Shreyas Doshi on Successful Teams, Product and Careers

0:00 welcome everyone to this episode with Sarah stosi on the CPO Mastery podcast this episode will be on successful products teams and careers so sharis getting into the first set of questions on successful products despite the abundance of content out there why do so many well-funded companies still continue to launch failed products yeah I love that you started with this question because we could spend a whole day on this question there's so much

0:31 depth to it something I have spent a large portion of my time over the past decade or so really thinking about this specific question there's so many layers to it so perhaps we can explore some of these layers and thanks for giving me the opportunity to to share some of my thoughts on this topic um and so I'd perhaps start with the observation that in most cases

1:02 a team that is working on products is basically fixated on building the product right that's what we spend most of our time doing when we are working on products I did the same when I was working on products especially early on in my career but I haven't yet met a team that is well funded that is perhaps part of a larger organization um or even a startup that is funded that was never able to build the product

1:32 right and I'm not talking about now you know Cutting Edge scientific products right I'm talking about software products whether they're delivered uh you know over the Internet or somehow or or you know they are embedded in devices of all sorts I have never met once never once met a team that was never able to ship the product right and yet most of the energy that is spent is around shipping the product

2:03 right so what does that say does that say that shipping the product is not important no absolutely it's important but what I started realizing more and more that shipping the product is actually a small portion of what it takes to be successful clearly because there are hundreds thousands hundreds of thousands of products shipped yet very few of them are successful right um so and this goes to you know the first point I want to make is a lot

2:29 of what is out there in terms of content is actually just highly I want to stop short of saying misguided but it's highly confusing because if you go on Twitter and say all that matters is shipping you know you'll get a thousand likes easy but clearly we we see that all that matters is not just shipping the product

3:00 there's a lot more to it than shipping the product uh so when we talk about oh there's so much product content out there there's so much knowledge out there there's so many use cases out there the first observation I'll make is as individuals and as teams we are actually learning the wrong things in many cases and we are certainly applying the wrong things in many cases right so so we have to recognize that now there's a lot of useful content out

3:31 there there's a lot of useful material out there but the part that is missing is that we don't think deeply enough about how this applies in our situation right we are looking for Solutions how do you make a product successful here's a five bullet list from shreyas Doshi okay this is it right and by the way I'll never publish such a list of like five bullets because there is no five bullets right but yet

4:01 we are often seduced by success stories right to the extent that the questions that people ask oftentimes people ask me questions of well I have this problem this go to market problem etc etc how did you solve it at stripe or how did you solve it at Google how did you solve it at Twitter or whatever the question is and I have to remind people that first of all the premise of this question itself is wrong

4:33 because it does not matter how we solved it at stripe right it does not matter now some of this is just American culture right like the way questions get asked is people don't ask the question what should I do they ask what would you do which is again the wrong question to ask and oftentimes it's also you know this format which is how did you solve it how did your company Solve IT etcetera so

5:03 it has the right intention but the question is wrong so now when you ask the wrong question most people will respond to the question that was asked they will not reframe the question right so so when you ask somebody what made you successful at Snapchat what made this successful at meta what made this successful at whatever other company you are going to get them to respond to your question and then you are going to try to take some learnings

5:28 from that and say okay you know I heard this famous person this amazing person highly successful person very wealthy person said a b c and so I got to try ABC so now here's the other problem first of all we're taking the wrong information or at least we are not taking the exact right information we need to take but now the next day we go to our teams and we say oh you know I heard this famous person say this

6:01 and then you lay it out very excitedly like they said a b c d e right and we should try this and guess what happens your teams get get excited yeah we should try this and then you see that and you say wow okay I cannot get my team excited most of the time but when I use some famous Company Success when I use some famous persons words all of a sudden there is tremendous buy-in so what am I going to do I'm going to

6:32 start using that as a tactic right so I got I asked the wrong question so just stay with me here right I asked the wrong question first of all like what made you successful at stripe or whatever the person gave me some answer which was a sincere answer but there's a bunch of garbage in there you can't separate the real signal from the garbage you took what was mostly garbage you shared it with your team and you said here's some garbage but you

6:59 framed it as here's some gold right and the team said okay we're going to implement this garbage what is going to happen this happens over and over and over again right so so that's one angle which goes back to yes there's a lot of content there's a lot of information there's a lot of knowledge right there's no dearth of books biographies of successful business people why isn't every business successful right there's another aspect which is

7:33 I would contend and this took me many many years to understand that in most companies and this is particularly true in very large companies the goal isn't even success the goal the real goal the objective function is not to maximize success right the real goal is to create a certain perception

8:06 of progress a certain perception of competence a certain perception of you having everything under control and that sort of spreads through each level of the organization right so that is the real goal now here's the thing these people are not malicious you know I worked at larger companies I've fallen prey to this as well and I've seen many other people fall

8:37 prey to this as well so it's not it's not a malicious approach but people confuse creating this perception with success right so the the form it takes is the following so I'll share a concrete example look in many well-funded larger companies if we are being honest when somebody goes to a product review so this is a product review with the

9:07 senior executive for instance what you should really be discussing is Insight what is the Insight you have about the market about the customers competition regulation Whatever It Is What is the what are the insights you have and how are you going to translate those insights into a compelling creative product that is highly differentiated and that will win

9:37 right that is what is supposed to happen in a product review that is not what happens in 9 out of 10 product reviews okay in 9 out of ten product reviews The Objective function is to show we have it under control we have done all the right things we've done this research we've looked at these metrics we've run this fancy report whose maths nobody can understand so everybody not GS because nobody can

10:07 understand it it's like the emperor has no clothes but we'll throw it at you so you think we are very smart and sophisticated and here's a plan and it's a buttoned up plan and we are certain it's going to succeed and by the way we need three more Engineers to make this happen and we need some cross functional alignment to make this happen and yeah sales is not very well aligned so can you fix that for us

10:33 that's the conversation in most of these product reviews right and the Insight is not there people are playing it safe right like and why are people playing it safe say you are an enterprising creative pm who really has this desire to win right well as APM you probably report to a GPM group PM or a director who then in turn reports to the VP some VP who then reports to some SVP who then

11:05 reports to the CEO right for a highly creative product to actually manifest out of the series of product reviews and meetings that happen you have to rely on each layer of your management also being highly creative highly entrepreneurial with a strong desire to win with a desire for impact first not Optics not having to worry about when's my next promotion going to happen and what team

