Shreyas Doshi: evaluation

Transcript context

…So you said you studied computer engineering. That's kind of what you moved to the US for. How did you move from that to product? Oh, yeah. So I started my career as an engineer. Oh, well, backtracking. So I completed my undergrad in India, came here to the United States to pursue a PhD in computer science. About one month in, I realized that PhD in academia wasn't for me. So I decided that I was going to drop out of the PhD program. And once I dropped out, this was like 2001, 2002. So the climate was very different. There were basically no jobs for tech people. Certainly there were no jobs for people who required a visa, which I did. So it was very difficult. But I ended up working as an engineer at a couple of startups. And that started my career in tech. I was an engineer for about four or five years. And when I moved here to the San Francisco Bay Area, I got a little taste of product management. So I was part of this team that used to be LoudCloud, and they were acquired by a larger company, EDS, at the time. So it was a startup team within a larger organization. And I was an engineer there and I just started doing some product work. And I found that my managers over the time would kind of send me to customer meetings. We had an internal product, so these were internal customers. And I thought it was a little surprising because I was fairly junior and I was an engineer, but I was like, okay, I'll just go to the customer meetings. And I really enjoyed that. I really enjoyed understanding what our customers were trying to do, kind of helping them out. I also enjoyed thinking about creative ways to solve their needs and whatnot. So that was my taste of product management. I was in for a year, for about a year, I was kind of doing the product job without having the title. And I was also the engineer. So I was in this great state where I'd figure out what needed to be built and I would just build it myself. So that's how I started. And at some point during that one year, I realized that while I was a good engineer... I was perhaps a top 20% engineer. I realized that I would never be a great engineer, that I would never be a top 10% engineer because I saw those engineers and the fortune of working with them. And I just could tell that I couldn't be that. And I increasingly got interested in this product thing. So I said, okay, let's try out this product thing. And so... That's really what started my product career. And I think what I have to be really thankful and grateful for there is the people who gave me a chance to do the product work. And there were many people involved. And so I think without their support, it would have been much harder for me to become a product manager. I didn't know that you moved from engineering to product. And your journey is very similar to mine, where I was also an engineer. And once I got to Airbnb, I was like, OK, I am not good. And I will not last as an engineer at a company like this. And I should think about what other options exist. And it worked out great. And so I wonder how often that happens of PMs moving into PM because they aren't going to make it as an engineer.…

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