Led a couple of Stripe's most successful products from their early days (Stripe Connect, Stripe Terminal). Helped build the Product Management function at Stripe, as one of the early members of the PM team and as Stripe's first PM Manager. Led & grew several products at Twitter, Google, Yahoo, including some products & features you probably use daily / weekly.

Now, I advise startup founders, coach executives, do occasional speaking engagements, and teach.

Oh, and I also write about product management, leadership, org psychology, and strategy. >500k people have chosen to follow my writing & my ideas across Twitter, LinkedIn, Threads, and YouTube.

~

Find more of my links at: linktr.ee/shreyasdoshi

🚀  It’s a bad idea to announce anything before a big holiday, but I’ll do it anyway: I am launching a free Substack!!! Over the years, I’ve written 100s of short essays that I never posted publicly. Starting Monday, you can finally read those essays here: https://lnkd.in/gxW-G2VU

Shreyas Doshi

Led a couple of Stripe's most successful products from their early days (Stripe Connect, Stripe Terminal). Helped build the Product Management function at Stripe, as one of the early members of the PM team and as Stripe's first PM Manager. Led & grew several products at Twitter, Google, Yahoo, including some products & features you probably use daily / weekly.

Now, I advise startup founders, coach executives, do occasional speaking engagements, and teach live courses (check out bit.ly/shreyas-course for more info).

Oh, and I also write about product management, leadership, org psychology, and strategy. >400k people have chosen to follow my writing & content across Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Deeply thankful for that.
~
Find more of my links at: linktr.ee/shreyasdoshi

ex-Stripe, Twitter, Google, Yahoo. Startup advisor.

A founder asked me in a recent advising call: “why do you teach?”

Here’s what I shared with him:

- It helps me scale my startup advising work: unfortunately, I cannot advise all the founders who reach out. In fact, I take very few formal advising roles, because I want to be certain it’s the right mutual fit (high growth company, fit with founder, challenging problems / huge opportunity, mutual availability). So my teaching is a great option for founders I cannot advise.

- I absolutely love it: in this next chapter of my career, I’ve decided to only work on things that I absolutely love. This means saying No to high prestige, rational opportunities (e.g. VC, leadership roles, podcasting, venture backed startup, etc.) Teaching is something I knew I wanted to do since my teenage years (at the time, I wanted to teach French, as I was very good at it in 10th grade). It isn’t for everyone and it is hard, but if it is for you, why not do it?

- It might be the best way *for me* to create further positive impact on our industry: to be clear, I don’t do anything because “I want to create a dent in the universe” (I know I won’t create any dent in the universe and will be forgotten shortly after I’m gone and I think that’s a wonderful thing, not something to be sad about). So while I am not teaching mainly to create a big impact, it is wonderful to read notes from 100s of students every month on how their products, teams, and their career are better off after taking my class. The total impact is hard to measure (and I am not going to try & measure it), but my gut says that the compounding impact from my teaching might be meaningful.

- I still get to solve fun product problems: one reason my teaching resonates strongly with some students is that I treat everything like a product. My (very small) team and I do more product thinking (and immediate application of that thinking) on a daily basis than I ever remember doing at Tier 1 companies I’ve worked at as a PM (reason: we are a tiny close-knit company and we view every problem through a product lens). This means exercising empathy, simulation, creativity, design in everything we do from course design, to communications, to community design, to marketing, to our operations. Plus, through my advising work, I get to work on the biggest product / GTM problems that founders are facing across dozens of domains and products.

- It works with my life: I work all 7 days of the week (mainly on my advising & teaching). The weeks I am teaching are particularly very intense (everyone in my house and my mom in India knows that I am basically unavailable those weeks). On the flip side though, my teaching + advising give me a lot more control over my schedule than almost any other work would. This means that I’ve been able to spend a lot more time with my son (17yrs, only child) over the past 4+ years than I could have otherwise. I like that.

Thank you for reading this far and for your continued love and support 💙 🙏

Just posted another previously private piece - this one is on the skill of Listening. It reveals an unorthodox, but once you do it, an incredibly effective approach to pure listening that I’ve now been using for over 7 years. As a bonus, it also includes a 15 minute deep-dive podcast on this topic that is based on a bunch of my private and public writing on what world-class listening looks like and how to get there.

Link in the comments.

Some of you asked what my new substack will be about, so here’s a preview of the type of content I’ll share (all of it will be free, no paid tier). First post will be on Monday and you can subscribe via the link in the comments if you want.

🆕 Latest Substack post: Don’t be a full cup
(link in comments)

A surprising number of management mistakes by otherwise-competent leaders are rooted in the operating assumption that (a) everyone is like me, and (b) everyone can be like me if they only knew these things and if they only tried harder.