11:37 size do I need in order for this promotion to happen and how does this product review fit into whatever conversation is going to happen in my calibration meeting you see people at different levels of the organization are thinking about all this junk right when they are trying to make a decision of what is going to get presented what kind of product proposal are we going to make and when people are thinking of all of this

12:07 what happens is you're highly creative highly differentiated very ambitious idea gets watered down right to something safe something that can be justified something for which you can ask a data scientist to run some numbers so you can show that it's going to work beforehand right so this process again this is this is just an example of what I was saying earlier which is

12:40 throughout this process the idea of actually launching a highly resonant creative differentiated product that has the best chance to win actually takes a back seat right it's more about well what is this executive going to say and what is that executive going to say and what are their biases and how might this impact their work and their strategy and therefore you know what is the

13:12 safest thing we can do here that gets us approval that gets us head count that lets us live another day or another next six months right or whatever it is till the next product review till the next performance evaluation calibration all of that right now I have seen this happen in some really world-class organizations so we're not talking about incompetent companies here we're talking about highly competent companies

13:43 but as these competent companies scale this is just rampant and this is why you have extremely well funded companies companies with tens of billions of dollars of cash flow who have very well funded teams who have all sorts of resources and who have all sorts of advantages strategic Powers etc etc still launch highly mediocre products

14:14 and still launch non-resonant products and do so over years and decades sometimes right so those are just a couple of angles to your question there's a lot more depth to it as well so I'm curious to your reaction and also if there are any kind of other angles we need to explore hmm I'm curious if you are good intention and impact Focus

14:44 uh and you really want to make something successful are there any um how do you get to good Insight are there any things that you can do to be successful if your intentions are correct if your optic Focus fine I I can see that aspect but if you're impact focused I heard things like Insight creativity and those things if you are going down

15:15 that path how do you do that best how do you do that best is there any non like ground truths that are company agnostic that can get you there or increase your chances yes they can there are ways in which you can increase your chances of building more successful products the first thing you will need to do to enable that

15:45 is you will need to understand the value of understanding Human Nature right there is a lot of emphasis in product management right now over the last 10 years or so on Analytics and you know metrics and not star metrics

16:15 and so on and so forth right and I think all of that is actually good you know when we did product management 15 years ago we were just we did not have all of these tools and you know getting analytics was very hard and if it's tough and so we had to make a lot of decisions without really having a whole lot of data now we had qualitative user research which we did intelligently there just wasn't enough data to make

16:44 the right decisions right the the chief thing I'll call out is we need to understand that our approach needs to be custom and modified based on the stage of the product that we're working on that we're trying to make successful so and for this I really like uh you know Ken Beck's 3x framework I talk about this as much as I can because it is such a

17:15 fundamental framework for all product managers and it's just unfortunate that still people don't understand uh you know the value of this simple framework so I'm going to use you know our conversation to kind of further that understanding which is first thing you need to understand is there are basically Ken back um shared this 3x model which is there are effectively three stages uh three possible stages of a product ah

17:45 explore expand and extract right and the names are kind of self explanatory but explore is essentially your early stage some people call it zero to one or zero to ten whatever the case might be expand is you know oftentimes viewed as okay you've hit product Market fit now you are in scale stage and uh you are in hyper growth mode etc etc and then extract is you are no longer growing

18:18 hundred percent sixty percent fifty percent year over year but your product is still now ah a juggernaut and perhaps you're growing 10 percent year-over-year five percent over year over year but that's on a massive denominator right so like hey if you know Google search if it grows you know on a hundred plus billion dollar denominator if it grows you know five percent year over year that's fantastic right uh just as

18:48 one example and the same for other mature products like say you know the core Facebook products and Facebook and whatnot so that's the extract so the observation is that once you understand explore expand extract a lot of the decisions that seem non-obvious actually become much clearer for you okay so let's take an example

19:19 uh you know my favorite example here is this idea of okrs okay um I think you know Done Right okrs are very useful ok there are people out there who and I'm sure you all have worked with such people uh there are people out there who think about okrs and they take great

19:51 pride in setting the right okrs like being good at okrs is a part of their identity so when you work with such an individual and you're working on a product and you're setting okrs they will go to Great Lengths to remind you that look okr takes the format of o colon KR colon okay that's the first thing and they will talk in great detail about what the O needs to be and then say your KR is a ship version

20:22 one of this product they will say no no no no no no you're doing okrs wrong let me teach you how to do okrs ah what is the metric that you are moving from value X to Value y that's what your KR needs to be ok so what is the metric that you're moving from value X to Value y now again you're working on an early stage product so you say let's say this colleague this okr fanatic is Bob okay

20:51 so say Bob I mean I'm just like just about we we're just about starting to write code for this thing right like we've done some customer research we have some idea of what we want um you know this this KR is three months out I don't have a metric Bob and what I'm going to show like what what metric am I moving from what value to what value right and so Bob will dutifully remind you

21:22 that well there has to be some Metric that you are optimizing for and without if you don't measure it and if you don't set Target against it success is impossible right so through you know let's assume five minutes of dialogue has happened what you will end up with is a KR that looks like the following

21:52 um talk to 10 customers of which five have signed a letter of intent to implement the product three months from now kr1 kr2 of those five customers two have gone live with three API calls a day

22:26 something something right and so you'll create these KRS right that are move metric whatever the metric is from value X to Value I let's bring it back to 3x the 3x framework right what Bob says is not wrong but the mistake Bob is making is which stage of product does that principle apply to

22:57 so that principle absolutely applies to the extract stage if you're working on the Facebook news feed I largely want to see KRS that go from you know move metric a from value X to Value y most of the KRS that's what I want to see okay if you are working on Uber's core product that's what I want to see okay those are all extract stage products right even in expand stage I want you to

23:30 identify two or three or four core metrics and I want you to have KRS associated with those whether it's revenue or whether it's growth rate or market share whatever it might be right in expand stage so that is your hyper growth stage what Bob does not understand is that by setting these goals in explore stage and then incentivizing you to hit those goals you are all but guaranteeing

24:01 that your zero to one product will not succeed because what is the point so now I'm going to get to the question um the core question right like what can you do what is the point of the explore stage the point of the explore stage is to get insight inside into what customers need inside into what is the solution that is most

