YouSaid · the spoken record

Shreyas Doshi

lines on the record: 81
first: 2023-09-05
most recent: 2023-09-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Shane for having me. It was really wonderful to chat and longtime listeners, so really, really happy and honored to have this conversation with you.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Career. Another is family. Third is interest. Fourth might be friends. Fifth might be community, et cetera. So I kind of like to think about these buckets in terms of like a stack rank. So at this point in my life, what are the top three things in my stack rank? And that stack rank changes. And then I like to evaluate Am I able to spend the time I want to be spending on the top three things in my stack rank? And if I am, then I'm successful. And so by that metric, I wasn't really successful in my 20s or mid 30s because I was not able to spend all the time I wanted to spend on the top three things in my stack rank. But luckily now I am. So I feel like I'm kind of successful.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I love that question. Success I define as the optionality I have with my time. And it took me a really long time to really understand this well because I was always very ambitious as an individual. And so I wanted to be very successful. But when I achieved certain goals that I thought work towards my success, I was still left a little unsatisfied. And so I kept looking for this kind of what is success for me. And I finally cracked it in my very late 30s, which is success for me is time optionality, but particularly it's about am I able to spend the time I want to spend on the top three things in my stack rank of my life priorities. And so I have about like a few things that are buckets of my life priorities. So one is”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Will make you much more effective and efficient at the remainder of your project time. So you'll naturally just be able to do things much faster and much better in the time that you're spending on your projects. And in fact, we'll take you less time now to have the same degree of impact. So of course, the last piece here is this requires a mindset towards growth. This requires some degree of ambition. And this requires taking responsibility for one's own competence. And so those are prerequisites, right? Without those mindset changes, none of what I said will actually be put in action or resonate with somebody. Because if you are going to say, well, it's the organization's job to grow my competence, then sorry, it's not going to happen.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this is something I personally did since the very early days of my career. And I found that what happens is that kind of, even if it's 5%, like say 5% of 50 hours, right? So in a week. So that's two and a half hours a week where I'm explicitly not learning just from doing projects at work. And what that does is that compounds like crazy over time, right? And the interesting part is some people say, well, but I can't do it because I'm so busy at my work. I already don't have enough time to do all the things I need to do. And now you're saying, take two and a half hours less or take three hours less. But what they miss is that those two and a half hours or three hours a week If you invest consistently”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the challenge is that what I ask people to do instead of just being focused on learning from projects at work is, you know, look, you have 168 hours in a week. Take some number of hours and call it your career time. And I don't care if it's 30 hours, 40 hours, 50 hours, 60 hours, 70, 80, 90, whatever. You do you. You pick some number of hours in a week, which is your career time. And your career time certainly involves all the time you spend on your work, on your projects at work, right? But let it not be 100%, right? I want you to carve out 5%, 10%, 20% of your career time. And I want you to allocate that time on learning outside of your work projects.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It becomes much clearer how I do that, which is okay, in order to grow my product sense, I need to grow my cognitive empathy. I need to grow my domain knowledge, and I need to grow my creativity. Now, there are details of how you might do that, but the point is now you have much more clarity on kind of this systematically growing your competence. One other tactic I'll share on this topic of systematic competence is you have to understand a lot of people think that at some point in their career, they reach a stage where they start making the assumption that the only way they'll grow their competence is through projects they do at work, which is, hey, I'm clearly doing all this work and I'm learning all these new things, right? And that's growing my competence. And absolutely it is, no doubt whatsoever.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Such that I can make a decision that will differentiate us, such that I do understand regulation and the limitations of what we can get done, et cetera. So that's kind of domain knowledge. And then the third piece is creativity. And creativity is about taking these two inputs, which is cognitive empathy and domain knowledge, and turning it into a concrete proposal for what we are going to build. So you can have the first two. But if you don't have the creativity on your team, then you can take all those inputs, but you won't be able to convert those inputs into a compelling product proposal and a compelling UX and a compelling go-to-market approach and a marketing approach and so on that will actually then resonate and lead to product success. So these are the three components of product sense. So now if I want to increase my competence, grow my competence systematically.