip planning process. We did a lot of one-on-one conversations. Um, and what we found were two really important insights.

So one insight that we found was that, um, people. Didn't approach trip planning as a single player activity, it was an inherently multiplayer activity. And so, um, whether it was, you know, multiple people adding things to a trip plan and going back and forth, or just a single person needing to get the opinions of other people that they were traveling with, ultimately other people needed to be involved in the trip planning process.

And a lot of the other companies that had attempted attempted trip planning started with trip planning as a single player activity. And it just didn't work. So, you [00:33:00] know, as soon as someone needed to share that with other people, they basically stopped using that planning tool and went back to how they were doing things previously.

So we realized, um, out of the gate that from a product strategy standpoint, We needed to prioritize social that needed to be on, on the early roadmap. The second thing that we realized was that people, as part of their planning process are actually compiling lots of different things. They're not just compiling lists of places.

Um, and specifically they're not. Compiling lists of things that are on TripAdvisor. They want to be able to, if they find a really cool attraction, that's not on TripAdvisor, they want to, um, be able to put that on their plan. If their friend sends them a really great list of things to do in Puerto Rico, they want to have that on their plan.

And so a travel plan is not a collection of places, as much as it is a collection of all of the different information that a person has gained about, um, about a particular destination that helps them go into, um, that destination feeling like they have the information to have the best [00:34:00] possible trip. And so the second thing that we realized, which we wouldn't have realized otherwise, um, was that the travel plan needed to be open.

Ravi Mehta is the former CPO at Tinder and taught product strategy as an Executive in Residence at Reforge. He explains what he calls the product strategy stack that he developed in his career at Tinder and TripAdvisor, and his alternative approach to OKRs. 

The product strategy playbook from Tinder & TripAdvisor

Ravi Mehta explains what he calls the product strategy stack that he developed in his career at Tinder and TripAdvisor, and his alternative approach to OKRs. 

The product strategy playbook that powered growth at Tinder & TripAdvisor — Ravi Mehta

Read the article inspired by this episode

Set “Non-Goals” and Build a Product Strategy Stack — Lessons For Product Leaders