Shreyas Doshi: The 6 Product Metrics You Need To Know; The 3 Types of Product Leader | E913

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Shreyas, this is such a joy to do. I've been a fan of yours from afar on Twitter for a while, but thank you so much for joining me today.

Thanks for having me, Harry.

Not at all. As I said, I've loved some of your Twitter threads and they've been pretty informative to me. Uh, but let's start with a little bit on you. So you've been part of some of the most incredible orgs from Stripe, Twitter, Google. How did you make your way into the world of product first? And let's start there.

Yeah, so I started my career, uh, back in, uh, the difficult, tough days, uh, of the Valley, uh, this was 2001, uh, as an engineer. And as an engineer here in California who needed a visa, uh, it was very difficult to get jobs back then. It was like drastically different environment than the one we found ourselves in over the last decade. Uh, and so I was lucky enough though to, uh, you know, join some really great teams, uh, early on in my career as an engineer. And, uh, I moved to Silicon Valley in 2003, uh, to join, uh, a team that used to formally be Loudcloud, uh, the Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz company. Uh, and, uh, when I was there, I got introduced to product management, uh, mainly because, uh, uh, I found myself, uh, getting sent to customer interviews and customer meetings and whatnot by my manager, and I didn't quite understand why, uh, because I was just an engineer, very early career. Uh, but I think my managers back then saw in s- something in me that I did not, uh, yet. Uh, so, uh, s- and, and I found myself getting very interested in, um, uh, learning about what customers are doing with the product and, and particularly coming up with, you know, more creative solutions, uh, about, uh, you know, to solve the customer problems. And that's when I realized that, uh, you know, maybe I should, uh, try this product management thing.

(laughs)

A- and so, uh, traditionally back then, uh, most people would do their MBA, uh, uh, b- in order to get into product management, and I decided I did not want to do that. I considered it, but I decided I did not want to do that. And I just said, "Oh, let me just apply to some, uh, consumer internet companies." Uh, Web 2.0 was big back then, and I wanted to work on web products, and so I applied to a few companies, and, uh, talked to Google, Yahoo at the time, Yahoo during its better days. And that was my first, uh, uh, real product management experience is when I joined Yahoo, uh, as a product manager back in 2006. Uh, and then since then, it's been a really fun ride.