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, and so let's take in this case again, let's take product sense. Well, product sense, which is again the ability to make the correct product decision. This is the way some people are really great at consistently building very good products. This is why some companies are very good at building products that resonate with their users is because they really embody that product sense in the work they do. So, well, it turns out product sense has three components. The first is cognitive empathy, which is do I understand how you think as a user, how customers think, how they approach situations, what will resonate for them or not, right? That is cognitive empathy. Second is domain knowledge, right? Do I understand enough about this domain, about the technology, about the market, about the competition, et cetera?”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the core things in kind of systematically growing our competence is the idea of decomposition. And anytime we say, okay, we want to get better at decision making or in the product world, a version of that for product decisions is product sense. I want to get better at my product sense, which I define as the ability to usually make the correct decision about a product or a product feature, whether it's macro or micro. Even in the face of very high ambiguity. So when somebody is confronted with something like that and that being a core part of their competence, it is very confusing because what step do I take here? So that's where decomposition comes in very handy because you can look at almost any area of competence and you can decompose it into its constituent elements.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Than to kind of try to find that kind of optimal thing, we are making changes to the code. And at some point, our code just refuses to cooperate. And so we get left with this kind of highly suboptimal product.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what I realized is that it's kind of like the IKEA effect takes hold, right? Where we put in a bunch of work behind this. And so now we think it's more valuable than it truly is. And now we are going to just stick to it despite the world telling us or giving us evidence to the contrary. So that's the cognitive bias there. But there is also more than just cognitive bias. There's a practical issue, which is our code, so I'm talking about software products for the most part, but it applies to many other products and initiatives as well. But our code is not as malleable as we think, right? We just think, oh, we're going to write this code, ship it, and then if it doesn't work, we're going to undo it. We're going to change it. We're going to learn, et cetera. And all of that is good. But our code is not as malleable as we think. And so it takes us much longer.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when you look at things through an opportunity cost lens, what you really realize is that for certain things, you want to kind of minimize the opportunity cost, meaning you want to pick the thing that is as close to optimal as possible. And so that's kind of how you'll minimize the opportunity cost. So that's why I like to say that in a high leverage role, your goal should not just be to increase ROI. You should also think about how you're going to minimize the opportunity cost. And the last thing I'll say here is oftentimes people say, well, you know, we can work on a number of different things because who knows what the optimal thing is.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A better way when you're in a very high leverage role, a better way to think about these decisions is through the lens of opportunity cost, right? Where opportunity cost is roughly the value you get out of the optimal option and the value you got out of the option you chose, right? So the delta between those two, the option you chose and the value you'd get out of the optimal option, that's what kind of your opportunity cost is.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What that leads to is a lot of Me Too products. It leads to us kind of just meeting table stakes. It leads to picking the safe things because the safe things are easy to quantify and they're safe because they're easy to quantify. And look, I have nothing against those kinds of improvements. I think those are important, those incremental improvements are absolutely important. But I find that a lot of product teams when they're making decisions about where to spend their time, they are solely working on those kind of high ROI things and typically things which kind of just reduce the denominator. And they are afraid to pick up the ambiguous thing, which might have a very large return, but might require some effort and might involve just working through the ambiguity. So that's when I realized that actually”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or you can play a trick and decrease the denominator. So you can keep the numerator constant, but if you just decrease the denominator, you can increase the ratio. And so I saw that tendency play out very often in making decisions about what to work on next, what to prioritize, how to think about our priorities. Is oftentimes teams will gravitate towards things where the denominator is small, right? So practically what that meant is this is low hanging fruit. This is a quick win, right? Oh, it will only take one day to do it. And then I'd ask, what's the impact of it? Well, it doesn't have a very high impact, but again, because it's quick, let's do it, right? And so we get kind of really seduced by this kind of tendency to want to reduce the denominator. And what does that do?”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, most of us and most teams certainly are ROI machines. They are return on investment machines. And the way we evaluate things is evaluate work whether to do certain work or not is this going to provide us with positive ROI? And again, during my own career as a person who kind of was responsible for deciding what should we build, when should we build it, what should we build first? For a long time I used ROI as a core way of thinking about the work we do. So it sounds good, but the challenge is the formula for ROI is like the value you got minus the effort or the time or expense you put in to get the value divided by the effort time expense, whatever the case might be. So it's a ratio, right? Now, whenever you have a ratio and you want to increase that ratio, so in this case ROI, you can increase the numerator.