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Shreyas Doshi Profile picture
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27 Sep, 11 tweets, 3 min read
It is almost Q4 and that means that annual planning will dominate the lives of many product managers & leaders over the next several weeks (or sadly, months).

Here is your annual reminder about doing annual planning effectively without the BS busy-work:
More resources for you below
A thread on product prioritization:
A thread on product strategy:
A thread on product metrics:
Remember (and remind your teams) that the proxy is not the goal
Important to understand this model (and help your team & your manager understand it):
If you are going to embark on a new initiative in 2022, the highest leverage activity you can do to increase odds of success is pre-mortems. Here's a @coda_hq guide & template for running effective (and fun) pre-mortems:
coda.io/@shreyas/pre-m…
On how to set goals for your product (more qualitative or quantitative, outputs or outcomes, etc), the most rigorous thing you can do is to understand the stage of your product, using Kent Beck's Explore - Expand - Extract framework & set goals accordingly
If you've reached this far, and if you're a growth-stage startup (post product market fit) that wants to figure out how to do strategy, planning, prioritization, and scale execution, feel free to reach out via DM (with some stats). As an experiment, I will do 5 such calls in Oct.
A framework to help you figure out what type of product-market fit you currently have and where you should go next:

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More from @shreyas

Shreyas Doshi Profile picture
26 Sep
You might have heard people say:
“Amateurs talk strategy. Professionals talk logistics.”

People conclude from this that, to be a true professional, they should fixate on logistics/operations.

Such conclusions are flawed & can even be harmful.

The Curse of Brilliance, a thread:
Before we dive in, let’s look at another quote, commonly attributed to Picasso:

“When art critics get together they talk about Form & Structure & Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.”
Same thing here.

People hear this, get impressed, and conclude that, if you want to be great at something, you should ignore all the abstract crap and just focus on the tactics that The Great Ones employ.

I mean, who’s going to argue with Picasso, right?
Read 33 tweets
Shreyas Doshi Profile picture
21 Sep
Since time immemorial, when a CEO asks a PM at Product Review, “what do you need to 10X users/revenue?”, “what will make you go faster?”, etc the PM steadfastly responds “We need [N] more engineers”. The Eng Mgr nods approvingly.

A story thread, with some hard truths to swallow:
“More engineers” will usually *not* solve your problems. Because the real problem is often a strategy problem, culture problem, interpersonal problem, trust problem, creativity problem, or market problem. More engineers *will* solve your “I don’t have enough engineers” problem.
When you finally manage to get more eng headcount, things will usually get worse before they get better. Management will now expect your team’s *immediate* output to be in proportion with this *new* headcount, not with your *current* staffing. Not fair, but that’s how it goes.
Read 21 tweets
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
27 Aug
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…
Read 18 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

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