Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products
Shreyas Doshi, an expert in product leadership from Stripe, Twitter, and Google, discusses the three levels of product work and conflict, the difference between measurement and evaluation, and the benefits of a writing culture. He also shares insights on decision-making, growing competence, and the agency-talent matrix.
Deep Dive Analysis
11 Topic Outline
Understanding the Three Levels of Product Work
Resolving Conflict Arising from Different Focus Levels
Distinguishing Between Measurement and Evaluation
Gaining Buy-in in Measurement-Focused Cultures
Lessons from Stripe's Product-Centric Culture
The Role and Impact of a Writing Culture
How to Influence Effectively Through Writing
The Antithesis Principle in Decision-Making
Rethinking Decisions Through Opportunity Cost
Systematically Growing Your Professional Competence
Defining Personal Success
6 Key Concepts
Three Levels of Product Work
These levels are Execution (what can be done quickly with current resources), Impact (how the product resonates, sells, and affects brand), and Optics (how things appear, credit, and perception). Conflict often arises when individuals or teams operate and communicate primarily at different levels.
Evaluating vs. Measuring
Evaluating is making a qualitative judgment about how something is progressing, which can be sufficient for improvement without explicit metrics. Measuring involves quantitative tracking. Sometimes, the effort to measure can be too large, or optimizing a measurement might not improve the underlying thing.
Antithesis Principle
This decision-making framework suggests that for personal growth and maximum impact, one should sometimes adopt the opposite behavior or belief of what is generally observed as a 'truth' in the world. For example, while most people learn better from entertaining content, one should strive to learn effectively even without entertainment.
Agency Talent Matrix
A 2x2 framework categorizing individuals based on their agency (drive to influence outcomes) and talent (competence). The quadrants are: Cog in the Wheel (low agency, low talent), Frustrated Genius (low agency, high talent), Go-Getter (high agency, low talent), and Game Changer (high agency, high talent).
Product Sense
Defined as the ability to consistently make correct product decisions (macro or micro) even in the face of very high ambiguity. It is composed of three key components: cognitive empathy, domain knowledge, and creativity.
Opportunity Cost (in Decision-Making)
A framework for evaluating decisions by considering the value of the optimal alternative that was not chosen. In high-leverage roles, the goal should be to minimize opportunity cost, rather than just maximize ROI, to avoid focusing solely on 'low-hanging fruit' or 'me-too' products.
10 Questions Answered
Conflicts often arise because people are operating and communicating at different levels of product work (execution, impact, or optics) and are not aligned on the level of discussion.
Leaders should step back, recognize the level at which the other party is operating (e.g., optics-focused), explore their underlying perspective and concerns, and then brainstorm solutions that address those concerns.
Evaluating involves qualitative judgment of progress, which can be sufficient for improvement, while measuring involves quantitative tracking. Focusing solely on measurement can sometimes be too costly or lead to optimizing a proxy instead of the true goal.
Pivot attention to demonstrating impact through leading indicators, which can include both early quantitative metrics (even if small) and compelling qualitative feedback from key customers, presented as a story.
Stripe fostered a culture where every function was treated equally, product and customer experience were considered everyone's job, and founders actively engaged with customers at all levels, reinforcing these values beyond mere words.
A writing culture creates a permissionless environment for sharing ideas, fosters transparency and cross-organizational clarity, and encourages innovative thinking. However, it can disadvantage those who perceive themselves as poor writers, and documents can become ineffective if ideas are buried in excessive detail.
The Antithesis Principle suggests that to maximize personal impact and growth, one should sometimes adopt the opposite behavior or belief of what is generally observed as a 'truth' in the world (e.g., not needing entertainment to learn, or being effective even without a great manager).
Beyond ROI, high-leverage roles should consider minimizing opportunity cost, which means choosing the option closest to optimal. This helps avoid the trap of only pursuing 'low-hanging fruit' or 'quick wins' that may not lead to significant long-term impact.