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what that suggests is that if you want to be influential, if you want to make an impact, you should work towards creating a strong positive impression in the first few moments of any interaction. And I think many people do that. But when I started thinking about it for myself, I realized that, but wait, if I fall prey to that same bias, I am going to unfairly judge other people who are otherwise great perhaps, but perhaps they did not make a strong, great impression in the first seven seconds. So I need to actually follow for myself. I need to follow the antithesis of that when I am meeting somebody new, right? And again, that kind of inconsistency is not natural to us as humans. And so it kind of like we really. Need to be intentional about developing it.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It indicates that, yeah, sure, by all means to have an impact and to be effective, you need to recognize the way the world works. But that doesn't automatically mean that you also embody that in yourself, right? And perhaps just to kind of drive the example home, the first time I really realized this is when I was just kind of reading, we've all heard this kind of anecdote, and I don't know if it's true, but is that the idea that people form A strong impression of you within seven seconds of meeting you.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I think the challenge for many people is that the reason the antithesis principle is not Extremely intuitive, and certainly it wasn't for me early on in my life, is because it requires us to embrace inconsistency. We just habitually look for consistency. So the thing we observe in the world. We want ourselves to act consistently with the thing we observe in the world. But the antithesis principle says that the very fact that you made an observation about this thing in the world, the way the world works, in all of its imperfect ways.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But if you're 10 years into your career, 20 years into your career, and you are in a career which kind of rewards you for your judgment and your agency and so on, it is actually in your interest to pay attention to the antithesis principle. Because again, if you just rely on great managers around you, then you are kind of limited in terms of how much impact you can make. So yes, by all means, be a great manager yourself and try to be the best possible manager you can, but at the same time don't always expect that you can only do good work if you are working for a great manager.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Even if you have an okay or absentee manager, you should turn yourself into a person who can do really great work. Now, this second conclusion is the non-obvious conclusion that very few people draw. In fact, most people will blame in some way the fact that their manager doesn't do one-on-ones with them as frequently as they expect and say, well, of course, this is why I'm not performing as well or whatever. And, you know, perhaps that is a reasonable statement if your early career.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the first conclusion you can draw, and this is the more sort of more obvious conclusion, is that you should try to be a highly competent manager yourself. And you should try to be a really great manager of people so you can attract highly energetic, highly talented people, and you can help them do really good work. But there is a non-obvious conclusion that the antithesis principle suggests, which is When it comes to yourself, you should turn yourself into a person who can do really good work Even without having a great manager.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In myself, first, I realized that this actually, this idea of the antithesis principle applies to all sorts of things. And I'll just share one more example and kind of would love your thoughts afterwards is one of the things that I post on Twitter that a great manager is really important for your career. I will get a gazillion likes because it's something people love, right? Like which is like a great manager, just follow great people, great leaders, and you will have an amazing career, et cetera, et cetera. So that's kind of perhaps the truth you observe about the world. But now, what are you to conclude from this? How do you kind of like act on this observation?”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Smart people don't consider this second conclusion, right? And we make decisions for ourselves and we create identities for ourselves around these kinds of areas because we see these truths in the world and we assume those truths must apply to us. And that's why it's the antithesis because actually what you should do, if you want to optimize and maximize outcomes and your impact on the world is you should turn yourself into the kind of person that doesn't need any sort of entertainment to learn something. Because that way, you know, while most people will discard a profound book that doesn't have an attractive title, you will actually take the time to read that book and to kind of really learn from the book despite it having a terrible title. So that's just like one example. There's just like once I sort of saw this.