Which company's recent product strategy has been the most impressive?

Kieran Flanagan · Aug 10, 2022

Canva has the most impressive growth strategy in Web2 because it templatized everything the product can do and then opened a template marketplace, building a distribution engine that keeps extending its search traffic

They executed extremely well on turning every product use case into a template and then let users create and sell their own, which multiplies acquirable search traffic

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Harry Stebbings · Jul 26, 2023

Canva's community-led growth is fantastic and belongs alongside Notion as a best-in-class example

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Harry Stebbings · Nov 1, 2023

Notion and Canva have the most impressive recent product strategies, because of how they opened up the aperture of templates

They widened what users could do through templates

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Harry Stebbings · Apr 11, 2025

Canva's product strategy has been the most impressive recently because its templates and marketplace let users borrow and build on others' creative work

It solves the cold start problem

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Casey Winters · Sep 22, 2021

Canva looks like a consumer subscription business from the outside but is actually able to grow like a network because of the content created through the service

40:21 Canva grows like a network through user generated content despite looking like a subscription business

Hila Qu · Jan 18, 2023

ChatGPT is the most impressive recent growth story, with growth driven almost entirely by the product itself through word of mouth and organic growth; Miro is a second standout in B2B product-led growth

The product is so revolutionary that growth is powered by the product, producing very strong word-of-mouth

47:09 Chatgpts product driven word of mouth and miros b2b plg make them the most impressive growth stories

Dominik Richter · Dec 1, 2023

Amazon is an outlier and anomaly in how it scaled with such heavy investment in infrastructure, technology and processes, and it reinvented how people think about organisations

48:24 Amazon is an outlier anomaly in its infrastructure investment and organizational reinvention

Dominik Richter · Dec 1, 2023

DoorDash is the most impressive competitor because it scaled in non-obvious, contrarian ways with operational excellence in a hard three-sided marketplace and a long-term focus

Everybody else in the space focused on other areas with a different hypothesis while DoorDash took the contrarian view and executed operationally

48:52 Doordash is the most impressive through contrarian operational excellence in a hard marketplace

Sri Batchu · Jul 26, 2023

Notion's large multipronged community-based growth strategy is the most impressive recent growth strategy, and very few companies manage to do it

He hasn't seen many companies build community-based growth at that scale or with that many prongs

54:49 Notions community based growth strategy is the most impressive

Shreyas Doshi · Aug 3, 2022

Lead School has the most impressive recent product strategy — bringing high-quality K-12 education to smaller Indian towns and cities through a combination of curriculum, technology and supporting operations

It targets parity of education quality for children outside big metropolitan areas, and he has watched them both formulate and execute on the strategy over the past year

43:16 Lead schools curriculum technology and operations strategy for smaller indian cities is most impressive

Jordan Van Horn · Aug 17, 2022

Retool's go-to-market is impressive because it grows fast despite having no clear buyer, via a nuanced product-led but sales-assisted model

They're selling all things to all people with no single person who owns the problem, yet still grow incredibly fast

51:09 Retools product led sales assisted motion scales with no single buyer owner

Kipp Bodnar · Sep 28, 2022

Cash App has the most impressive company marketing strategy of the last couple of years.

Money is the ultimate commodity, and Cash App reached a younger demographic in a platform-centric way through TikTok and in-person activations, making a product that had no business succeeding very successful.

47:52 Cash apps commodity product marketing via tiktok and in person activations is the most impressive

Marty Cagan · Dec 7, 2022

Tesla's product strategy has been exceptional and unusually visible, because it had to be tied so closely to the company's financing strategy.

The dependence on financing forced the product strategy into public view.

53:20 Teslas product strategy tied to financing made it exceptionally visible and impressive

Harry Stebbings · Dec 7, 2022

Stripe's strength is that it forces new product creation and execution rather than merely maintaining its core, and its ancillary products are outstanding.

53:47 Stripes forced new product creation and outstanding ancillary products make it impressive

Antoine Le Nel · Oct 18, 2024

Nubank has the most impressive growth strategy outside of Revolut

They went extremely deep in a huge market in Brazil and are now getting strong growth in Mexico too

53:48 Nubanks deep market penetration in brazil and mexico is the most impressive growth strategy

David Lieb · Sep 21, 2022

Tesla's master plan is the product strategy he is most impressed by, and articulating a set of things that might become true and would change the world if they did is what every product leader needs to do

That kind of articulated conditional vision is what gets people excited

53:54 Teslas master plan impresses by articulating a conditional world changing vision

Geoff Charles · Dec 6, 2023

Apple has the most impressive company product strategy today, continuing to innovate and win at massive scale

Craftsmanship, delight and brand create extreme customer loyalty, and the ecosystem (iOS monetization, Apple Pay, Apple Card, Apple Wallet) compounds revenue in a way visible in public markets, with very few misses

50:25 Apple craftsmanship and ecosystem monetization makes it the most impressive

Kevin Niparko · Sep 29, 2023

Retool's move from internal tools to a low-code app builder is the most impressive recent product strategy and will be a big opportunity for product builders

It lets builders create data-informed apps with less technical tooling

43:38 Retools shift from internal tools to a low code app builder is the most impressive strategy

Hugo Barra · Nov 9, 2022

Nothing has the most impressive recent product strategy, above all its design language and new smartphone

He loves the design language they created and the phone they just shipped

48:07 Nothings design language and new phone make it the most impressive strategy

Glen Coates · Mar 8, 2023

Microsoft's approach to AI is the most impressive recent company product strategy

They correctly identified years ago that partnering with OpenAI would be strategic, and are now swinging for the fences with AI-driven search where the downside is negligible and the upside could reshape a competitor's business

46:17 Microsofts openai bet and ai driven search is the most impressive strategy

Aatish Nayak · Apr 11, 2025

Perplexity is the most impressive recent product strategy, and it is a case where product quality rather than distribution drove adoption

Their focus on making the answer extremely fast with everything else out of the way is second to none, and consumers adopted it because the product is so good

61:25 Perplexity product quality not distribution drove adoption

Jag Duggal · Mar 29, 2023

Spotify's evolution through mobile, subscriptions and podcasts has been masterful because it balanced keen focus on customer need with profoundly deep technical understanding of the underlying technologies

The company paired customer-need focus with deep technical understanding, embodied by its leadership

47:43 Spotify masterful strategy balances customer need focus with deep technical understanding

Brian Balfour · Aug 16, 2023 · hedged

Canva and DoorDash are the most impressive growth stories of the last year because they had to fight for growth against advantaged competitors

DoorDash faced rivals like Uber Eats with advantages it didn't have, and Canva's marketplace approach worked hard for its US growth

54:09 Canva and doordash fought against advantaged competitors making them the most impressive growth stories