Shreyas Doshi

Just a few notes to myself (a driven & ambitious person):

1) Kings are overrated and usually unhappy. It’s much better to be kingmaker.

2) Eventually, everyone realizes that they don’t want to be Elon Musk or Steve Jobs. How quickly do you want to get there?

3) Legacy is overrated. So is impact.

4) Learn from everyone & everything. Don’t view people as better or worse than you, worthy or unworthy of teaching you. And if something doesn’t fully resonate, don’t reject it wholesale. Try extracting the useful bits and learn from those. Wisdom is everywhere, if you can spot it.

5) When you find someone inspiring, try to separate their content and their charisma. And if it’s the charisma that inspires, be very careful.

6) The chief indicator of authentic confidence isn’t bravado. It’s the person’s openness to discovering why they’re wrong.

7) Whatever industry or domain you are in is probably smaller than you imagine it is. People talk. Don’t burn bridges over the small stuff.

8) When in doubt about where to take a job, pick the place with the better people. Even if it ends up being the wrong bet, you will still be more fulfilled with your work.

9) In the tech industry, things often change. Platforms change, technologies change, office signs change, employers change, centers of gravity change. The one thing that remains constant is the people. Always optimize for the people.

10) If you choose to understand just one cognitive bias, let it be the Fundamental Attribution Error. If you choose to understand one more cognitive bias, let it be Confirmation Bias.

Last but not least, very important note:
No rule is valid for every single situation in life. Except this rule.

An observation about Product Managers who get promoted quickly early on:

They consistently turn high ambiguity into clarity, clarity to alignment, alignment to plans, and plans to shipped product. No matter what problem you give them, they surprise you with their ingenuity and energetic action.

An important transition point in your career is when you go from just playing defense in business review meetings by answering executives’ questions to actually framing the most important questions and facilitating a productive discussion & resolution for these questions.

Certain talented folks should not pick their next job based on which one seems like the best “learning opportunity”. I know it sounds great, even noble, to say that you are mainly looking for a company & a manager under whose wing you can learn and grow (actually it doesn’t sound that great, but everyone says it, so we assume we are also supposed to say it).\n\nIf you are an intrinsically motivated, curious, and talented person, here’s a less conventional idea that works better: Do not fall into the Always Learning Never Ready trap. You will learn a lot anywhere, so it is much smarter to pick your next job based on culture, overall talent level at the company, and company growth. In a high growth environment, the learning will automatically follow.\n\nSo many people don’t understand that Doing Opportunities are more holistically rewarding than Learning Opportunities. And as a bonus, you also end up learning a lot more from the Doing Opportunities.

Over the short term, you shape your work.

You decide what to work on, how to work on it, and you create outputs that are shaped by your skills & choices.

Over the long term, your work shapes you.

The type of work you do and the manner in which you do it will change you as a person.

Perhaps the best example is when smart, talented, well-meaning people realize that they must begin to prioritize managing optics to continue getting further ahead in their company.

It starts off very innocuously. You are being practical. You promise yourself that you‘re just playing the game as it is supposed to be played at these higher levels. This is not actually you. You are just acting a part.

You learn the many levels of this new game. Being smart & ambitious, you begin to perfect it.

A decade goes by. It has paid off. You are much farther ahead than your peers. You report to the CEO now. It feels good. Really good.

You finally feel like you‘re ready to fulfill that lifelong dream of starting your own company. So after much thought, you go for it.

But unbeknownst to you, you are now a different person than the person who first had this dream. You are great at managing optics, you are great at deluding yourself & others, and so thanks to those neural pathways that have gotten deeply etched by your work over the past decade, your past work is shaping your new work.

So in decisions big and tiny, you optimize optics over impact. Over time, some well-wishers & courageous early employees point out the symptoms to you. But your charisma and your ability to argue your way out of everything (something you secretly pride yourself on, by labeling it as hard won intelligence) wins — always.

No one knows for sure how this story ends or what happens to your startup — but it probably ends better if you can recognize that — while you think you are shaping your work, you are the one in control, you are the one who‘s decided to play a certain part for practical reasons — the work you choose to do is busy shaping you, for better or worse.

One downside of being a go-getter who constantly Gets Sh*t Done is that you assume that everyone derives the same degree of satisfaction as you do from checking off items on their to-do list and so you push people towards alignment & action without pausing to first inspire & motivate, which makes you come across as less persuasive, which hampers your career growth beyond a certain level.

Corporate life is just repeating this loop until you retire:

“We need a meeting to stay in sync”
↓
“I love this meeting, so glad we are doing this”
↓
“Why don’t you present your team’s status at our sync meeting?”
↓
“Hmmm... this meeting is getting kinda big”
↓
“Omg, who are all these people?”
↓
“I'm gonna do my email while listening to updates”
↓
“Sorry, was dealing with urgent Slack DMs. Were you asking me?”
↓
“I will skip this one & catch up via the notes”
↓
“Let's save everyone time, and just do async updates”
↓
“I love async updates. Can’t believe we were meeting for this”
↓
“Hmmm... people aren't in sync on each others’ work”
↓
“I have an idea! Let’s do a biweekly meeting to stay in sync”

The test of a good EM-PM partnership is not absolute harmony. Rather, it is the ability to have the necessary tough conversations without any loss of mutual respect, trust, and future candor.