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On yourself and on the world, right? If you think really deeply about this kind of truth, let's just say, which is most people learn better, learn the best when the content and the teaching is entertaining, is that if you want to help people learn something, make it very engaging and entertaining. So that's the obvious conclusion that almost any smart person will reach. It turns out there is actually one more conclusion you should draw to be a better decision maker and to have better results for yourself, which is it is actually not in your best interest to be the kind of person who only learns from entertaining content, right? In fact, to go even further than that, you should not even be the kind of person that needs any sort of entertainment as a prerequisite to learning, right? And so I would say that most”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are certain truths or maxims that we learn or we discover about the world and how the world operates. And then we use those maxims. For making many decisions, sometimes we should use the antithesis of that truth or maxim when it applies to us. So I call this the antithesis principle. One kind of truth that we might know about the way the world works is that most people learn better when the content or the teaching is entertaining, right? When it's entertaining, it's like it's got great stories, amazing analogies. People just learn better. And there are many people who proudly say, right? And I come across such folks all the time as a teacher myself or as somebody who writes online and so on is that, well, I only learn through engaging writing. As a smart person who wants to make a big impact.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The structure we choose, the things we choose to emphasize changed drastically based on kind of this working backwards view of what it is that we really want to evoke in the reader.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. A movie is an experience. A book is an experience that somebody is creating. A podcast is an experience. And so similarly, a document that you're writing is an experience you're creating for your target audience. So it helps to be very intentional about what do you want them to experience. And I'm not talking about fiction writing, right? I'm talking about like just like business non-fiction writing about a certain product or a certain whatever. But it's really important to work backwards from, you know, do I want them to be excited? Do I want them to be slightly concerned? Do I want to kind of clarify that we should be afraid about a certain competitor or whatever the case might be? And then kind of keep that in the back of our minds. Because then as we kind of write, the words we”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And start with that message in any kind of document and proposal in the work setting. You know, share that message very early on in the document, whatever that might be. Our core insight is X. And based on this core insight, X, our proposal is that we do A, B, and C. Actually, your proposal to do A, B, C might be informed by 10 other insights, PQ, RST, et cetera, right? But that can come later, right? Or that can come in an appendix section, right? For the more curious, right? But if X insight is actually the Then that's really what executives need to know.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lightly edit it. And then I look at the document, I'm like, you know, I have to tell you, and this is not going to sound like happy news, but I would rewrite this whole thing. Because here you are, you're saying, well, maybe you can just use a few better words. But the problem is not the words. We need to create greater clarity. And that means we have to rethink the structure. We need to write with empathy for where the reader is likely coming from. And that is much more work than changing a few words here and there. But once we kind of like start talking about it in terms of no, no, no, no. The goal is not to communicate everything we know about this topic. The next step to take is then to ask, which is what is the most important thing I want to convey?”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. And it was hard to understand the true value of those ideas in that noise. And so when I observed that, I started trying to identify why is it the case? And then I realized after some time that the reason that some folks do this when they're writing is because they want to communicate everything they know about this topic. And of course, when we do that, the story we tell ourselves is, oh, I want to build a bulletproof case, right? So I'm going to provide all of this detail. And of course, what actually ends up in practice is regardless of how well you write this thing, the reader is lost, right? And so oftentimes people would come to me and say, like, look, I have this document, but I feel like I'm not using the right words. So can you kind of...”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And nobody looked at it. The executives don't care, or they're just like cynically, they're giving us busy work. So one of the things I did in these situations is, and this was often situations where somebody on my team or in my org was kind of bringing me this problem of like, what do we do? It kind of became important for me to start sharing some principles of how you influence via writing. Number one is oftentimes when this was happening, when they were describing this type of frustrating situation with a writing culture, I observed that in their documents had all the right ideas. But it was hard to find those ideas.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think that is a very key aspect that people tend to ignore of kind of this writing culture. And it has done right has really profound effects on the degree of transparency across organization clarity and really kind of innovative big thinking that you can engage in. You know, the problem is that not everybody is a good writer. Some people have also told themselves stories about, oh, I'm not a good writer. And so one of the challenges is that Such a culture makes it hard for people who kind of think they're not a good writer to be able to influence. Because ultimately. Any form of communication in an organizational setting is a form of influence, right? So I would, you know, I managed and mentored a number of people who'd come to me and say, look, I wrote this document down. I shared it. It took me two days to write it.