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27 Aug, 18 tweets, 5 min read
If you lead teams that are directly involved in conceiving, building & launching products (i.e. product mgmt, engineering, design, user research, data science, product ops, product mktg, ...), this thread is for you.

Top 5 must-read books for product leaders:
1)
 Working Backwards, for principles & tactics on operating
amazon.com/gp/product/125…
2)
 The Mom Test, for truly understanding your customers
amazon.com/gp/product/149…
3)
 Are Your Lights On, for understanding the problem
amazon.com/gp/product/093…
4)
 Understanding Michael Porter, for product strategy
amazon.com/gp/product/142…
5)
 Super Thinking, for mental models & frameworks
amazon.com/gp/product/052…
These books are not ranked in any particular order. Pick up whichever ones resonate the most and work from there. There are a lifetime of great tactics, principles, and ideas in these books.

Interested in even more book recos for product leaders?

Scroll on 👇🏾
7 Powers, for creating & leveraging assets for long-term competitive advantage
amazon.com/gp/product/099…
Empowered, for a better way to build product teams & products (this should literally be #1 on your reading list if you are still structuring your product work in “feature teams”)
amazon.com/gp/product/111…
Principles, for operating & setting culture
amazon.com/gp/product/150…
The Score Takes Care of Itself, for empowered management (essential especially for PM leaders)
amazon.com/gp/product/159…
The Charisma Myth, for presence, communication, influence
amazon.com/gp/product/159…
The Motive, for understanding your true role as the leader of an organization
amazon.com/gp/product/111…
Adrenaline Junkies & Template Zombies, for understanding team dynamics for tech projects
amazon.com/gp/product/B00…
What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, for learning to adapt as a leader
amazon.com/gp/product/140…
High Output Management, for operating (this is a classic, still phenomenally good and relevant, but of the two, I believe Working Backwards is better suited for modern tech companies)
amazon.com/gp/product/067…
Competing Against Luck, for conceiving products & solutions that resonate with customers (and understanding the importance of creativity in product work)
amazon.com/gp/product/006…
What books have you found to be most useful for product leaders?

Please do share them below.

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More from @shreyas

Shreyas Doshi Profile picture
11 Sep
My Slack policy:

Closely track 2-3 channels that matter most for my team’s priorities

Largely ignore the rest

Chime in as a last resort (often the team will resolve the issue on their own, without needing me to “provide value”)

Mobile / after hours notifications OFF

Contd.👇🏾
Respond to most DMs ~immediately (except those sent after hours)

Don't use the Slack native app on my laptop

Pin the Slack tab in Chrome (along with my standard 5-6 other pinned tabs)

Check the Slack app on the phone 2-3 times over the weekend (for any @ mentions or DMs)
Star the important channels

Set a Slack auto-responder when on vacation

Mute the Slack tab before starting "deep work"

Quickly redirect complex team discussions to a doc / email (Slack is often a great discussion starter, but also not the best discussion resolver)
Read 9 tweets
Shreyas Doshi Profile picture
22 Aug
A brief thread on

Impact = (Execution ^ Strategy) × Market

for product people:
Obviously, this is not a formal mathematical formula. Its goal is to help us understand & explain to others the *relative* roles of the factors that determine long-term impact. To understand it, it’s useful to assign a value of 0 to each factor (while keeping the others non-zero)
Let’s start with:
Strategy = 0 (others non-zero)

You get:
Impact ≈ Market

What it tells us:
A very bad strategy won’t kill you. But if you don’t fix it, it will severely limit the impact of your execution over the long term.
Read 16 tweets
Shreyas Doshi Profile picture
16 Aug
A thread with 7 high value ideas & habits that took me more than a decade of my career (and dozens of costly mistakes) to learn:
1/
Most Execution problems are really Strategy problems, Interpersonal problems, or Culture problems.

Good leaders execute well because they see this. They fix the root problem.

Bad leaders struggle because they have a habit of sticking Execution band-aids on very deep wounds.
2/
In a high leverage role, you can think of doing your work at 3 levels

-The Impact level

-The Execution level

-The Optics level

Each level is important. But the level at which you think *by default* matters a lot. This default becomes your habit. You are now on autopilot.
Read 18 tweets
Shreyas Doshi Profile picture
31 Jul
July 2021 content recap:

Job change decisions
Evaluating a company
Calendar & todo list
Placebo productivity
Firefighting
3 key cognitive biases
Writing culture
Megacorps
Hard in practice
Product leaders & mistakes
Technique & mindset
Underrated job search tip
and more...

👇🏾
A thread with 8 ideas I’ve found useful over the years, from my own experience and from speaking with 100s of talented & ambitious tech people about making better job change decisions
A thread on evaluating the caliber of people at a company as a job candidate
Read 21 tweets
Shreyas Doshi Profile picture
27 Jul
A tragedy with most megacorps is that they program their talented & ambitious product people to conflate what it takes to get promoted with what it takes to create actual customer value. Image
What can megacorps do about this?

I am not an expert and I don't know if anything significant can be done. Megacorps are incredibly complex entities and I doubt that any simple/obvious/seductive advice such as "do X, don't do Y" is practicable enough to effect meaningful change.
However, I do think that there's a concrete lesson for talented & ambitious people working at megacorps.

If you want to eventually build your career outside of megacorps, you need to avoid drinking the megacorp kool-aid.

This is not easy, but quite do-able with self-awareness.
Read 7 tweets
Shreyas Doshi Profile picture
12 Jul
The MSN list is a simple & powerful format for hiring managers to create clarity on what they are looking for when hiring for a given role

It cuts through the noise of typical JDs & forces you to focus on what really matters for *this* role.

The MSN list, explained in 6 tweets:
Here’s the format of the MSN list

Must
• ...
• ...
• ...

Should
• ...
• ...
• ...

Nice
• ...
• ...
• ...

(told ya, simple!)

The rules are also simple

-Max 3 bullets each for M/S/N

-Each bullet is an atomic attribute

-You can evaluate each in the hiring process
A real-ish example for a specific senior PM role 👇🏾
Read 7 tweets

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