24:34 likely to work and inside into overall how is the market going to receive it how many customers are we going to have are they going to pay for it what are they going to pay for it right a lot of this is uncertain these are all ambiguities in explore stage the chief goal of explore stage is to resolve these ambiguities you see the whole thing of like you know getting five customers to sign the LOI

25:06 is actually a distraction because if I have that okr hanging on my head I will just day to day make very different decisions then if my goal is to get this inside right because like okay I'm approaching you know it's two weeks before the end of the quarter I have this KR of getting five customers to sign the letter of intent

25:37 do you think I'm in in in in insights mode right now no I'm in panic mode I will do whatever it is whatever it takes to get five people to sign this darn thing I'll promise them all sorts of things right but I'll I'll do all of this under the guise of being user-centric right but like again the objective function is not success the objective function is not winning it's defense right like it's like oh I

26:08 have this KR and I need to meet it so what is the solution to this right if you are in Explorer stage you need not have that many quantitative okrs qualitative is fine shipping a darn thing is fine really it's fine right the challenge is most companies treat all products the same way especially companies that scale what ends up happening is they are treating all products the same way because they they create a process you

26:40 see they learn some things those some sometimes there's problems with the launches so Executives come up with a solution which is we need a standard process for every launch right but then now what they're doing is they are applying that standard process which involves all sorts of checks and blah blah blah and checklists and launch calendars and bit flipping and all sorts of other stuff you know your listeners who are Google employees know what I'm talking about when I say launch Calendar

27:04 bit flip and all of that uh but now what happens is that for the reason for the sake of consistency and fairness they're applying the process that works very well for extract stage products to explore stage products and so because of that they're kind of killing the product before they've even given it a chance to live and they don't even realize it right

27:37 so in this environment if you are a product manager you will need to you will need to break some rules right and by the way this is what being entrepreneurial is all about right because if you are constantly in defense mode if you're constantly in like oh I hope I don't get fired oh I hope you know all my executives are happy with me all the time right

28:07 unfortunately it is not going to work out right because then you're going to make these mistakes over and over again right um so you will have to be you know a lot of this innovation you see Innovation is not about a dearth of ideas Innovation is actually about a lack of Courage because you know in many organizations to actually innovate right to actually

28:38 build something really powerful and make it win what you really need is courage and not enough people have courage right so I would say you will need to have courage right now the next question is okay fine I have courage I'm entrepreneurial I have courage what do I do next my suggestion to you is just fixate on the user fixate on the market

29:09 understand the competition very well and then I want you to come up with specific creative ideas and proposals for how you translate that insight into product you see most people translate inside and customer conversations directly to product features but by doing that your competition is also doing that so you're basically building something that everybody else

29:39 is building they're not differentiating in any way what I want to see is a step in between which is yes you have insights here and from these insights customer Insight Market Insight Etc you want to create a product proposal in the middle of these two I want you to add a high degree of creativity now not all creative options will be the right options maybe they are not

30:09 pragmatic maybe they cannot be executed but I want to see you go through that process right the next thing I'll tell you is ask yourself honestly if you are indeed that creative because I'll tell you most people are not very creative when it comes to product creativity right now we are all creative I am saying the degree of creativity required to make consistently winning products is

30:41 very high both at a macro level and a micro level both at the level of what features do we want and also how do we solve this technical problem we are having which will lead us to make all sorts of compromises on the user experience at that point also a lot of creativity is required that's creative execution the challenges that while all of us are creative to really win in a competitive environment you need an extremely high degree of

31:12 creativity you need to be like top 10 percent in creativity in product creativity by definition everyone is not going to be top 10 percent are you willing to recognize that perhaps you are not top 10 percent in creativity most people cannot because I'm product manager I'm supposed to look at the job description I am supposed to be the one making decisions about what to build so therefore I must be creative

31:44 right so a lot of product managers stumble there and not just product man I'm not just talking about IC product managers all all levels all the way up to CPO people stumble there right the most successful product managers and product leaders have a high degree of self-awareness on this and they are outcome focused so what do they do they find the right creative person on the team and that doesn't have that person does not have to have the title of a product

32:14 manager that person could be a designer that person could be an engineer that person could be you know an engineer with just one year of experience on the team but each time they are the one coming up with highly creative and interesting ideas now because they are less experienced nobody's actually paying attention to them right as a product manager as a product leader I would recommend that you pay attention to what they're saying it's not that

32:44 hard to find creative people on a team say you have a team of 15 20 people I guarantee you and assume that this is a an organization with above average Talent right let's make those assumptions you have a team of 10 plus people and you are in a company which has above average Talent maybe top 20 percent top 25 percent Talent right which by the way it applies that those criteria apply to basically all the companies like Google meta Apple etc

33:15 etc so it's quite common in that sense I can tell you with very high confidence that there is at least one person on the team that is a creative product person but you are not leveraging their insights and you are not leveraging that creativity so I'll ask you to leverage it partner with them right work with them do working sessions with them of like okay you know this is what our competition does this is what I heard

33:45 from customers what do you think should happen here right so those are the things if you do you end up with an entirely different type of product proposal then you know nine out of ten product proposals that you'll see at a seemingly successful company ah that has a high density of talent right now that you have something that has a chance of being highly differentiated

34:16 now your challenge is messaging and communication right because I told you earlier that yeah you'll need to bend some rules right but at the same time to actually get done you will have to play by the rules too right and so the way you play by rules is by mastering the art of influence okay and and this is influence with cross-functional peers this is influence

34:47 with other teams that are perhaps getting in the way of your Innovation which happens all the time again in larger companies um this is influence with executives right you see as such the CEO of your company wants exactly all of this to happen what I said okay the CEO wants all of this to happen problem is

35:18 there's a lot of noise in the middle layers where people are concerned about a lot more than just successful customer successful products profitable products right so now what you'll have to do in order to exert influence on your executives and your leadership is you will have to find out like what triggers them what gets them excited what their work priorities are and you will need to shape your proposal in a way that aligns with that

35:51 right and if it is impossible to make it aligned with that then you will have to do the hard work of convincing them that this what the thing you are proposing is actually the correct answer right now look a lot of this is hard work is an extremely high degree of hard work it is also it requires really high degree of talent and traits so it's both like skills and traits that is that are necessary to

36:24 make all of this happen right and have I seen this happen absolutely many times but it is not the common case right so really I want you to think about getting back to your original prompt if you are this product manager or product leader I want you to think about the various things I said and then I want you to think about how it makes sense for you to adapt and adopt your approach adopt a different