While this might seem obvious, most EM-PM partnerships, in practice, strive for 100% harmony & agreeableness at the expense of candor & occasional disagreement.

Note here we are not talking about disagreement that is rooted in egos, toxic habits, and self-centeredness; rather we are talking about necessary (and sometimes inevitable) disagreement on high stakes issues pertaining to team culture or product progress.

While it’s easy to blame EMs and PMs for not being radically candid in their mutual interactions, this problem is at least in part due to the incentives & disincentives created by peer review processes & promotion criteria. These processes & rules incentivize — especially on the PM side — the *appearance of* absolute harmony between the PM & their EM counterpart.

So like with most things in product, the onus of fixing this problem lies primarily with the senior leaders of the org, in how they design the incentives and how they then coach PMs (and EMs) on the validity of productive disagreeement.

10 tips for misery in work & life:

1. See self as a victim
2. Complain constantly
3. Resent successful people
4. Compare habitually
5. Nitpick to feel superior
6. Assume bad intent
7. Refuse to listen to others
8. Try hard to please powerful people
9. Aim to impress everyone
10. Learn only by making mistakes

8 facts that leaders must accept sooner or later:

1) People are not exactly like you

2) They need not be exactly like you

3) No one can read your mind

4) You must clarify & repeat-repeat-repeat

5) You cannot force people to change

6) Only they can, if they want

7) You can listen better than you do

8) You can thank people more often than you do

I had stubbornly resisted most of these facts early on as a leader. Don’t be like me.

For any product problem, small or large, start with the goals & motivations of your users and then explore the creative space of how you can address those goals & motivations in ways that will also meet your business goals & metrics, and then within that region of the solution space, creatively mix-and-match to further optimize your business goals & metrics.

Most people take the reverse approach, starting with business goals & metrics, then fitting in users’ goals & motivations, which often leads to predictably similar and undifferentiated features & products. Paradoxically, an excessive fixation on business goals & metrics during the conception of solutions can lead to worse outcomes on those very goals & metrics.

As performance review season gets underway in many places now & through Q4, here’s a rough model to help you think about how you are perceived in almost every mid-sized to large company.

Your work is generally observed and perceived [0] by others along the following 3 dimensions:

1) Content: this is about the insights & ideas you have, the proposals you make, how you solve problems, the things you ship, the metrics you move in the short-term, the business impact you create in the long-term, etc.

2) Confidence: this is about the image you project as you do your work, do you seem to have things under control, do you seem to be able to tackle tough tasks, how you communicate, do you come across as “leadership material”, are your peers and people above / below in the hierarchy confident in you, etc.

3) Context: this is about your sensibility around your company’s implicit culture, how you adapt your approach to your org’s power structure, that important exec’s quirks & preferences, general biases of important peers & stakeholders, etc.

Now, here are some crucial observations to consider as you think about how you’re perceived and how that affects your odds of getting promoted:

A) In most companies, if you are extremely good at just 1 of these and average / below average at the other 2, you are going to “get stuck” beyond certain levels (usually Manager / Sr. Manager will be your ceiling).

This is unfortunately the cause of a lot persistent frustration for otherwise-talented people who are GREAT at Content, but repeatedly get passed over for promotion to higher levels.

They don't understand why this keeps happening. And usually no one explains to them the perception side of things i.e. no one explains that it is usually because they are not projecting as much Confidence as they ought to for the next level and they are not as attuned to the Context of the org & the company [1].

B) To have a chance of getting Director / VP level scope, you must be very good at a minimum of 2 of these and you must not suck at the 3rd one.

And btw, this is how you get different types of leaders at the mid / upper management level of a company.

e.g. a leader who spikes on Content + Context but not on Confidence is going to have a VERY different style than a leader who spikes on Confidence + Context but not on Content.

This observation alone will explain a lot of confusing promotions, where someone seems not competent-enough to be a senior leader, but yet they somehow are the one chosen for the VP job.

C) Employees who get promoted to and show longevity at the highest levels (Executive / CEO) in top tier companies tend to be very good at all 3, especially Context.

Last but not the least: as with any model, this is by no means a perfect predictor of how things will always work everywhere. But hopefully this helps clarify some perpetually confusing things that happen in our career & in the careers of people around us.

Some go-to survival tactics of managers who don’t actually know how to make an impact:

- Need a re-org
- Must hire for a key role before anything else
- Need new processes
- Need to fix & align another function
- Must fix severe staffing shortage somewhere
- Organize a Strategy Summit
- Need another re-org

Throughout, blaming predecessors for “this mess”.

Can often survive for years this way.

Understanding this is the first step to fixing this.

In Product Management, a lack of time is often *really* a lack of…

Prioritization across teams
Focus on what's been prioritized
Conviction on the most important thing
Clarity on a winning strategy
Discipline to do things right
Courage to do the right thing
Energy on the team
Talent on the team
Staffing for critical roles
Support from upper management
Guidance on goals & expectations
Understanding of the PM role

There are huge skill differences between

A) understanding customer pain, and

B) deciding if your product should even solve that pain, and if Yes,

C) how to solve it in a way that creates major differentiation

A is easiest of these three. Many can do A well.

B should often be No. Most people cannot resist the temptation of saying Yes for B.

C is where fortunes are made. Few can do C consistently well.

As a product person, it pays to get really good at A, B, *and* C.