Shreyas Doshi: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yes. And so I'm going to share a short kind of personal anecdote related to the LNO framework, which is that when I just joined Google as a relatively new PM, this is back in 2008. For the first three years, I was overwhelmed and stressed. And that was because one, I was a new PM in this like really high performance environment. I was working on some important products and launches and I just had too much to do. And I look back at that time and it was perhaps the most stressful time of my career where I would long hours, et cetera. But even at the end of the day, I'd feel highly dissatisfied because my to-do list was endless and I wasn't able to make a dent on it and I was also a little bit of a perfectionist. So I was like, no, no, no, I need to do this well. And yeah, I was just constantly, I would come home and talk to my wife and kind of basically just complain to her about how I'm not able to make progress or as much progress as I want. When that was accompanied with like, you know, not being able to sleep very well because I was concerned about how much output I was producing and whatnot. And so again, very stressful time in my career. And then things changed when I discovered the ideas related to this LNO framework in a blog post. Unfortunately, I can't even find that blog post somewhere, but it had some ideas that I took and then kind of created this LNO framework on myself, which is essentially that like as a product manager. or as anybody in a creative, high impact, high leverage role, all your tasks are not created equal. There are actually three type of tasks that you end up doing in such a role. So there are L tasks, which are leverage tasks. And the L tasks are are such that when you put in a certain amount of effort, you get 10x or 100x in return in terms of impact. So those are L tasks, leverage tasks. Then there are neutral tasks. So that's N. And those are tasks where you basically get what you put in. or just a little more than that. So you put in 1x and you get 1.1x. Those are neutral tasks. And then there are overhead tasks, where you get back in again, in terms of impact, you get back a lot less than you actually put in. And it turns out that many people, many people who are ambitious or are perfectionists, like myself, by default, treat each of these types of tasks the same way. And therein lies the problem. So this was the epiphany for me back at Google when I kind of discovered some of these ideas. And what I realized is that among the things in my to-do list, there are actually only very few L tasks. And so it made sense for me to focus a lot on those L tasks, to take on those L tasks when I was feeling most productive, most energetic during a certain time of the day. And for the L tasks, let my inner perfectionist shine because I'm going to get so much more in return, right? It makes sense for me to spend that time on that PRD, for instance, related to an important feature that will meaningfully impact our revenue. e because I'm going to get so much more in return, right? It makes sense for me to spend that time on that PRD, for instance, related to an important feature that will meaningfully impact our revenue. Right. I'm going to spend more time on that than I ordinarily would. So now where does that more time come from? Because it cannot come from just working more hours. Well, it comes from spending less time on N tasks and O tasks. And so there are some tasks that you do. Classic example of an O task is, say, an expense report. Right. Like, sounds silly, but I used to try to make my expense reports really good. And sometimes, like, that made no sense, right? Like, no, no, no, I need to do that. And again, this is the silliest example. But there are many examples. And something I realized is that the same type of of activity can actually be either an l task or an n task or an o task so what's an example so say like a classic pm task activity of filing a bug report right and so many companies have these bug templates etc etc right like that you use to file a bug report Well, it turns out that filing a bug report, depending on the situation, depending on what type of bug it is, can actually be an L task, high leverage task. And over there, you want to file a very detailed, explicit bug report. And in other cases, might actually be an O task. where you don't fill out the template that diligently and you don't add 15 screenshots with annotations, right? Instead, you just have one screenshot and you hit submit on the bug report. So that shift, usually for the same type of activity, we provide the same type of engagement. And the last example I'll use to illustrate this is taking notes. It turns out even taking notes, taking notes, synthesizing them, and then sharing them can actually be an L task, an N task, or an O task, depending on what type of notes they are. So if it's like, you know, after I understood this previously, I would just send all notes like I tried to make them really good, which took a lot of time. But then I realized, well, this is a meeting where, yes, I need to send notes. But again, it's like it's just standard stuff. I just need to like quickly list out people need to really know is the three action items that came out of the meetings. Who owns them? That's it. And it is not about something highly strategic or controversial. Well, in that case, I'm just going to send the notes out the moment the meeting is over. I'm just going to hit send because I've already taken the action. I'm not going to try to make my notes look great so that others can appreciate. Oh, Shreyas always sends great notes. On the other hand, if it was a product review with the CEO about a very contentious topic that you have gone back and forth multiple times and now you made a decision about something, you want to perfect those notes before you send them out, right? Like you want to get the language right. You want to be very clear on what the decision is. So there's no room for misinterpretation. So you don't backtrack afterwards or people say, well, but I thought we said this. So that's a case where it's an L task. very clear on what the decision is. So there's no room for misinterpretation. So you don't backtrack afterwards or people say, well, but I thought we said this. So that's a case where it's an L task. And yeah, I would say just spend an hour or even two hours perfecting those notes because it's an L task. So hopefully that helps illustrate some of the ideas behind the LNO framework.…

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