36:54 approach from the one you're using right now and to wrap it all up I will say ultimately it does go back to courage because without that essential element of Courage and also a high degree of resilience what is going to happen in practice is you will say okay I agree with everything Shreya said I'm going to try it out but you're going to encounter roadblock number one next week roadblock number two the following week

37:26 and then you're going to encounter other bad news the week after and it's going to be easy to give up right so that courage and that resilience is gonna is is what's going to take you through now after you do all this right I know this sounds like a very frustrating and sad Journey that one is about to embark on but as you do this what you'll find is your career and its trajectory

37:58 takes an entirely different shape right because as you do this and as you build these skills what ends up happening is all of a sudden and this is not going to happen overnight but as you do this over a course of yours without trying much to do it explicitly you will end up in what I call the top 10 percent product manager product leader bracket and what that does in turn

38:28 is it opens up all sorts of opportunities for you both at large companies and startups not only that because it opens up so many opportunities for you it also sets you up for highly outsized compensation wherever you go right and I think this is still true yes we are going through a downturn right now but this is still true that they're at many places people at the same level you

39:00 could have a vast disparity in compensation because there are people who are in this top 10 percent kind of bracket in terms of their skills in terms of their trade in terms of their ability to consistently build products that are actually successful that they are so sought after right and there isn't enough of them so it's classic you know when there isn't enough Supply you know there's going to be a lot more

39:30 compensation a lot more demand for your time and you're going to be able to choose from among the best options in terms of where you want to work next right so that's the upside besides just launching successful products happy customers and the satisfaction one gets there is clear upside to you but the road is not straightforward there is no one book that you can open up and say I'm going to read this book and now I'm going to be in the top 10

39:58 percent it is a lot of hard work and a lot of commitment towards doing what's right how do you measure your own creativity because if you don't know is creativity something you haven't seen before how do you measure your own creativity so you have self-awareness on that because if you don't even know whether you're strong or not you don't you don't know to look for other people that have it you might be highly creative will be hard for you to know that

40:30 it's going to be very hard for you to know that so this is where the onus is actually on your manager you see when your manager you see most managers don't do performance reviews the right way and they don't do feedback the right way and most product managers don't ask for feedback the right way right so the default assumption that I have to make if I don't know your manager who your manager is

41:02 is that your manager is incapable of actually giving useful feedback to product managers okay so now again from a high agency perspective the onus is on you to extract the right kind of feedback from your manager so what you want to ask your manager is once they've had enough time working

41:33 with you you want to really ask them what are my superpowers what do you see as my superpowers now again for most managers that question is going to calcium off guard as a manager it is actually your duty to figure this out proactively but again most managers do not do that

42:03 so when you ask this question also tell them that look I know this question might come across as perhaps something we haven't discussed don't say something you haven't thought about because then they'll take it personally and they'll get defensive but it's just something we haven't discussed so all I wanted to do was plant the seed I would love to get your perspective on this in our next

42:33 one-on-one so like what you're doing is politely actually suggesting to them I don't want to hear what you have to say right now because actually if they give you a reaction right away and if they are not a really good manager like again a top 10 percent top 20 percent PM manager they're going to give you some let's say that happens right so I want to be tactical here right so let's say they give you some

43:00 first of all you'll need to have the judgment to evaluate that it's but like let's assume you do uh you say Okay that was great thank you right uh is it okay if we continue this conversation in our next one-on-one right because this is useful input for me I'm going to think more about it and I'm perhaps going to come back in our next one-on-one with some more questions but I would also request if you also

43:32 mull this over some more right and if you have other ideas or other observations about my superpowers I would love to hear that right so as you do that what ends up happening hopefully over the course of a couple of conversations is you start getting some signals right and treat it like a dialogue right but over time like as you were kind of having

44:03 this conversation it will become clearer to you and you know some manager might not necessarily say oh product creativity is your superpower right but they might say something like you know Ma this whole thing of like you know examples based feedback right like again good intent but very shoddy execution right so your manager will say okay you know my feedback for you in terms of your superpowers is well you at this meeting

44:33 you this problem came up and you dealt with it really well and then uh you know I heard from your engineering counterpart that um you know when you guys had this technical issue you worked really well with the designer and the tech lead to come up with a new way of solving this problem right uh and uh you know whatever the feedback so they're giving you examples right like what they don't understand is like what is the higher level pattern which is

45:00 like oh there is probably a creative execution this product creativity right sometimes you might have to extract the pattern right from the examples um but see if it is there right and by the way you don't have to restrict this just to your manager right like you can go to your engineering counterpart people you work with on a regular basis and ask them this question if you don't get any feedback around this specific area of product

45:30 creativity that does not mean you are not creative or that that does not mean that you are not highly creative but it should give you some reason for pause right is it because you haven't had you know most people will say in these situations well I am creative but I just haven't had a chance to demonstrate that creativity right but I want you to understand that creativity doesn't require a chance because when somebody is creative it's not like they say oh today I choose

46:02 to be creative they can't help it they cannot help it right Steph Curry doesn't say today I choose to shoot the basketball well that's not how it works that's not how Talent works okay Jerry Seinfeld doesn't say today I choose to be funny or today I choose to watch the hilarity of human interaction

46:34 he can't help it right he sees it everywhere right so don't give yourself the excuse of like well my organization hasn't provided me with the opportunity to be creative therefore right like be true to yourself because that's the most selfish thing you can do right if you want to optimize for yourself you've got to be true to yourself so ask people because if you are highly creative that

47:06 almost certainly would have manifested in all sorts of different ways even in an environment that is generally non-creative okay which gets me to the later point now so that this was for early career people okay remember I said creativity cannot be measured but creativity can be evaluated so how do you evaluate creativity you evaluate it relatively right there is no metric for creativity but I'm sure you have seen products

47:37 that demonstrate that manifest creativity more than other products so creativity can be evaluated on a relative basis and that's what your peers are going to do if your early career your peers are going to evaluate your creativity on a relative basis which is oh you know normally like in the past I've seen for this kind of problem the solution seems to be of this type but Alice is such a

48:09 creative PM that she came up with a very different solution and it was actually a better solution than would anybody would have come up with and it worked really well right so we're always evaluating things relative to something else relative to our experiences well now let's assume you are in the second category you have more than five six years of PM experience you have enough sample or in your own experience to figure out how creative you are