Systematically growing competence involves decomposing a broad skill (like product sense) into its core components and dedicating a consistent portion (e.g., 5-20%) of one's 'career time' each week to learning activities explicitly outside of immediate work projects.
Success for Shreyas is defined as having the optionality with his time to be able to spend the desired amount of time on the top three priorities in his personal 'stack rank' of life priorities.
28 Actionable Insights
1. Own Your Competence Growth
Cultivate a mindset of growth, ambition, and personal responsibility for your competence, as these are prerequisites for systematic skill development. Relying solely on the organization for your growth will impede progress.
2. Perform Independently of Manager Quality
While a great manager is helpful, cultivate the ability to perform excellent work and achieve impact even with an average or absentee manager. Take responsibility for your own performance and growth, rather than relying solely on external support.
3. Learn Beyond Entertainment
While engaging content aids learning for most, actively cultivate the ability to learn effectively even from unentertaining material. This allows you to gain insights from sources others might overlook.
4. Embrace Inconsistency for Better Decisions
To apply the antithesis principle effectively, intentionally embrace inconsistency in your thinking, recognizing that what applies to the general world may not be optimal for your personal actions. This mindset helps in making better, non-intuitive decisions.
5. Counter Biases with Antithesis
When aware of common biases, actively apply the antithesis principle to yourself to counteract them, such as intentionally avoiding quick judgments of new people. This helps prevent unfair assessments and fosters more objective interactions.
6. Leadership Needs Judgment
For effective decision-making, especially when traditional metrics are insufficient, company leadership must possess strong judgment. This judgment is crucial for navigating complex situations and ensuring true impact.
7. Minimize Opportunity Cost
In high-leverage roles, prioritize minimizing opportunity cost by selecting optimal options, not just those with high ROI or quick wins. This prevents gravitating towards low-impact, easy tasks and leads to more significant outcomes.
8. Prioritize High-Return Ambiguous Projects
Avoid prioritizing low-effort ‘quick wins’ that lead to ‘me too’ products; instead, embrace ambiguous projects with potentially high returns. Be aware of the ‘IKEA effect’ and the overestimation of code malleability, which make backtracking from suboptimal choices difficult.
9. Make Customer Experience Everyone’s Job
Cultivate an environment where every function, from engineering to sales, takes ownership of the product and customer experience. This collective responsibility is essential for creating truly exceptional products.
10. Treat All Functions Equally
Foster a culture where all organizational functions are treated as equal, regardless of their specific roles. This equality encourages authentic dialogue and collaboration, preventing rank-pulling from stifling good ideas.
11. Leaders Must Live Values
For company values to be truly embedded, leaders, particularly founders, must actively embody them, such as regularly engaging with customers. This commitment shows employees that values are lived, not just stated.
12. Cultivate High Agency Contributors
Encourage individual contributors to exhibit high agency, empowering them to influence outcomes and execute creatively, even amidst constraints. A few such individuals can significantly help a team overcome obstacles and make an impact.
13. Hire Go-Getters for Ambiguous Roles
When hiring for ambiguous roles, prioritize ‘go-getters’ (high agency, lower talent) over ‘frustrated geniuses’ (high talent, low agency). Go-getters actively resolve ambiguity, whereas frustrated geniuses tend to complain about it.
14. Develop Go-Getters into Game Changers
Understand that ‘go-getters’ (high agency, less experience) can become ‘game changers’ (high agency, high talent) with sufficient experience. Prioritize hiring go-getters for roles where experience can be rapidly acquired.
15. Use Writing for Clarity and Consensus
Adopt a writing culture where discussions start with documents to force clarity and facilitate asynchronous consensus-building. This approach helps clarify thinking and uncover the true roots of disagreements better than verbal debates.
16. Foster Permissionless Contribution via Writing
Utilize a writing culture to create a permissionless environment, allowing anyone to propose improvements or share insights through documents. This approach enhances transparency, cross-organizational clarity, and innovative thinking.
17. Lead with Core Message in Writing
To influence through writing, prioritize conveying the most important message and core insight early in your document. Avoid overwhelming readers with excessive detail; instead, lead with your main proposal.
