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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“So, in practice, I'll observe a couple of things. Number one, this is where a writing culture helps intensely. So Stripe famously has a writing culture. And a lot of these discussions would start with a document and they're asynchronous discussions. And the reason I think it's key is because just having to write these things down forced a degree of clarity that is often missing when you're kind of having just these debates verbally by forcing ourselves to kind of write down our thinking. It enables the reaching of consensus or a decision better than if we were trying to do it all just verbally in a meeting. Because again, oftentimes when we are doing it in a meeting, there's also like other factors that come in, right? Like it's not just a lack of clarity and the lack of”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You realize, right? Like that, this is what the company cares about, right? Like when the founders are actually living the values that are put up on the wall, that means that they're not just words on a wall, right? We can all say, you know, yeah, sure, you need to be customer-centric and so on. But the actual process of doing so involves a lot of discipline, commitment, and consistency.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In many cases, they would kind of have a meeting with the customer and send out notes. And another interesting thing I found is normally when a CEO of a company is talking to a customer, it is usually they're talking to the CEO of that customer. But at Stripe, oftentimes you would get these notes from the founders saying, oh yeah, so I was visiting this customer and I talked to their customer support team. I spent time with their customer support team to understand whatever it is, how they're using the Stripe dashboard, right? And so as you saw this as an employee,”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not once in my five plus years there did somebody play the card of, well, so I am the product manager. I realize all this debate and all of that, but since I have this title and this question is about the product, so therefore I'm going to make the call, right? So it wasn't really about like, you know, pulling rank or title. It was about really discussing the idea. So that's one way that I think Stripe put this in practice. And look, the other way of like the entire sort of fabric of the organization kind of pushing you to build the right product was that the founders kind of lived these values as well. So, you know, Patrick and John until a very, very long time as the company was scaling and to a point where you wouldn't expect the founder to do so, they were talking to customers. They were talking to users. And not only that,”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And nothing else. And if it's something about the user experience, well, you bring in the expert, the product manager, or the designer, and they will tell you what to do. In those environments, you just don't end up building really inspiring products. And so what I saw at Stripe were perhaps like two things I'll flag. One was that really every function was treated as equal, right? Like really you treated every function equally. And now they might perform different roles, but it wasn't one function was better than the others, or one function was higher than the others, right? So what that enabled is a much more focused and much more authentic conversation between functions of what is the right thing to do here.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then you can have at least the ingredients for creating magic. And too often what happens, and I've seen this at many, many companies in the valley, some of the most successful and modern companies in the technology space is that at some point this idea of like, okay, are we building the right product? Are we building a product that our customers will really love? And are we building a product that will win in the market? Those concerns get relegated to one function or a couple of functions. While the other functions get more focused or somehow asked to get more focused on just like stay in your lane, do your thing, you know, ship your code, right? And do it on time and do it at reasonable quality, but that's your job.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At a company that has already been very successful without product management. So that was one of the motivators for me as somebody who started my career as an engineer but had been a product manager for over a decade by that time. And one of the first things I really learned when I joined Stripe is that when product and thinking about the product and thinking about the customer experience is everybody's job, which it certainly was and has been its dripe for a while, kind of thinking about the product and fixating on what kind of product we're building and why we're building it and how it's going to resonate with our users when it is everybody's job, you know, engineers and designers and even sales and marketing and other functions.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just learned so much at Stripe. I was there for over five years. And I joined as they were just thinking about what product management means at Stripe. And so this was a company of a few hundred people at the time and already building.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The numbers will only tell a certain story. And so, what you've got to still continue to do is expose yourself to some of the signals. And these might often be qualitative signals in the market with regards to your competition, with regards to your customers. And so the founders that have been able to scale really well and their companies have been able to build incredible products over the long term. I have found they kind of strike this balance really well. They do stay very close to their customers. They do stay very close to some anecdotes. And don't just kind of manage by spreadsheet.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That challenge, though, is sometimes some founders will kind of lose their way entirely. Again, they make the mistake of treating the proxy as the goal. And they lose sight of the real goal, which is impact. So while I do want you to manage with numbers, because that's the only way you can scale, I also want you to not forget that”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think if we were talking about general patterns, that matches my understanding and my observations too. But I'll add an interesting additional observation, which is what happens when the company starts to scale, right? So now we are going to have to rely on other signals. And one of the things that you might end up learning along the way is that, oh yeah, so from this point onwards, you have to manage by the numbers. Because you're not close to the customer anymore, you don't have as much strong empathy for customers as you used to. And at certain scale, your instincts may actually be wrong. The instincts that actually worked for you early on may not work.