177 / Big Bets Are Back — Why They Need a Balanced Approach, with Michelle Parsons

Michelle Parsons is a dynamic product leader who has led high-growth teams at Kayak, Spotify, Netflix, Hinge, and Lex. Her passion for building community and embracing new challenges has recently brought her to a leadership role in a new startup that helps people reconnect to themselves and one another.

In this episode of Product Momentum, Michelle joins Sean and Dan to talk about “making bets” – not just the seductive big bets that promise game-changing innovation – but also the smaller bets and quick hits that also play important roles in delivering value, validating assumptions, and mitigating risk.

Here’s what we learned:

The Balanced Portfolio Framework

At the heart of Michelle’s thinking is the notion of the Balanced Portfolio Framework – an idea she developed while leading product for kids’ content at Netflix. Under this framework, your roadmap is divided into three buckets – big bets, smaller bets, and quick hits – that help you pursue transformational innovation while delivering consistent value.

As you’ll hear, connecting the dots between them helps to ensure that product work is driven by the value delivered to users and your business.

Big bets start with user insights and clear hypotheses

Big bets are the bold, strategic moves that are super-impactful, but also come with a great deal of uncertainty. They start with user insights and clear hypotheses that address the following questions: What need are we trying to solve? Why does it matter to our users? What metric will this move – and why does that metric matter for business impact?

“These are the things that everyone wants to work on,” Michelle adds. “But they’re never just ‘cool ideas.’ They’re the big innovative features that bring your strategy to life. But they come with a ton of unknowns. Super impactful, but really, really risky.”

Small bets preserve resources and de-risk the big bet

Think of small bets as the “meat and potatoes” of your roadmap – incremental improvements like polishing UX, refining workflows, or optimizing metrics.

Here’s what Michelle says: “The small bets are really about the optimizations and enhancements, the things that consistently create incremental impact for your users. Not only do they touch on macro metrics like retention, engagement, and delight, but they also help to de-risk the big bets.”

Quick hits are the targeted work that accelerate learning

We’re all familiar with those small, fast, low-cost experiments or enhancements. These are the low-hanging fruit that support rapid learning.

“A quick hit is a learning task,” Michelle adds – “not to be confused with a quick win.” Certainly, they can also be quick wins, but “quick hits are really this body of work, discreetly tied a hypothesis or a data point that you want to prove out further.”

Use storytelling to align stakeholders around ‘why’

Michelle emphasizes that roadmap planning is not just an exercise in listing features, but a storytelling exercise. Because many stakeholders – executives, founders, investors –don’t live in the product trenches. To get buy-in, you need to clearly articulate: What problem we’re solving, for whom, why it matters, and how this work moves the needle.

Be sure to watch/listen to our entire conversation with Michelle, so that you can catch her thoughts about:

• How her team at Netflix utilized the Balanced Portfolio Framework.
• The role AI can play in balancing bets that deliver user benefit and business value.
• Michelle’s new start-up plans for building connections and community.

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