Lenny Distilled

Shreyas Doshi

Former PM, Stripe, Twitter, Google, Yahoo

20 quotes across 2 episodes

The art of product management

If you do a pre-mortem right, you will not have to do an ugly post-mortem. You might still do a post-mortem to learn, but odds are very high that it is not going to be a bad post-mortem.

You as a PM perhaps are fixated... on the execution level, which is what does it take to get something done? The CEO on the other hand is approaching it from the impact level... there is that mismatch.

All your tasks are not created equal, there are actually three type of tasks... L tasks which are leverage tasks... when you put in a certain amount of effort, you get 10X or 100X in return in terms of impact.

The L tasks, PMs implicitly just deep down they know what their L tasks are, because those are the tasks that are bothering them the most because they are not doing them or because they're not doing them as well as they know they should.

The reason we procrastinate on these tasks are, one, because we know that they're L tasks, we know the impact they'll have, and we are a little scared... The second is they require dedicated attention. And again, we are afraid about whether we'll have anything interesting to say.

In a high leverage role, you should stop doing work that simply provides a positive return on investment, ROI. And you should start focusing on work that minimizes opportunity cost.

When we reprogram ourselves to think in terms of opportunity cost, we are no longer thinking, 'Oh, is this a good use of my time?' Instead, you are thinking, 'Is this the best use of my time?' And it's a subtle but profound shift in our thinking.

High agency is about finding a way to get what you want without waiting for conditions to be perfect or otherwise blaming the circumstances.

I have found that approach very useful during planning... 60% of our time on incrementals... 30% I want to allocate towards big new initiatives... 10% I'd like us to allocate towards stability and infrastructure.

A sure far way of identifying those is when you put on a bandaid and the bandaid falls. So, many organizations that are constantly just solving the same problem over and over again... you put the bandaid, but the bandaid doesn't work.

Most execution problems that I encounter in a high performing environment where everybody has the right intentions are actually not execution problems, they are either strategy problems or interpersonal problems or cultural problems.

How does this make our users love Twitter more? Simple question. But then at that point I realized, yeah, we never really talked about that because we were so engrossed in all the other stuff.

I have found that approach very useful during planning... 60% of our time on incrementals... 30% I want to allocate towards big new initiatives... 10% I'd like us to allocate towards stability and infrastructure.

The art of product management | Shreyas Doshi (Stripe, Twitter, Google, Yahoo)

Taste is about the ability to identify what is really good, without needing to see its results. Game recognize game before the game is called, right? Like, game recognize game in the practice session.

If you have a real product strategy, a real one that everybody is aligned with, that you have got pre-alignment on, then a lot of this nonsense we tend to do with annual planning actually goes away.

If you identify your superpowers and work in accordance with them, you will do the best work of your life. You will love it, and you will be great at it, and you won't have that frustration.

Product work happens at three levels. There's the impact level, there's the execution level, and there's the optics level. My happy place is the impact level.

Our jobs get frustrating when we behave, most of the time, in misalignment with our superpowers and who we truly are at our core.

At some point, if you haven't already gotten there, many of you have, but for those of you who haven't, you will get there, where your scope will be so large, that no matter what you do in terms of efficiency, whatever framework you use for prioritization, whatever framework or tool you use to manage your to-do list, whatever tools and techniques you use, whatever prioritization you do, your scope is so large that you are still going to be incredibly busy.