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So if you spot something that you think needs to be improved, in a writing culture, in a true writing culture, you can write about it and share the document and see what people have to say, see if it resonates. And certainly at Stripe as a writing culture, I saw it often where there were people, you know, regardless of their role and their function within the organization kind of wrote down something super insightful. And as they shared it, it kind of spread through various Slack channels saying like, oh, this person wrote this doc, you know, you should check it out. And now all of a sudden people are going in the doc and posting comments. It's like, oh, this is actually an interesting point. Can you expand more on it? Or like, you know, I don't quite agree with this. What's your perspective? And all of this is happening in a fairly permissionless manner.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think one of the areas where it's extremely helpful is when you have a writing culture, it becomes more of a permissionless environment in a non-writing culture where perhaps the way big decisions are made or proposals are shared, it's usually in some meeting where perhaps we have a discussion or I walk you through a slide deck. Well, the observation is that all of a sudden, if that's the way that big proposals need to be made or even small proposals need to be made, now you need permission, right? You need permission to join the meeting. You need permission to present at the meeting. You need permission. You need to ask for permission to take asynchronous, meaningful slot of everybody's time to be able to share what you want to share. And a true writing culture kind of removes. A lot of those constraints.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now you can increase your competence so you can go from the low perhaps on the low talent side to the high talent side just by virtue of having that much more experience. And so again, in many cases, for certain roles, I would rather prefer a go-getter who's perhaps a little bit lacking on certain of the certain experience factors because I've found that those experience factors can be rapidly made up for.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who's his primary responsibility is to resolve ambiguities and act in the presence of ambiguities. So for PMs, it becomes really important to kind of have this high agency. And then lastly, the last quadrant in this matrix is the high agency and high talent quadrant. And these folks I just call them game changers, right? Like they change the game for the company, for the team, for themselves. But the reality is that there are very few of them, right? So if you come across a game changer early in their career, you better hold on to them, right? And you better provide them with the opportunities and the support that is necessary for them to achieve their potential. And last thing I'll say on this topic is sometimes go getters over time become game changers because with enough experience.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They have a high degree of optimism, but perhaps they're early in their career, right? And so they don't yet have the talent and the full competence. So go getters is an interesting group. And one other observation that I made over the years is that given generally this is more a guiding principle than a rule, but like given a choice between hiring a frustrated genius and hiring a go-getter, if it is a role that has a high degree of ambiguity, I would rather hire the go-getter than the frustrated genius. Because I know the go-getter will work hard to resolve the ambiguity versus complain about the ambiguity. And in many ways, product management, the role I have done for many, many years is a”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you don't quite demonstrate the drive and the resilience, the confidence, and sort of the creative execution to do something about it. You're waiting for conditions to be perfect. And you have this fantasy in your head that when conditions are perfect, I will be able to achieve the potential of myself or my team. So that quadrant I call the frustrated geniuses. There is no situation that is ever going to be up to the standards of perfection that they're hoping for. Then you also have the high agency, but perhaps low talent group. And that group I call go-getters, right? So these are folks that are just like, they're very ambitious. They want to get things done. They are often very creative. They're very excited. They want to take on new projects.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so these might be really brilliant people. Maybe they went to really amazing schools. They have great pedigree, et cetera, et cetera. And we've all worked with such folks over time where they have tremendous potential, but somehow there is probably something that's kind of stopping them. And they're often kind of looking around them and complaining about, well, but this is not right. And but like we don't have clarity on the cross-border goals and we don't have the resources we need and we don't have the cross org support we need and the cross functional support, et cetera, et cetera. And look, pointing these things out by itself, I don't think is a bad thing. You need to confront the reality of your situation. But what happens to kind of... Have low agency but high talent is you have the ability to point these things out”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This two by two matrix of low agency, high agency on one axis, along one axis, and then low talent and high talent along the other axis. And so you get this kind of four quadrants, if you will, where if you have low talent and low agency, then you are going to be a cog in the wheel. You're going to perform some undifferentiated work. And maybe that's essential work. But whatever work you do is not really going to substantially change or improve the trajectory of the team or even of your own outcomes. So that's kind of the low talent, low agency quadrant. Then you have the high talent but low agency person.