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Others are qualitative components. Because ultimately, at the end of the day, regardless of what one might cynically think, your company leadership is primarily interested in impact. Now sometimes they're fooled in thinking that the numbers are the only way to be confident about impact. But if you can make a compelling case and tell a story about how it is actually a combination of some of these leading indicators and they may be qualitative or quantitative, then you'll be surprised how much buy-in you can get.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is, and I did this a lot at Stripe, for instance, when we were working on B2B products, that in some cases they took a year or year plus to show direct revenue impact or volume impact. I would call out some very big customers that we were able to sign up and their qualitative feedback on this recently launched feature. And I would present that in a document saying, okay, this is what we are hearing from this customer as a leading indicator. So there are ways even in a highly kind of qualitative environment to kind of pivot folks' attention towards what really matters, which is impact, and then help them understand how that impact has multiple components, some of which may be measured components.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is the conversion rate in sales calls, for instance, which is an early indicator of potential resonance or the number of customers who've actually purchased the product and listed this feature as one of the key reasons why. So I'll talk to my sales teams and kind of get some of those leading indicators to me from them. And again, these could be measurements, these could be numbers, but the numbers are so small that all we might be able to say this quarter is like, oh, we got five new customers who said that this feature was one of the key reasons why, right? And you can't really run an A-B test of any sort or some large scale experiment with that. So, okay, five is good. And we've done some measurement. But this is where I like to also add some qualitative criteria.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the impact we are after. Then I like to sort of clarify and perhaps using even examples that features like this in the past have taken three months, six months, a year, year plus to show the full impact. And that is likely to be the case with this feature too. So therefore, what I want to share with you today is some of the core leading indicators we have of how this feature is working. And so then I'll go into the leading indicators. And now these leading indicators might be other metrics. So they might be things we have measured.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On a graph with other ways of showing impact. Because ultimately the measurement is not the goal. The impact is the goal. We hope that the measurement is just a proxy for the impact we made. And sometimes we forget, we can't differentiate between the proxy and the goal. And so we make the proxy the goal. So once you kind of understand that, that ultimately it's about demonstrating impact. One of the core things we need to realize is this idea of leading indicators. So what I like to show, I like to remind people in these kind of corporate situations is that ultimately we are after this impact, right? Whatever that is, like customer satisfaction or higher retention or greater revenue or greater revenue per customer, whatever the case may be.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it is very tricky, and I would say this is why the solutions to some of these problems lie not with an individual or individual contributor within the company, but they lie with the company leadership, right? So ultimately the company's leadership needs to have the judgment. If they do not, things are just very hard. This is why a lot of the work, both the writing I do, the coaching I do, and so on, is focused on leaders and leadership without leadership understanding these ideas and these principles, it's just very hard. Now, all that said, what I've found interesting is that it is possible sometimes to pivot this kind of intense desire for, you know, showing numbers.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, we need to measure this thing first before we embark on this project or this initiative to improve said thing. There is certainly value in measurement. So don't get me wrong, right? Like again, we should not think binary about this. But in some cases, the effort to measure something is so large. It sometimes dissuades us from performing the action that makes sense. The fundamental sort of observation here is that 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. So that's the other danger as well. So anyway, those would be a couple of core observations that led to this insight.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I don't measure it. I don't track it on a daily basis. I don't have any metrics associated with it. And yet I can tell that I'm improving in these areas. So how am I doing that? How many of us are doing all sorts of activities and improving in those activities without explicitly measuring those upfront or measuring those on an ongoing basis? Actually, the way I know that I'm improving is because I'm evaluating, right? And that's where I feel like there's a difference between the idea of evaluating how you're doing and measuring how you're doing. And then I started seeing at many cases, in many cases at work, it was quite similar. If we start everything with”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And over time, I realized used in the wrong context, they tend to cause a lot of damage that we don't even realize because we feel like we are being smart when we say, oh, this thing must be measured before we can improve it. Really, the way I realized some of the flaws in this thinking of you cannot improve something that you don't measure is kind of looking at my personal life and sort of evaluating so I'm a parent. And so at one point, I ask myself, am I measuring how I'm doing as a parent, right? Or am I measuring how I'm doing as a spouse? And while I clearly improved in certain areas of parenting, I had not done any measurement there. So then I started asking myself, well, if I've clearly improved in this area of parenting or this area of being a spouse,”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's often the case, Shane, that you hear in business meetings, right, that if you can't measure it, you cannot improve it. Certainly in most of the highly rational company cultures that I have seen, these kinds of statements are taken as truths.