18. Write with Reader Empathy
When writing, consider your reader’s perspective and desired emotional response, structuring your document and choosing words intentionally. Work backward from the intended impact to create a compelling experience.
19. Clarify Team Decision Philosophy
For a team to be great, establish and consistently follow a clear philosophical understanding of how decisions are made and what the team is optimizing for. This shared clarity guides daily actions and strategic choices.
20. Bend Rules with Judgment
Great teams are willing to bend rules, not break laws, by exercising sound judgment rather than blindly following playbooks. This judicious deviation from standard processes is essential for outperforming and creating unique value.
21. Allocate Time for Outside Learning
Consistently allocate 5-20% of your career time each week to learning activities separate from your work projects. This dedicated learning compounds over time, significantly enhancing your effectiveness and efficiency in your core work.
22. Decompose Competence for Growth
Systematically grow your competence by decomposing any skill or area into its fundamental constituent elements. This approach clarifies specific areas for development, making the path to improvement more actionable.
23. Demonstrate Impact with Leading Indicators
In quantitative environments, demonstrate impact by presenting both leading metrics and qualitative feedback from key customers. This strategy helps shift focus from mere proxies to the actual impact being made.
24. Balance Qualitative and Quantitative
To scale successfully, balance quantitative management with qualitative customer insights and anecdotes, as founders often do. Avoid losing sight of true impact by solely managing through spreadsheets.
25. Evaluate Beyond Pure Metrics
Understand that evaluating progress can be sufficient without formal measurement, especially when measurement effort is large or risks improving only the proxy. Prioritize the actual impact over solely focusing on measurable proxies.
26. Don’t Judge Differing Team Focus
When collaborating, avoid judging other teams or individuals for their focus (e.g., optics vs. impact), as this prevents true collaboration. Recognize that different teams may prioritize different levels of work to create room for effective teamwork.
27. Understand Opposing Perspectives First
When conflicts arise from differing focuses (e.g., execution vs. optics), step back to understand the other party’s perspective and concerns. This approach helps identify the root of the disagreement and fosters collaborative solutions.
28. Define Success as Time Optionality
Define personal success as having the optionality to allocate time to your top three life priorities. Regularly assess if your time usage aligns with these priorities to measure your personal success.
8 Key Quotes
Oftentimes conflict between people and teams arises mainly because we're not talking at the same level.
Shreyas Doshi
Sometimes evaluating how something is going is enough. And sometimes if you try to measure a thing, you might think you might improve the measurement, but you might not actually be improving the underlying thing.
Shreyas Doshi
The challenge though is sometimes some founders will kind of lose their way entirely, right? And they, again, they make the mistake of treating the proxy as the goal, right? And they lose sight of the real goal, which is impact.
Shreyas Doshi
It wasn't really about like, you know, pulling rank or title. It was about really discussing the idea.
Shreyas Doshi
The act of writing it is very helpful for the person writing it, but the act of consuming somebody else's writing is also very helpful for what we talked about when we first started, which was perspective taking.
Shane Parrish
It's not a movie, right? Like lead with the best here. Don't build up for it because most people stop reading.
Shane Parrish
If you can only operate in ideal circumstances, you're only going to be average because circumstances are never going to be ideal and you need to find a way to operate no matter what the circumstances are.
Shane Parrish
Success, I define as the optionality I have with my time.
Shreyas Doshi
2 Protocols
Influencing Effectively Through Writing
Shreyas Doshi- Identify the single most important thing you want to convey.
- Share that core message very early in the document.
- Rethink the document's structure to create greater clarity for the reader.
- Write with empathy for where the reader is likely coming from, considering their perspective and desired experience.
Systematically Growing Professional Competence
Shreyas Doshi- Decompose the desired area of competence into its constituent elements (e.g., product sense into cognitive empathy, domain knowledge, and creativity).
- Allocate a consistent percentage (5-20%) of your weekly 'career time' to learning activities explicitly outside of your immediate work projects.