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and so as I was thinking back a few years ago about the people I've seen that have outsized outcomes consistently, both for themselves and for the teams and the companies they're part of. Realized that there were some patterns between those individuals. That's when I came across this term high agency, which I believe Eric Weinstein coined the term and essentially it's a high agency is about, it's basically about doing certain things, taking on hard things without waiting for condition to be perfect or otherwise blaming your circumstances. I wanted to kind of marry this idea of high agency that I came across with the idea of your talent, right? The degree of talent you have or the degree of competence, whatever kind of term we use there. And so then you can kind of start to imagine.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To great teams. But another one I'll share that is often not discussed is just high agency among the individual contributors of the team. I think at some point a team It's like 10, 20, 30, 40 people, 50 people more. It becomes really important, not just for the leaders to be ambitious and have good judgment and so on, but for the individual contributors to be very high agency people where they feel that they have the ability to end the sort of desire to influence outcomes, right? And they are going to execute creatively to do that. And in some cases, they are going to bend rules. And in many cases, most teams have constraints, whether they're staffing constraints or funding constraints or whatever else. And it's this ability of at least a few individuals on the team. You don't need the entire team to be extremely high agency. But the ability of at least a few.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, yep, yeah, it's so interesting that people don't see that the reason they're getting paid the big bucks is and the reason the way they'll create alpha for their team or for their company is through that judgment because if everybody could just follow playbooks, then they might be wonderful playbooks, but over time even wonderful playbooks become the industry standard. So now if you want to outperform, you need something else and that something else is always judgment. And so, yeah, absolutely. Willingness to bend rules. And now the question is, well, how do I know which rules to bend, right? That's the next question I get when I write about these things. And it's like, again, it goes back to judgment. One, you know, I have quite a few on the list of the attributes of good.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A little bit is perhaps some insecurity, perhaps a lack of adequate courage on the part of the leaders of the team. But the other is being able to defend when things go wrong. So following rules is very comfortable because if we follow all the rules and it doesn't work out, we can just point at the rules and say, look, we followed all the rules. We followed the process. We came to all the product reviews. We showed you all the mockups and all the intermediate artifacts as the rules said, right? And so therefore now if this product failed in the market or failed to win, don't blame me like I followed the rules and this is how a lot of operators operate in organizations.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Following through on it in the day to day. So that is one thing I like to call out. Second thing I like to call out is to what degree is the team willing to bend rules? I'm not talking about breaking laws because you shouldn't do that, but to what degree are you willing to bend rules? And there are teams that want to do the right thing that will follow all the rules. And they do it for two reasons. One is there is usually kind of”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The first one is really the best way to describe it is what is Is there clarity on how this team makes decisions? And I mean it certainly from a tactical kind of process perspective, but I mean it more from almost a philosophical perspective, right? Which is that what are we optimizing for? And if you look at all the sort of like, you know, the great companies out there, they have some way of deciding what makes sense, what product to build and how to build the product, how much attention to detail to give certain things and how much to build fast, right? And hopefully some of those are codified in the operating values or the operating principles of the company. But does this team have clarity on that kind of philosophy for how they're making decisions is, I think, a really important factor. And then are they actually”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. I like to observe that there's a difference between very good teams that operate quite well and really great teams, the teams that are not only able to operate quite well on one project, but on multiple projects and are able to kind of crossfall in it their goodness to other teams that they work with. One of my observations about the core difference between a good team and a great team is the judgment of the leader of that team.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That writing culture helped address a lot of this where, yeah, we might disagree, but now we understand the root of our disagreement better because you're trying to optimize for this metric and I'm thinking of this other metric. So let's have a conversation about that first. Instead of, again, litigating the minutiae of whether there should be a three-step flow or a two-step flow, right? So that is one kind of mitigating tactic to this. The second one is oftentimes, yeah, you kind of had to take this decision to somebody else, typically somebody higher up in the hierarchy to make the decision, which is like, look, we've had this, you know, what we called rigorous conversation and discussion and install document. Documented here in this Google Doc or what have you, and we can't seem to decide.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT