Shreyas Doshi: recommendation

Transcript context

…One more question along this line, just to look tactically. Every PM ends up with like a spreadsheet of their ideas and ROI and cost and benefit and all that stuff. Do you recommend folks create kind of a column for opportunity cost? Or is this more of a broad thought process you go through when you're looking through your list of ideas? Yeah, it's more the latter. I do not recommend trying to quantify opportunity costs because it's a lost cause. Instead, what teams need is just sometimes the freedom and sometimes just permission to explore and attack these things that minimize opportunity cost. And so as leaders, that's the best thing we can do is to give the teams that freedom or the permission to pursue these things. And the way it manifests and the way I've kind of tried to do it is when we are planning, I often give guidance to the team around what percentage of our time we want to spend on what type of activity, right? And I learned this from Google's classic 70-20-10, where during its fast growth years, Google had the 70% search and ads, 20% apps, which was like things like Gmail and whatnot, and 10% on kind of other big bets, right? So I have found that approach very useful during planning, where what I will say is like, look, yeah, we need to spend again, depends on the context. But when the team is starting to plan the next quarter or the next half or the next year, my role as a leader is hopefully I've already clarified the strategy. So they have that as an input. But the other thing that I see in my role as a leader is to clarify the rough allocation, right? So what I'll share as a guidance with the team is is given our situation and given our strategy and given what's going on in the market, I would like us to target about 60% of our time on incrementals. And by that, I mean incremental features that improve users' lives on a day-to-day basis. So these are like actually high ROI things that we do. So 60%, and again, these numbers are whatever they are. You pick whatever is right for you. But 60%, I want to go towards incrementals. 30% I want to allocate towards big new initiatives. And because it's 30%, it can't be five big new initiatives. It's probably one or two, right? And then 10%, I'd like us to allocate towards stability and infrastructure. So this is the guidance I'll share with the team. And then I will ask the teams to create their plans and proposals based on this rough guidance, right? So this kind of gives people the space to like say, okay, we do need, we do have this 30%. So there's no sense putting in more high ROI tasks in there or quick wins in there. And I think just the simple guidance enables the team to kind of just do the right thing. And I often get surprised with all the awesome stuff they come back with. I really like that rule of thumb. What an excellent nugget to include along with this big idea. I'm realizing we're going for an hour and a half now. And I don't want to suck up all your time. So there's this idea that I think it might be a really good one to end on. It'll be a bonus sixth big idea around high agency and the importance of PMs being high agency. And the reason that it stuck out to me is this I found to be really important in my career. And I think it led to a lot of the success that I saw along the way is just always feeling like I have agency and feeling ownership of what I was doing and where I was going. And so I'm curious to hear your take on this and to kind of dive into this trait of high agency and how important that is for PMs.…

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