Shreyas Doshi: evaluation

Transcript context

…That's a question that a lot of PMs would hear and be like, oh my God, I can't. Come on, man. We're trying to move some metrics here. But I love that you took that as like, okay, I really find this really important. And this is a really important question to think about. And as a lesson of how to approach this kind of stuff. So I love that. And oh, yeah, I think you were going to talk about Stripe too, right? Yes, Stripe. I worked a lot with Patrick and John. John was my manager for a while. And from John, I learned a lot about marketing. John is a master marketer, among many other things that he's absolutely great at. He's just a great marketer and um i just learned a lot about how to think about talking about the product in terms that uh you know again obvious stuff but talking about product in terms that customers really understand and then sometimes emphasizing things that we as product people might not think are really important and because maybe we didn't spend much time on building it And we want to talk about things that we spent a lot of time that are sort of truly innovative, etc, etc. And John would often make these, again, these kind of observations about, well, if we just talked about the product in this manner, that will likely resonate a lot more with customers. And that got me thinking a lot. about how I need to kind of reframe my approach to basically separate the effort involved in kind of building something with the effort you want to put behind talking about said thing. And that doesn't have to be the same features that you talk about. So that's something I learned a lot working with John. Patrick, I think the main thing I learned was just how to think and communicate more clearly. Patrick did that extremely well. And then overall, from both, I sort of learned the importance of setting the culture you want simply by consistently being an example of the behaviors you want to replicate in the organization. So instead of kind of talking about values, I saw both of them just kind of live the values that they wanted the company to replicate, especially as the company was scaling. And so whether it's a culture of being user-centric or it's a value around humility, they just lived those values so consistently. And I think that consistency spoke louder than anything that you might write on a poster on the office walls. It's just hearing you describe all these companies and all these founders that you've worked with. It's pretty incredible, the set of experiences that you've had and kind of like the primordial soup in which you became a PM. And it explains a lot about how you're able to squeeze so much wisdom and insights about the role of product management and the art and skill of product management because you've seen so many ways of doing it and so many companies that kind of done in different ways and so it's a good segue to kind of shifting to talk about the the five big ideas the first is around this concept of pre-mortems there's something that stuck with me when you tweeted it i think it was a couple years ago at this point and i see it come up occasionally in your tweets and amongst people chatting your super follower threads and so i also like that there's something you can actually implement and act on pretty quickly and see impact and so curious to kind of hear your Thoughts on this idea of premortems, just unpack this idea for folks.…

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