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That conversation, engaging in the dialogue, trying to understand where they are coming from. I've found opens up opportunities for us to recognize, oh, I see this is what is going on. You care about making sure that these responsibilities are clear for reason X, Y, Z. So perhaps we can both achieve our objectives here of moving quickly while yet clarifying who owns what. And let's now brainstorm about that”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That they felt they deserved. And so naturally now there are going to be a little bit more wary about collaborating with my team on this initiative. And they want to make sure that the optics are set right. So it's only through kind of taking a step back and truly taking the time to explore their concerns. Like for instance, concretely, I noticed that, you know, in the past couple of meetings, you've talked a lot about making sure that executives are aware of the division of responsibilities between our teams. And certainly my team's perspective is that it is a very ambiguous project. So we can't really clarify all the strict division of responsibilities at this very moment. But I wanted to ask you what your rationale is for this perspective, because I really want to figure out a way to make this work. And so just kind of having.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Other individuals or other teams saying, like, oh, these people are only focused on optics, whereas I am focused on impact and execution, which are the right things to be focused on. And when you start with that sort of feeling, it doesn't create or make any room for true collaboration. So instead, later on in my career, when I had this vocabulary and this way of looking at things, when I saw these situations where perhaps somebody else, some other team leader that I'm trying to collaborate with is really focused on optics, I wanted to take a step back then and really explore their perspective a little more. And perhaps the reason they were focused on optics is because they've been burned before, that they helped various other teams with their initiatives in the past. And they did not get the credit.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, what we end up doing when we feel like the other party is not listening is that we just keep repeating our message and we do it louder each time, hoping it will stick and it doesn't. And then we are frustrated that it doesn't. It's like, you know, I've told you this five times or we've had this meeting three different times. And I just don't understand why you don't get it, right? Like that's at least the feeling, even if it's not vocalized. The real solution out of this is take a step back and recognize what is going on. Recognize that, oh, I see this.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On different things. Maybe the leader of one team is very optics focused. So they are thinking about what are the optics going to look like if we combine our forces together and work on this initiative. How can we make sure that my team gets the credit that it deserves for doing this work? And perhaps another team leader is more fixated on the impact level or the execution level. They sweat and they kind of litigate and relitigate a lot of details without really realizing that, oh, the conflict is present mainly because one is operating at the optics level and the other is operating at the execution or impact level.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But then if you come into this kind of product review as the product manager and you kind of drown the group in all sorts of execution level detail, which you think are the right things to share because these are challenges you're facing right now. If you lead with that, you are going to lose the audience. And so, and this is merely just one example of where executives are probably thinking at the impact level, product managers or engineers are thinking at the execution level. And I've also encountered team issues, interteam issues, famously. There are many organizations where two teams can't work together and they complain. And each team complains that we can't work well with this other team. Even in those situations, I've often found that it's actually the leaders of the team that are fixed.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talking and expecting different levels where somebody who's close to the ground, like a product manager or an engineer, you are fixated at the execution level, which is what is it that I can get done in a short amount of time with the resources and constraints I have. Okay, so that's the execution level. But oftentimes in these situations, the executive, the CEO wants to start at the impact level. They are more concerned about, well, is this product going to resonate? Fine, we'll build the product, but how are we going to sell the product? Have we thought about compelling ways to do that? And how is this going to affect the company's brand? They want to start with the level of the impact and they want to engage in a dialogue with you of how we can make the best possible impact.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Before presenting to an executive, maybe it's a product strategy or something else. And they'd be very nervous. And so I'd have a conversation with them about, hey, nervousness is normal in these situations, et cetera. But what's really going on, what is your real concern? And so they'd often point to past examples where they would say, oh, you know, I was talking to the CEO in this last product review and I shared with them exact details of how we can make these goals more ambitious or whatever the case might be. And that just did not land with the executive. And I shared all the details with them, but I felt like they were confused. And now they've asked for this other product review. And so now I'm frustrated, right? And in that example, my observation is that, again, it's the case of people.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, for sure. So this took me many years, almost two decades of working on products mainly at high-tech companies to really realize oftentimes conflict between people and teams arises mainly because we're not talking at the same level. And we might have similar missions and similar goals and OKRs and whatnot. But if we are not aligned on the level at which we are talking, that can lead to a lot of confusion, a lot of distress among individuals and teams. And so the three levels of product work that I discovered through my observations were the execution level, the impact level, and the optics level. Oftentimes there would be product managers or other folks on my team who would be very nervous”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of my personal challenges in my own kind of journey and growth as a leader was it was easy for me to judge other individuals or other teams saying like, oh, these people are only focused on optics, whereas I am focused on impact and execution, which are the right things to be focused on. And when you start with that sort of feeling, it doesn't create or make any room for true collaboration.”
2023-09-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT