Shreyas Doshi on pre-mortems, the LNO framework, the three levels of product work, why most execution problems are strategy problems, and ROI vs. opportunity cost thinking

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:03)
There's no one out there today who shares more wisdom, more consistently on the art of product management than Shreyas Doshi. Shreyas kind of came out of nowhere a few years ago and started tweeting gems of insight about building product and the role of product management, and rightfully so has built a huge following on Twitter. What I love about Shreyas is that his insights are often framed in really memorable and interesting ways, and they're often contrarian and not ideas that you've heard elsewhere.
Shreyas has worked at some of today's most important tech companies, including Yahoo, Twitter, Google, and most recently Stripe, both as an IC and a manager, and his advice is always rooted in his real-life experiences at these companies.
In our chat, we focus on five topics and go deep on them. We talk about the power of pre-mortems, we talk about how to best use your time as a product manager, we look into the three levels of product work, and how getting them wrong often leads to tension on your team, we dig into why most execution problems are really strategy problems, and we talk about a common pitfall in prioritization. And if you listen to the end, we actually throw in a bonus topic. I really appreciate that Shreyas made the time for our chat, and I cannot wait for you to hear it.
This episode is brought to you by Coda. Coda is an all-in-one doc that combines the best of documents, spreadsheets, and apps in one place. I actually use Coda every single day. It's my home base for organizing my newsletter writing. It's where I plan my content calendar, capture my research, and write the first drafts of each and every post. It's also where I curate my private knowledge repository for paid newsletter subscribers. And it's also how I manage the workflow for this very podcast. Over the years, I've seen Coda evolve from being a tool that makes teams more productive to one that also helps bring the best practices across the tech industry to life with an incredibly rich collection of templates and guides in the Coda doc gallery, including resources for many guests on this podcast, including Shreyas, Gokul, and Shashir, the CEO of Coda. Some of the best teams out there like Pinterest, Spotify, Square, and Uber use Coda to run effectively and have published their templates for anyone to use. If you're ping-ponging between lots of documents and spreadsheets, make your life better and start using Coda. You can take advantage of a special limited time offer just for startups. Head over to coda.io/lenny to sign up and get $1,000 credit on your first statement. That's coda.io/lenny to sign up and get $1,000 in credit on your account.
This episode is brought to you by Product Board. Product leaders trust Product Board to help their teams build products that matter. From startups to industry titans, over 6,000 companies rely on Product Board to get the right products to market faster, including companies like Zoom, Volkswagen, UiPath and Vanguard. Product Board can help you create a scalable, transparent and standardized process so your PMs understand what their customers really need and then prioritize the right features to build next. Stakeholders feel the left too with an easy-to-view roadmap that automatically updates so everyone knows what you're building and why. Make data-driven product decisions that result in higher revenue and user adoption and empower your product teams to create delightful customer experiences. Visit productboard.com to learn more.
Shreyas, the man, the myth, the legend, thank you so much for joining me and for having this conversation.

**Shreyas Doshi** (3:47)
It's great to be here, Lenny.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:49)
So we strategized about how to make this podcast as concretely useful and actionable for as many people as possible. And so we decided to do is instead of a regular interview where we talk about a lot of stuff, instead we're gonna go deep on five of your ideas, teachings, lessons that you've shared on Twitter that have stuck with me and I know have resonated with a lot of other people.
And we're gonna call it the five big ideas from Shreyas Doshi. Does that sound about right?

**Shreyas Doshi** (4:14)
Sounds great.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:15)
Okay, cool. So before we get into that, before we get into the meat of all this stuff, you share a lot of wisdom on Twitter, but you don't share a ton of about yourself and your background where you grew up, where you're born and things like that. So I'd love to learn a little bit more about the human that is Shreyas. And so maybe we start there, like where were you born? Where'd you grow up? What did your parents do for work? What did you want to be when you grew up?