48:43 right because presumably you've done many product launches you've worked with many teams you've gone through hundreds of Sprints at this point right and you work with dozens of colleagues both PMS non-pms maybe hundreds of colleagues right so now you can start evaluating yourself relatively right and just do that evaluation

49:14 do the evaluation of your products relative to other products as well so that's what happened to me in my own personal experience um I happen to kind of be fairly high on creativity or more than that actually I'll take the other example which is empathy customer empathy user empathy cognitive empathy I just happened to somehow have a very high degree of empathy for customers that helped me reach the

49:46 right answer faster I did not understand that for like the first five six years of my career as a PM and frankly like nobody really gave me that feedback either they said yeah you do good product stuff but nobody like really gave me that feedback right but come here five six seven I was now able to figure that out myself because remember by that time I was also like starting to Mentor PMs and manage PMs and so on right so I was now

50:14 able to see you know that kind of relative because like you know early on in our career and in our lives in our professional lives we assume everybody is like us right only later we realize oh wait there are some people who don't have any of what I seem to have and there are other people who have a lot of what I don't have right so again these are all relative comparisons so as you look at that that's how you

50:40 will get I know you said you wanted to get to it quick but I think this is a an important point for two reasons one is um we get stuck in this measurement a lot which is like how do I measure is there some Metric for it but what happens is actually the measurement is an excuse not to take action or not to see the truth because there are many people who if they find out or if they realize I

51:06 cannot precisely measure a certain thing they will actually ignore it because they they bind to the uh you know what you cannot measure you cannot improve etcetera etcetera all of it is lies we improve things all the time without measuring them in our daily lives ah so so that is one key reason why I wanted to clarify that evaluation point and this point about relative evaluation and how it changes with one's career is a very important kind of career lesson

51:36 for folks you know that it's very helpful and what's your kind of measure you shouldn't do is very it's a great that you called it I was it a lie because I compare that all the time uh with very okr specific leaders that are yeah moving on to the next segment on successful PM careers can you explain your LNO system and how that could be useful to product managers yes um so the LNO system is um

52:07 a system that I created uh an evolved actually from Elizabeth Grace Saunders Ino technique which I read about about four four years into my PM career I was in this situation where I was stressed overwhelmed I was not able to just have any kind of rest and relaxation at home after I was working at Google at the time and I was just not able to relax after coming home after

52:39 work because I had this endless task task list and I was very ambitious by Nature so I was just like I have so much to do I can't get most of it done I'm working really hard I'm always overwhelmed and it was affecting my personal life it was affecting my sleep a high degree of stress and just this constant state of anguish confusion while I was doing my

53:10 work as well so the quality of my work was also suffering during this time and so naturally when we're going through a really tough period in our lives we look for Solutions like we are forced to it's like a kick in the butt right like go figure this out right so I was trying to figure this out and I was lucky I just came across this blog post um with the irono technique by Elizabeth Grace Saunders

53:38 and the core insight in there was that as perfectionist which I certainly was a perfectionist um you know we often don't understand how much effort needs to go into a given task and we allocate the same amount of effort and attention to every task so that was the core Insight in there

54:08 and then over time as I understood it I started adapting it to PM work and that's what led to what I now call the LNO system and so for product people and for many other folks who are in high leverage roles there are basically three types of tasks you could be doing there are L tasks leverage tasks those tasks give you 10x 100x of what you put in to the task give you or your company right so an example of this is say

54:39 you're charged with writing the strategy for a for how for the role of AI in your product area right now assuming that there is a meaningful role that AI has to play in your product area this task you've been given is very clearly an L task right it it could generate you know 10x returns could generate 100x returns it could generate 100 000 X Returns versus what you put in right

55:09 because if you get that strategy right the outcome is going to be hopefully phenomenally great so it's clearly a normal task then there are n tasks which is neutral tasks these tasks are essential tasks that you do where what ends up happening is you get the same amount back right and then there are o tasks which are overhead tasks which is which are tasks and time you spend where you are

55:39 actually from an opportunity cost perspective you are getting a negative return right like so you put in X and you get 0.1 x or 0.5 x ok so that is the LNO system leverage neutral overhead connecting this with that Insight that all your tasks are not created equal what that tells you is that you have to be very conscious of how much time you spend

56:13 on an L task versus an N task and an O task right and the system I came up with to cope with all of this is with L tasks I'm going to take as much time as they need and I'm going to work on L tasks during my most productive time of the day which for me was the morning early morning right so instead of doing my email and other things I'm going to focus on L

56:38 tasks and I'm going to block off my calendar and I'm going to work on the cell task right with neutral tasks you want to aim at doing a strictly okay job okay but and and that's okay because even if you aim at doing a strictly okay job because you have this kind of drive for quality and in my case perfectionism your okay is actually also still pretty good right so so say for instance an end task

57:09 is you know maybe a PRD you need to write but it's not for a core feature that's gonna you know expand your Revenue significantly or expand your user base significantly or whatever we all have tasks as product managers which need to be done because the engineer needs to build out the feature they're requesting the PRD for it etc etc but it's not the main thing it's got to be done but it's not the main thing so it's an end task so just

57:37 aim for a strictly okay job because again you might think it's okay but actually the engineer will be like ah that was pretty good it was useful right ah and then there are oat asks where like again because all your tasks are not created equal you want to actively try to do a bad job right and a very sort of you know the example I use the most often is uh filing expense reports right when you're filing expense

58:05 previously I used to write like you know this is stupid but I think I'm not alone in this uh you know when I file my expense reports I would like think about what description to write that's clear right that but now that I use the LNO system like whatever as long as it meets the criteria I'm just going to fill it in right um and by the way this is not it's not only for those mundane tasks you can

58:27 have many product tasks that are also o tasks like sending notes for certain types of meetings or even filing a certain type of bug report or whatever the case might be going to a certain meeting where you are required etc etc so there are many such tasks that are that fall in this kind of O category and that's where you try to actively do a bad job and what ends up happening is you end up saving a lot of time from those o tasks

58:57 and end tasks that you can now apply to L tasks right last thing I'll say here is you know a lot of people talk about the Eisenhower Matrix right like you know urgent important and you know do it delegate it etc etc right the problem with that you know I I'm a huge fan of the as in our Matrix but the problem with the as in our Matrix is it doesn't work for high leverage roles such as product management

59:22 because even after you go through the whole Eisenhower Matrix process the tasks that end up in the do category right ah whether do it now or do it later right the tasks that end up in those two categories are still overwhelming you still do not have time in the day enough time in the day to do it so the LNO system helps you where the Eisenhower Matrix kind of leaves you right with the Eisen R Matrix you'll still have a ton of

59:51 tasks so take those tasks apply them through the LNO system and I would even prefix each task in my to-do list with L and an O so I would remember when I before I took on the task how much effort I want to put in what quality I'm aiming for etc etc when am I going to schedule that task in my calendar Etc so I found it to be a very practical system and so have many other PMS at this point

60:18 ah to be able to just deal with both the volume of work we need to do but also I think the more important aspect of the LNO system is if you follow it it gives you a much higher degree of satisfaction with your work so after I started doing the LNO system I was driving back home and reaching home much more satisfied because I knew that I had tackled the high really high leverage tasks sure I

60:43 had many other tasks on my to-do list but as long as I tackled the very high leverage tasks and I had done a decent job with some of my end tasks I was still quite satisfied at the end of the workday how can product managers best prepare for the first 90 days on the job um so I'll share two thoughts on this question um the first is that there is somehow a high degree of

61:16 fascination with this first 90 days thing and for good reason because you want to create a good impression and so on but I would just say that you know ultimately the job you do is like much hopefully much longer than 90 days right so what I like to think about the way I like to tackle this question is not so much in terms of tactics and hacks

61:46 of like oh do this so that you create a good impression etc etc I like to think about it in terms of generally you know what is the role of a product manager and what are some habits that they need to have throughout their time on a given product right and not just in the first 90 days and I want to be able to create suitable conditions for those habits to be established so that's the lens through which I look

62:14 at it more so than the whole idea of like oh what's going to create a good impression now mind you I care about the creating a good impression it does matter so don't take it as oh the good first impression does not matter it actually matters a lot but if you take it through this lens you will actually end up creating a much better impression ok so what does that mean concretely one of the things that I recommend very

62:40 concretely that product managers do in the first 90 days in fact in the first 30 days is start using their own product very deeply start using your own product very deeply right ah and yes there are cases where using your product is difficult but again you can kind of figure out ways to do it right because really there is no substitute for using your own product there is no course there is no book there is no YouTube video

63:13 or no Twitter thread that is a substitute for using your own product right so in the first 30 days as you start using your own product a few things will start happening now I'm going to connect it to the Optics part which is creating a good impression right um as you start using your own product your peers will notice right they will notice because maybe they saw you asking a question or some

63:44 activity or maybe you made even ah you know a remark about like how some part of the product was a little confusing for you right people will see that as a really positive sign right um so that's one second thing I recommend doing is the relationship thing right in the first 30 days start establishing

64:15 steps towards building a relationship right so what is commonly recommended is do one-on-ones with your you know the key members on your team and I agree with that recommendation wholeheartedly but as you do that one-on-one Focus that one-on-one on it being the first step of what will be a highly productive relationship right so try to understand the other

64:47 person try to understand their background right try to understand what part of their work excites them try to understand if you're a leader try to understand what are some frustrating things that they face in their work right like really ask them a lot of questions about their work about what excites them and try to understand the way they view the world because ultimately if you do it with the right

65:17 intent people love talking about what excites them kind of by definition right so not only have you again created a good positive impression by doing this instead of just like starting a barrage of like okay so tell me you know what's the next project on this and uh you know are you going to work on this other thing oh I saw you know something in our Sprint that is a little late are you going to take it on

65:48 right like a lot of us as product managers we are kind of these go-getters and we want to get done so we fall into this tendency of like you know in that first one-on-one we are going to start like and we again we are doing it perhaps to even create a good impression that like I get done but all that this person walked away with this like oh man like I went into this kind of introductory

66:10 one-on-one and I walked away with a bunch of tasks to do right like that is not a good first impression right so that genuine interest in the other person and in in how they view the world and what excites them about their work not only creates a better positive impression but it now arms you with the context of how you're gonna better build that relationship right um so so again the relationship part is important but this part is like I want

66:41 to add that Nuance to it one other thing I'll say is don't just meet with your team members and your stakeholders right one of the things I like to ask people is especially if it's a new company you want to ask your manager who are the five best people you know at the company doesn't uh or in the organization doesn't matter if they are you know working on your product or not right go and meet them

67:09 why is this important well guess what you joined this company that means presumably you actually want to do well at this company you want to progress in this company and so you're better off understanding what great looks like at this company that is why you are asking this question who are the five best people you know okay I found this on the web for understanding what really looks like it's coming check it out very soon we won't need this because

67:40 we'll have ai um so uh so so find that out and go talk to those people right because that will give you a view of like oh this these five best people they might all be different in their ways but you'll start seeing some common patterns right and so now that is very useful signal that none of your peers have because they are busy you know shooting tasks over and running SQL queries to show that they can do three table joins

68:09 or five table joins right like again all of those things are useful but the point is that you've got to think about it more in terms of the longer game right and think about it more in terms of you know authentically what will make you more effective at the company and then you will find uh these kinds of smaller tasks you can do in the first 30 days or 90 days so those are a few examples I shared um

68:36 but again there's so many other things right like go into a customer meeting observe a sales meeting uh you know perhaps even start getting ramped up on the interview process if it's a company that has a well-defined interview process there are many things you can do but can I have this longer term lens and then work backwards from there we just had an example of AI over here but how should product managers approach AI for their careers as well as their products

69:00 and thinking about getting it possibly onto their roadmaps yeah so I like to think about it in terms of three categories the first category is how will AI impact the domain I'm in how will AI impact the product I work on or the products I work on and um in some cases AI will absolutely disrupt

69:32 your category entirely say you are building some SAS software for you know large legal firms that helps with uh research right high stakes research or whatever I'm just making it up or say you're working on you know customer support software right like those two categories and again there are dozens of such categories but I'm just using these as examples those two categories are almost certainly going to get

70:02 disrupted by AI so if your product or your domain Falls there in in that area you are going to need to be very Vigilant and you are going to need to be a lot more proactive right ah and depending on what level in the organization you might be at it might not be your official responsibility to think about it right maybe it's some vp's responsibility the CEO has the VP to think about it but that still shouldn't stop you from

