Shreyas Doshi: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yes. So my second question, I have to get the words right, do I actually have good taste? Do I actually have good taste is my second question. And for me, I asked this question after, again, all of these things... By the way, everything I say, I have been that guy, I've made that mistake. So that's why I just have to admit to myself that, yes, I have made these mistakes. And one of the mistakes I made, this was when I was at Google, and I was relatively new to product, about less than five years. And at Google, there's some parts of Google where you would be told as an early career PM that like, "We don't do strategy here. Strategy is for MBAs, okay? We are all about execution, okay?" So I'm in this environment, I'm naïve, and I look around me and I'm like, "Google is the most successful company on the planet," at the time, and they are saying this, and I'm hearing this consistently, so it must be right. It must be right. And so I start saying it. I start saying, "Oh, yeah, execution is everything, and we don't do strategy around here." And I even remember there were not that many PMs, but there was a PM at Google who was kind of like the same level as me, but he just had much more wisdom than me. And he was trying to nudge me into... Like, I was managing a product. And he's like, "Shreyas, what is your strategy here?" And I was like, I told him the same thing. Like, "Oh, no, no, what are you talking strategy? We don't need strategy. We just need to get shit done." That was the thing. And so I kept repeating that mantra until I got to Twitter. So this is Twitter right after their IPO. And I saw Twitter had an incredible asset, which is the product and the network effects. It had other incredible assets, including the brand. It had other assets that were great, including the talent. And yet, this company was struggling, the product was struggling. And even if it wasn't struggling, it was making a lot of money. But the point is it was not meeting its potential. So that's when I realized, and it wasn't like some sudden realization, it took me six to nine months of being at Twitter. This is circa 2014. That's when I realized that, "Oh, my gosh, Twitter's biggest problem is a product strategy problem. The reason they're struggling is they don't have a real product strategy." Now, of course, attempts were made to create a product strategy, but it wasn't a real compelling, cohesive product strategy. So that's when I realized the folly of like, "Oh, wait a minute..." I was at Google six years. I spent most of those six years saying like, "Ah, strategy's useless. There's no point to strategy. Execution is where it's at. "I'm like, "No, actually, I was wrong." And that got further solidified as I went to Stripe, and I was kind of now growing earlier stage products and trying to make them highly, highly successful. I saw an even greater value and importance of having a clear strategy. And so that made me realize, basically... f now growing earlier stage products and trying to make them highly, highly successful. I saw an even greater value and importance of having a clear strategy. And so that made me realize, basically... You know, we talk about taste, we all talk about taste, and it's about the beautiful pixels, and the perfect product, and the whatever else, the Steve Jobs-esque passion, and all of that, whatever it is. And yes, taste is about that, but I think there is something that we as product leaders, and certainly I did, needed to recognize about taste as just a factor in pretty much everything we do, which is like, do we have good taste around the beliefs we choose to create within ourselves as product leaders? And then, those beliefs end up dictating everything we do, including how we manage, how we lead, how we make decisions. And so it's that taste I'm talking about when I say, "Do I really have good taste?" And when I asked myself this question, and again, I really had to dig deep. It wasn't easy, but at some point I realized that no, actually, I don't have good taste. I don't have good taste in how I choose to evaluate things that come my way. Again, not in terms of the product, because by that time I had skills to say, "Well, this should not be a two-step flow. This should be a three-step flow," whatever the case may be. But I still did not have good taste in terms of how I choose what are the things I choose to believe, how do I learn, who do I learn from, what content I learned from, what content I resonate with? And then, I went on this journey to try to develop that better taste. What I'm hearing is people focus maybe too much on the output, like the experience, these experience design taste versus what they choose to take in as informing their taste, and what they see as an example of great and correct. Is that what you're saying?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.