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Shreyas Doshi

Episode #268

Product Leader & Advisor

Formerly Stripe, Twitter, Google, Yahoo

🎯Product Strategy🚀Career & Leadership👥Team & Culture

📝Full Transcript

14,595 words
Lenny (00:00:03): There's no one out there today who shares more wisdom, more consistently on the art of product management than Shreyas Doshi. Shreyas came out of nowhere a few years ago and started tweeting gems of insight about building product and the role of product management, and rightfully so, has built a huge following on Twitter. What I love about Shreyas is that his insights are often framed in really memorable and interesting ways and they're often contrarian and not ideas that you've heard elsewhere. Shreyas has worked at some of today's most important tech companies, including Yahoo, Twitter, Google, and most recently Stripe, both as an IC and a manager. And his advice is always rooted in his real life experiences at these companies. (00:00:48): In our chat, we focus on five topics and go deep on them. We talk about the power of pre-mortems. We talk about how to best use your time as a product manager. We look into the three levels of product work and how getting them wrong often leads to tension on your team. We dig into why most execution problems are really strategy problems. And we talk about a common pitfall in prioritization. And if you listen to the end, we actually throw in a bonus topic. I really appreciate that Shreyas made the time for our chat and I cannot wait for you to hear it. (00:01:29): This episode is brought to you by Coda. Coda is an all in one doc that combines the best documents, spreadsheets, and apps in one place. I actually use Coda every single day. It's my home base for organizing my newsletter writing, it's where I plan my content calendar, capture my research and write the first drafts of each and every post. It's also where I curate my private knowledge repository for paid newsletter subscribers. And it's also how I manage the workflow for this very podcast. Over the years, I've seen Coda evolve from being a tool that makes teams more productive to one that also helps bring the best practices across the tech industry to...

💡 Key Takeaways

  • 1Most execution problems are actually strategy, culture, or people problems in disguise.
  • 2Do not just optimize for positive ROI; optimize for minimizing opportunity cost.
  • 3Use Pre-mortems to create psychological safety and identify 'Elephants' (unspoken risks) before launch.
  • 4Classify tasks using the LNO framework: Leverage (10x), Neutral (1x), and Overhead (<1x).
  • 5Product work happens at three levels: Impact, Execution, and Optics; misalignment here causes team conflict.
  • 6High Agency is the ability to achieve outcomes despite adverse conditions without waiting for permission.

📚Methodologies (4)

The Pre-Mortem Framework

by Shreyas Doshi

🎯 Product Strategy

Instead of waiting for a post-mortem after a failure, the team imagines the project has already failed spectacularly in the future and works backward to determine why. This uncovers hidden risks that polite corporate culture usually suppresses.

Core Principles

  • 1.The Prompt: Start by stating, 'Imagine it is 6 months from now and this project has failed miserably.'
  • 2.Categorize Risks: Identify 'Tigers' (fatal threats), 'Paper Tigers' (perceived but fake threats), and 'Elephants' (unspoken truths).
  • 3.Voting: Have team members vote on the scariest tiger identified by *someone else*.

"If you do a pre-mortem right, you will not have to do an ugly post-mortem."

#pre-mortem#strategy#product
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The LNO Framework

by Shreyas Doshi

🚀 Career & Leadership

Categorize tasks into Leverage (L), Neutral (N), and Overhead (O). You should only strive for perfection on L tasks (10x-100x impact). For N and O tasks, 'good enough' or doing them quickly is the goal to free up time for L tasks.

Core Principles

  • 1.Identify L Tasks: High leverage (10x impact). Apply perfectionism here. (e.g., Strategy, critical PRDs).
  • 2.Manage N/O Tasks: Neutral/Overhead (1x or <1x impact). Do these strictly 'good enough' or delegate.
  • 3.Placebo Productivity: Use N/O tasks to build momentum before tackling a scary L task.

"The mistake is that we treat all tasks as created equal. They are not."

#career#leadership
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👥 Team & Culture

Product work happens at three levels: Impact (Business outcomes), Execution (Getting things done), and Optics (Internal awareness). Conflicts arise when one person is arguing from 'Execution' (it's hard to build) while the other is looking at 'Impact' (customers hate it).

Core Principles

  • 1.Know Your Level: CEOs default to Impact; PMs often get stuck in Execution details.
  • 2.Value Optics: Internal optics isn't just 'politics'; it creates energy, awareness, and trust.
  • 3.Switch Contexts: To resolve conflict, explicitly identify which level the other person is operating on and match it.

"Optics creates awareness of the impact and execution. It creates energy."

#three#levels#product
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🎯 Product Strategy

In high-leverage roles, there are infinite tasks with positive ROI. Focusing on ROI leads to picking small, quick wins (reducing the denominator of time). Instead, focus on minimizing opportunity cost—choosing the *best* possible use of time, not just a *good* one.

Core Principles

  • 1.The ROI Trap: ROI formula incentivizes doing quick, small things rather than hard, big things.
  • 2.Define Allocation: Use a framework like 60% Incrementals, 30% Big Bets, 10% Infrastructure.
  • 3.The Question: Ask 'Is this the optimal use of time?' not 'Is this a good use of time?'

"You should stop doing work that simply provides a positive return on investment and start focusing on work that minimizes opportunity cost."

#opportunity#minimization#strategy
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