The art of product management | Shreyas Doshi (Stripe, Twitter, Google, Yahoo)

You should be spending some time on internal optics because it creates energy, it can creates awareness, it creates excitement, it creates opportunities for feedback. Those are all really great things and they will enable greater impact and better execution for you.

(instrumental music) There's no one out there today who shares more wisdom more consistently on the art of product management than Shreyas Doshi. Shreyas kind of came out of nowhere a few years ago and started tweeting gems of insight about building product and the role of product management. And rightfully so, has built a huge following on Twitter. What I love about Shreyas is that his insights are often framed in really memorable and interesting ways, and they're often contrarian and not ideas that you've heard elsewhere. Shreyas has worked at some of today's most important tech companies, including Yahoo, Twitter, Google, and most recently, Stripe, both as an IC and a manager. And his advice is always rooted in his real life experiences at these companies. In our chat, we focus on five topics and go deep on them. We talk about the power of pre-mortems. We talk about how to best use your time as a product manager. We look into the three levels of product work and how getting them wrong often leads to tension on your team. We dig into why most execution problems are really strategy problems, and we talk about a common pitfall in prioritization. And if you listen to the end, we actually throw in a bonus topic. I really appreciate that Shreyas made the time for our chat, and I cannot wait for you to hear it. This episode is brought to you by Coda. Coda is an all-in-one doc that combines the best of documents, spreadsheets, and apps in one place. I actually use Coda every single day. It's my home base for organizing my newsletter writing. It's where I plan my content calendar, capture my research, and write the first drafts of each and every post. It's also where I curate my private knowledge repository for paid newsletter subscribers. And it's also how I manage the workflow for this very podcast. Over the years, I've seen Coda evolve from being a tool that makes teams more productive to one that also helps bring the best practices across the tech industry to life with an incredibly rich collection of templates and guides in the Coda doc gallery, including resources from many guests on this podcast, including Shreyas, Gokul, and Shishir, the CEO of Coda. Some of the best teams out there like Pinterest, Spotify, Square, and Uber use Coda to run effectively and have published their templates for anyone to use. If you're ping-ponging between lots of documents and spreadsheets, make your life better and start using Coda. You can take advantage of a special limited time offer just for startups. Head over to coda.io/lenny to sign up and get a $1,000 credit on your first statement. That's coda.io/lenny to sign up and get a $1,000 in credit on your account. This episode is brought to you by ProductBoard. Product leaders trust ProductBoard to help their teams build products that matter. From startups to industry titans, over 6,000 companies rely on ProductBoard to get the right products to market faster, including companies like Zoom, Volkswagen, UiPath, and Vanguard. ProductBoard can help you create a scalable, transparent, and standardized process so your PMs understand what their customers really need and then prioritize the right features to build next. Stakeholders feel the love too with an easy to view roadmap that automatically updates so everyone knows what you're building and why. Make data-driven product decisions that result in higher revenue and user adoption and empower your product teams to create delightful customer experiences. Visit productboard.com to learn more. Shreyas, the man, the myth, the legend, thank you so much for joining me and for having this conversation.