70:34 thinking about it and from offering proposals and suggestions so that's something I would highly highly recommend that you do if you fall in that category now there are other places where maybe AI is not going to entirely disrupt what you're working on but it can be a great differentiator right and where that is the case say you're working on some human collaboration software right ah you know maybe that type of human collaboration will still exist in a

71:05 world with AI but now the question is like oh how can you enhance that human collaboration using what is now possible with AI which wasn't possible a year ago or two years ago certainly three years ago um so I definitely want you to be thinking about that as well right in fact another thing I would recommend that you do and it's a fun exercise to actually do is

71:36 how will AI change this where this can be anything so get together with a bunch of PMS or people on your team Engineers designers whatever right Friday maybe take half an hour and pick any domain right ah and it can be something very specific and just pose the question of like how will AI impact this domain right

72:06 um and the the possibilities for you are actually endless right like for instance how will AI impact podcasts okay how will AI impact real estate purchases how will AI impact parenting how will AI impact coaching how will AI impact

72:36 higher education right like just like you can go on and on right Horticulture right like this just there is no end to this right why are why is this fun and useful um well fun you can decide if it's not fun don't do it but the reason this is useful is because you want to exercise those kind of Pathways in your brain to kind of really think about these things right because this is where again

73:07 you know even if you're not working on you know real estate software it's actually worthwhile to think about that because you see again going back to the creativity Point creativity you cannot plan for right creativity is actually a result of like various actions you take or don't take and then somehow that ends up as at some point a creative Insight right so you can't really plan for creativity but you can do these types of things that will actually make you a lot more

73:35 creative in the future right so that's just like as an aside that's an activity I would suggest that you do um and if you don't find a team or a group to do it with you can do it on your own right costs nothing it costs maybe 15-20 minutes 30 minutes of your time okay so so that's the first category how will AI impact my domain my products etcetera right the second category is how does AI impact teams right and my

74:02 prediction is that teams are going to get a lot smaller and what that means is um that you are not going to have such a high degree of Need for collaboration and particularly a high degree of need for the project management that we often tend to do as PMS right so naturally you have to do a lot more project management if your team is 20 people versus if your team is four or five people right and so so what that means is that the

74:34 core parts of the PM job the highly differentiated parts of the PM job are going to become even more important and by the way this applies to other things as well right like if you want analytical insights as a PM with the advances in AI you'll simply be able to ask questions and you'll be able to get answers instead of spending you know half a day doing data analysis as in which you do today right but you won't need to do

74:59 necessarily later right um so ah market research same thing right like now you AI won't do all your market research for you or hopefully it doesn't do all your market research for you but it can save you a ton of time it can save you 80 percent of time right to do it so uh furthermore on the team topic one of the other possibilities is that these roles start getting a little more fuzzy right in a world where like you know you

75:27 can declaratively create UI markups and you can even declaratively create code right ah what might end up and they'll still be Engineers they'll still be designers I think there will still be PMS but if we fast forward a lot we might end up in a scenario where these distinct titles don't exist you know we might end up in a scenario where in you know the the product team of the future

76:00 has maybe five or six people and there perhaps you know doing the same amount of output and outcomes as that of a 20 percent team or a 30 team or even a 50 team who knows I don't know but the titles of the five people on the team might actually just be the same that title might be Builder or maker or whatever it is product Builder

76:32 right because AI is going to let Engineers do market research it's going to let them create at least decent first versions or second versions of you know ux and UI right so in such a world it might not be surprising if we're all just builders right and and what that might mean is we might want to

77:02 also for job security reasons and for impact reasons we might want to build more skills outside of just the core product stuff right that that is involved in kind of building the product so so that could be an interesting and it's merely a forecast on my part and so I could be wrong that could be an interesting side effect the way things are going that we don't have titles anymore ah and the last thing is you know the

77:28 impact on your career um and this is where like the key thing I'll emphasize is besides what I just said the key thing I'll emphasize is focus a lot more on the core parts of the PM job and the core part of the PM job is to define a product that will be successful right that's the main job so so you need to work on the skills and the experience that that lets you do a great job there which

77:58 is how you're going to define a product that will be successful and that all of that goes back to customer Insight Market Insight creativity creative execution influence all of those skills are going to be equally valid if not more valid so think about it in these three categories and the last thing I'll share is don't don't succumb to your fear recognize your fear I know a lot of people are

78:29 actually intentionally not keeping track of what's going on with AI or ignoring it because they're afraid they're afraid that it's going to change things they are afraid that perhaps that AI will take their job ah they are afraid of learning something new so I highly recommend it's actually quite normal like that tendency is quite normal some people are very excited about AI stuff and they're all over it but there are many people who are like actively avoiding it this is not the

78:59 kind of thing you avoid I'm fine that you avoided you know the web 3 stuff and the crypto stuff and maybe you even avoided the mobile boom or whatever the mobile wave right like uh 10 12 years ago because you were working on different kind of software it's fine but ignoring what's happening with AI is akin to ignoring what was happening in the 90s with the World Wide Web right and ah I don't think it is smart

79:29 to ignore it and so but the the words I say don't matter what you first need to do is you need to recognize that the fear exists you are afraid it's okay to be afraid and then only when you accept that will you actually move on to the next step which is actually learn more engage more play with these tools and so on finally you left striped two years ago yes and we really have been enjoying

79:55 your writing but what else has been keeping you occupied and excited yeah so it's been a really fun Journey uh over the past two years there are three activities that uh keep me engaged and excited uh the first one is advising so that's where I spend a lot of my time advising startups uh Founders and sometimes you know Executives at uh startups um and I do that you know both on an

80:25 informal basis so there are at this point I've informally advised more than 100 startups over the last two years there are also some startups with whom I have an ongoing unadvising relationship over the next six months or a year or two years so so that is one aspect of the work I do and that's like really deep work uh really high impact work obviously because I'm working with Founders on very important choices that they're trying to make or decisions uh

80:52 that they're trying to make for their company whether it's strategy go to market execution whatever the case might be that's one-on-one that's very deep then of course there's the writing which like many people kind of found out about me or learn about me through my writing I don't spend that much time on my writing because a lot of this I've kind of learned over the years so it's it's less about writing entirely new things it's more about just like

81:18 expressing those things in a way that people understand sometimes they are very nuanced ah so that can take time but I still don't spend a ton of my time on writing but I really enjoyed that part too and that is my kind of one two tens of thousands hundreds of thousands kind of reach an impact right so writing allows me you know it's kind of the opposite side of my advising it allows me to have that broad impact but it

