What I learned from Shreyas Doshi.

On Finding your Superpower, Building Products, and your Career.

Dear Reader,

On Monday I attended an amazing product management event with Shreyas Doshi, hosted at Monzo’s London office, and I learnt a lot. It was an informal meetup that consisted of networking, lots of pizzas, and an interactive Q&A session.

Drawing from over 2 decades of experience as a product leader, Shreyas Doshi has led product teams at some of the most successful tech companies such as Stripe, Twitter, Google, and Yahoo. Today he advises startup founders, and shares high-quality insights on product management.

I thought it would be helpful to share my notes from the session. Enjoy??.

On Learning

Shreyas advises we focus on learning 2-3hrs/week outside the on-the-job learning, during your work time.

But before you do this, it is important to discover your learning style – reading, YouTube, podcast, or shadowing a successful colleague who has the skill you are trying to develop.

On managing and supporting your team

Context: the conversation was around how do you support your team members to develop their skills.

Shreyas advocates having career chats with your team members where the conversation is focused on them and what they want to do/learn. When he has ran similar sessions, he doesn’t talk about the existing work being done. He advises asking them “What they want to do in 5years”.

He raised an interesting point around deciphering what team members want. Sometimes they could say they want to talk about their careers, but really what they want is to know if you would recommend them for promotion, and what’s required to make this happen.

Another interesting comment Shreyas made was about not being fixated on the content of your review feedback, but rather what skill you wish to improve upon.

Question 1: How did you decide to go into the career of advising/teaching and speaking?

Shreyas talked about how every 5-year interval of his 20-year career, he would write a post about what he had learn. In 2011 he wrote about How to get into Product Management, and in 2018, Product Leadership.

Eventually he received several positive feedback, especially from founders who said his advice was different from everyone else including their VC investors. That led to his decision to focus on advising startup founders.

Finding your Superpower

The previous question led to an engaging conversation around the importance of finding your superpower.

Shreyas mentioned how in your Product Job (or writing/podcasting, or anything else), the top 5% have a great career, the top 10% have a good career, while the top 15% have a decent career.

So, it’s important you find your superpower within Product Management that you do better than anyone else at your company (for example running meetings, analysing metrics, or speaking to users).

Which brought us to the follow up question, how do you find your superpower?

Option 1 - He believes that if you have reached a certain level of expertise, you should be able to tell your superpower – The 2-3 things you do really well that others can’t do e.g. energising your team to achieve a goal.

“Don’t be humble here, you want to be able to leverage your superpower to service your team”. His was customer empathy; deciding on the right features to build for users.

Option 2 - If you still don’t know, he recommends you ask others who know you, and have a solid judgement, but don’t ask everyone.

He also mentioned that it is important for managers to know the superpower of each of their team members. This will enable them manage their team based on their strengths, and not based on the manager’s ego (which is when the manager expects them to do things the way he/she would do it).

Question 2: How do you go from being an internal PM to a B2C PM?

Context: the question was based on a conversation around transitioning from one kind of PM work to another e.g. Internal to B2C, or B2C to B2B.

Shreyas recommended you first figure out the kind of work you love doing and start there. This would ensure your desire to change PM roles is for the right reasons, but also because you would only get better at a role if you are good at it and really love it. ?The catch is that “what makes you good as a B2B PM could get in the way of you becoming good as a B2C PM”.

He asked that we let go of thoughts of impacting the world and really figure out the kind of work we love doing. “If you benefit yourself and do great work you will eventually impact the world”.

If you still decide you want to change PM jobs there are 2 ways to do it:

At your company (say Google) try to do your targeted PM work (say B2C) for other PMs in that role, outside your normal job hours. This would expose you to that work, and you would be ready and noticed when an opportunity arises.

Alternatively, you could leave your company and work in the targeted position at a smaller company. You would probably need to take a demotion and work on developing the new [B2C] skills. Once that is achieve, you could return to a bigger company with those skills.

Question 3: As a PM with a specific skillset/strength, how do you prioritise which skill to work on and improve?

Shreyas advises we first assess our skill levels across the 3 levels of Product Work (Impact level, Execution level, and Optics level) to know where we are, and where we need to improve. He also advises we combine this with what our team needs, currently.

He mentioned how the general advice to focus on your strengths doesn’t apply to PM because the role is a generalist one, and you need to be good at other things – depending on whatever the team needs.

“Every PM wants to work on the new 0-1 project, but what helped you manage a mature product, would be different for a new 0-1 product”.

“Often PMs want to be founders and think they should focus on management skills, but the skill that would make you a good founder is product sense”.

Question 4: In a recent product sense workshop with Kunal Shah, you mentioned that for product thinking we should understand the users’ unexpressed needs, and simulate different options. How do we do this?

I asked this question ??. You can see the product thinking template I referenced at the 31:04 timestamp of the Product Sense Workshop video.

Shreyas said that answering this question would take 5 hrs, but he would give us a quick cheat code to do this.

The first cheat code was that we should read the book The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick (here’s my book review).

Secondly, he recommends we embark on the journey of understanding human nature. We can do this by focusing on understanding ourselves. He also recommended the work of the Advertising expert; Rory Sutherland? especially his book Alchemy.? (more resources on Rory: YouTube, Podcast interview)

“This would help you understand users better than they understand themselves” – Shreyas Doshi

Closing Thoughts

This was a great session to learn, reflect, and network with other product practitioners.

If you are interested in learning more from Shreyas Doshi, I encourage you to check out these podcast interview – Lenny’s Podcast, Farnam Street. He also has a new course on Improving Your Product Sense.

Many thanks to the team at Monzo for organizing and hosting this event.

If you enjoyed this article I have written other product articles on Spotify, Figma, and Apple’s AI Strategy. I also write book reviews where I summarize lessons learnt.

Would you like to read more product focused articles or something else? Is there a topic you currently struggle with? Let me know. You can message me [email protected].

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Thanks for reading and bye for now.

Nero

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