Shreyas Doshi: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. And so I realized this somewhat late in my career as a leader. Most execution problems that I encounter in a high performing environment where everybody has the right intentions are actually not execution problems. They are either strategy problems or interpersonal problems or cultural problems. And so just to illustrate it, I'll make the observation that, you know, many leaders are extremely busy in such environments, whether it's a fast growth startup or a fast growth larger company. They're extremely busy. They're usually overwhelmed. Like I said earlier, I was one of those people. Take a deeper look at what they're engaged in. And I got a chance to look at it with my peers that I was kind of mentoring or coaching or people on my team, PMs or PM leaders were like extremely busy and usually overwhelmed. I noticed two things that like what made them busy is two things. One is that somehow the organization had imposed very high optics requirements. So they had to do a lot of optics related work, show up at certain status meetings and blah, blah, blah. So we talked about that. So let's leave that aside. But the other reason they're so overwhelmed is that they're constantly solving execution problems. So they solve the most important ones, the new ones come up, and they solve those. And then there are two new ones to solve. And on and on, right? Like, it's a classic whack-a-mole. And as I noticed that, and I'll share a concrete example of where this might happen, where an execution, a seemingly execution problem surfaces. So say two teams are misaligned, right? There's lack of they need to work together, but they're misaligned. Everybody knows it. And that is affecting our execution. That misalignment is affecting our execution. It's affecting our ability to hit our OKRs. It's affecting their ability to hit their OKRs. So as a leader, or say you're a director of product or VP of product responsible for one of these teams, you now charge with fixing this execution problem so we can move faster. So you do a dozen meetings to figure out what's going on. You try to diagnose the issue, how to better align. And then you talk to your peers on the other side, and then you decide, okay. here's what we're going to do to solve this execution problem. We are going to create a new review process. And so we're going to create this process and we're going to review priorities on a regular basis across these two teams. And then we're going to also ask the managers of these individual teams to do regular one-on-ones so they can stay in sync. So this type of scenario is extremely common, again, especially in high growth organizations that want to accomplish a lot. You'll come up with this solution after many meetings and a lot of work, a lot of conversation. And so as I grew as a leader, I got increasingly curious about this type of situation. And when I looked at it more closely, I started realizing that what looked like an execution problem, nversation. And so as I grew as a leader, I got increasingly curious about this type of situation. And when I looked at it more closely, I started realizing that what looked like an execution problem, this misalignment and kind of causing execution issues, wasn't usually an execution problem. Instead, it was a strategy problem in some cases, because the reason we are misaligned is because we are pursuing different strategies. Or like that is the more often the cases, the reason we are misaligned is because we don't know what the strategy is. Right. So we don't know what the strategy is. We craft some OKRs based on what makes sense. The OKRs are not very well aligned. We don't have a sense of priorities and we also don't have a sense of what we do when reality changes. This is all stuff that a strategy, a clear, correct strategy should help inform. But actually, like this lack of strategy. is what's causing this misalignment. It's not because they're not meeting regularly. And what happens in these meetings is, again, you're arguing the minutiae of like, well, are you going to work on this feature? I depend on this. So can you swap two engineers from this team? Like all of this stuff that PMs are very familiar with. You're talking about all the small stuff, but like nobody recognizes that like, oh, this like, can we fix that? Right. So as I started seeing this often was a strategy problem. Sometimes it was not a strategy problem. It was a culture problem. So what is a culture problem in this situation where two teams are misaligned? It's basically that you have a problem where you have set a culture that you are supposed to mainly optimize for your OKRs, right? In a culture like that, it becomes really hard to allow two teams to work better together because if... One of the teams doesn't hit their OKRs because they were helping rightly for the sake of the company. They were helping this other team. That team's manager is going to get his or her wrist slap at the next performance review. So that is a culture problem. Now, yeah, you can set up the meeting and you can request all the syncs you want between these people. It's not going to solve the culture problem. The execution problem is going to manifest in different ways a month down the road. So that's like an example of a culture problem. Or it could be an interpersonal problem, right? It's simply, and this is actually quite common, it's simply that these two people cannot get along. The two team managers do not get along, right? And they just constantly might be creating friction, right? And so as a leader, it is important for you to spot that, right? And then coach them through their differences, coach one or both of them through that so that they can better work together, right? when you solve that you won't need that monthly review meeting and all these syncs and 50 other things because they're not going to work anyway so that's just one concrete example of like team misalignment which is often viewed as an execution problem but it's not an execution problem are there signs that tell you okay we're like dates are slipping people are surprised like of execution problems you have like are there signs that maybe it's one of these other factors Or is your experience like it's almost always one of these other things?…

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