81:45 might not obviously be as deep as my advising work and then most recently about six months ago I started teaching and the reason I started teaching is because uh I was getting a lot of requests for coaching from product managers product leaders but I was no longer able to address that because um you know I just don't have enough time in the day so that's when I came up with this idea of like I always wanted

82:11 to kind of teach because I enjoy it but but I came up with the idea of like you know teaching that feels like coaching right so I might be teaching say a CL you know a class of dozens of people or even 100 plus people but the challenge I created for myself is like can I do my teaching in a way that really feels very intimate that feels like I'm coaching you because that's the only way I would be

82:43 able to scale my coaching um so that's what I've been doing over the past six months and I launched the first course in late October and this one is focused on managing your career as a PM and it's targeted to senior PMs and PM leaders and really it's a way it happens over a weekend and it's a way for me to coach an entire cohort on making much better career choices and much better career decisions

83:13 so that's what I've been doing and it's been incredible because one I've been enjoying it a lot second ah it's very clear that it was very clear to me the reason I started this course is because I felt like people did not know how to really manage their own career which in some ways if you think about it is your most important product right and and I I often encountered people who were world-class product people they made excellent product

83:39 decisions but when it came to their own career they were either lost or oftentimes I saw them make really poor decisions uh whether it's about how to manage up or how to aim for the next promotion or uh how to think about what company to join next or how to work with executive recruiters or how to set yourself up for success in interviews how to negotiate compensation so what I cover in this course is an entire

84:06 end-to-end view of how do you think about your career your career path how do you build your competence all the way through to if you're at a company what does it take to succeed and it's been really fun um you know more than 1300 people have already enrolled for the course in the past cohorts and I usually do cohorts once every six to eight weeks so so that's kept me busy as well and that's been the newest addition and that

84:33 really addresses this Gap remember I mentioned one on one on the advising side and one to tens of thousands hundreds of thousands on the writing side and this lets me address the one to dozens and one to hundreds and one to thousands kind of range where I can have a fairly Deep Impact uh by sort of treating my teaching as though I'm coaching and then hopefully later in 2023 as well as in 2024 you will see

85:02 more courses uh perhaps something on product strategy product leadership product sense and a few others I I've been through the course and the open this opening statement the question that you asked was like something that I didn't I think a lot of people don't think about so you asked when you have investors you you look at the rigor with how much an investor makes a decision to invest in the company there's a lot of rigor there

85:31 and you ask is that the same as your career and most people look at that and they're like yeah like people put investors put a lot of rigor into thinking about Investments that's the same as your career and you explain how investors are making many decisions and some of them can fail and one of two of them have to be success and you have to apply even more rigor to your career than that which I thought

85:56 was quite insightful because it's the most consequential decision you make yeah so I found that you know I found it to be very impactful and I think really did enjoy it thanks for sharing yeah the the last question I have here is uh many people with layoffs and things that are happening are maybe wanting to go down a similar path uh and open up a new chapter what advice do you have for them for now or in the future if they want to

86:24 do things like this uh you mean like things like advising coaching coaching those types of things yeah um I would say two key things that one needs to really think through and be honest with oneself the first one is why are you doing it so whatever there are many folks who

86:55 have Ambitions after okay after my you know after I reach a certain point in my PM career I want to start a company I want to be a VC I want to do coaching I want to do advising whatever it may be I want to do teaching um I want to be a consultant etc etc why are you doing it what is the real reason right and what I want you to think about

87:28 is is there love are you doing it because you love it right because if you don't love doing it there's going to be a problem and not just like a philosophical problem although there is a philosophical problem but a practical problem okay so let me help uh perhaps I can help people understand what the Practical problem is you see when you are a

88:01 let's say you are a PM so you've been on PM for many years let's say you're an average PM or an above average pm well the observation is and above average pm still makes a pretty decent income in most parts of the world right you can have you can lead a very good life by being an above average pm very comfortable life okay now say you are changing careers to being say let's take coaching

88:33 right you want to be a coach and I will make the observation that if you want to do this as a career if you want to monetize it above average is no longer good enough because an above average coach makes nearly zero dollars so that power law gets very unforgiving when you go into careers like

89:05 you know teaching or coaching or in some cases even we see you even though we see there is a certain percentage you're guaranteed or whatever but the point is these power laws the power law gets very very challenging here right so like basically if you are a top 10 percent coach yeah you'll make a decent income right if you are a top five percent coach you will make really good income if you're a top one percent coach

89:32 probably make more income than a PM leadership role that you could have otherwise taken with a lot more flexibility right and a lot more hopefully fulfillment but again it goes back to love right do you really love it right because if you don't love it then no matter how much self-discipline you have you're going to find it very very hard to become a top ten percent top five percent top one percent coach

90:02 so which then brings me to the second point which is are you willing to commit to learning and to Growing yourself such that you do become top one percent up five percent up ten percent in that new chosen next chapter of your career you see since I started teaching sometimes people will ask me oh uh they'll ask me questions like even for advising people ask questions like so how do you monetize this how do you

90:34 decide how to price this how do you decide how to Market this right and there's nothing wrong with these questions but the the only problem is that they're not asking the most important question which is shreyas how do I become an amazing teacher for PMS an instructor of Philippians how do I become an amazing coach for PMS how do I become an amazing advisor for PMS right because

91:04 unless you have that awareness that you need to be again if you want to monetize this properly you need to be top 10 top five percent of one percent yeah you can learn all the marketing tactics and all the pricing tactics you want but when you put up your course how many people are going to sign up maybe through great marketing you convince people to sign up but how many people are going to sign up for the next

91:30 time and the next time after that and the time after that it's an endless game right so that's my advice to people is like think about competence everything has to go back to competence and first focus on that competence and then if you're plotting this move a year from now two years from now three years from now in the next one two or three years just fixate on that competence

92:01 right instead of trying to take classes that tell you techniques and tactics of how to create marketing funnels and demand gen and all of that for your courses all of that is useless unless you can be a top 10 percent of five percent of one percent instructor right so focus on that before you decide to then start this next chapter of your career or audience is going to love this podcast really appreciate you coming

92:32 down and do this it's been a year in the making and we are so thankful for your time thank you for coming down today I'm honored thanks for having me it was a wonderful conversation uh and uh thank you for all the work that you do thank you Chris