Nitin Mishra

One reader asked an excellent question on my first Substack post, on Micromanagement:

”Do you sometimes get pushback simply for using the word micromanagement? I feel like it’s so loaded with memories of the unproductive kind, that people generally get stuck on the feeling rather than the reality.“

Yes, in practice, I will sometimes use the term “co-ownership”, instead of “micromanagement”. Especially if a new team member hasn’t yet built trust in my leadership and hasn’t gotten exposure to the effectiveness of my management style (since that takes some time to show).

So I will say: “we will co-own this, and that means that I will be more involved in this project than the other projects you’re working on”.

Depending on the specifics of the situation, I might also use some other terms, such as:

“You are primary owner on this, and since it is super-important, I will be the secondary owner”

This conveys that we both will own it.

Once they get comfortable with the terminology, I will sometimes remove 'owner' shorten it to: “you should go to that meeting because you’re primary, but keep me posted on Slack and I am happy to join mid-way if it isn’t going well, since I am secondary“, etc.

Overall, a shared vocabulary is a very powerful thing.

Over time, as trust gets built, I prefer to use the raw'est term possible, because it is closest to the truth i.e. I will say at times “yes, you’re going to see me micromanage this project because [reasons]”. But before that trust is built, it is quite practical to use a different term such as co-ownership. 

Also never take this stuff literally. If you don’t like that term personally, nothing is stopping you from using a different term. The bigger point is not the specific word choice, it’s about accurately discerning the truth of the situation and the relationship and managing your messaging accordingly, to be maximally effective towards your goals.

Link to the micromanagement post is in the comments below.

✨ My first Substack post is out. Understanding Micromanagement (4 minute read): https://lnkd.in/gHJjxgTt

Really looking forward to seeing your comments and shares. Let me know what you think.

A hilarious quirk of human nature is that we marvel and laud and get uplifted by someone gifted’s natural talent in every human endeavor such as sports, cinema, music, art, literature, food, architecture, etc. etc. and we are simultaneously dogmatically certain that there's no such thing as natural talent in one domain and of course that domain happens to be our own specific line of work.

There’s lots of ideal theory on product leadership that sounds right, feels right, and makes us want to hit the Like button when we read it on LinkedIn, except... it is just ideal theory, it doesn’t reflect the true day to day practice of product leadership.

I enjoyed this podcast recording with Christian Idiodi in which he asks excellent questions that gets me to share the true practice of product leadership, including ideas that won’t get likes on LinkedIn, but are really essential in practice if your goal is to be highly effective product leader.

Give it a listen and let me know what you think:
https://lnkd.in/gVWGjndz

Is your preferred product leadership style Operator, Craftsperson, or Visionary? Over 2000 people have now completed my Product Leadership Style self-assessment 🤩 (link is in the comments, if you also want to do it)

Looking for something to listen to this weekend? Check out this audio deep-dive I just published on the types of micromanagement, what types make sense (and which ones to avoid), and the delicate messaging that works when you do have to micromanage. It’s just 11 minutes, but packs a lot of depth, including some of my ideas that I haven’t posted publicly before.

Link: https://lnkd.in/gdP96Cbn

If you’re in a product role, it is smart to listen to what Chris Johnson says.

Founder & Managing Partner at Artisanal Talent Group

To be elite, like Kobe or Jordan elite, you need to be talented but more importantly outwork everyone else behind the scenes! I tell every Product executive that I interview and put in front of a client that they MUST do the following: 1) nail their story in a detailed, clear and articulate way 2) prepare and ask deep, compelling questions 3) be authentic 

Today I met Lexy Franklin and saw what he is building at www.superinterviews.com and was blown away. Every single person from senior execs to ICs should be using this product to craft their story and prepare for interviews! You cannot wing the CPO interviews at Anthropic or Rippling or Notion or really any company for that matter. If you are interviewing there, that means you are in an elite camp, but that doesn't mean you will get the job. You need to outwork the other elite product execs that are in play for the same roles. This product will give you a leg up in outworking the rest of the field and will be a game changer for candidates who use it!  

Kudos to you and the team Lexy for building a world class product.

🆕This week’s newsletter post (link in comments):
The Product Builder’s True Journey

(while this post is super concise - just 62 words - it includes a bonus chat with Claude, which is long, but worth a lifetime of wisdom for those who want to build successful products)

⏳ Publishing my first Substack post on Monday.
Get it here: https://lnkd.in/gwzTRs56

One of the most fun & actionable things we cover in the Product Sense course is Taste in practice—as you build products on real teams. The ‘in practice’ part is vital. Most of what people know about Taste is theoretical and woefully incomplete. Here’s what a student (who’s a PM leader at a top tier company) said after our 2 hour dedicated class on Taste, in which we also do a Taste workout:

Latest free newsletter post.
The Problem with Product Reviews: https://lnkd.in/g3d5XUYc

“It reminded me why I love product management in the first place” 🙌🏾

Product Manager @ ASI | Building and Growing

Can’t recommend Shreyas Doshi’s course World Class Product Sense in Practice enough. It’s refreshing to take a class so deeply crafted and theoretically sound yet practical.

It’s safe to say I’ll be referring back to the course notes for a long time to come, I haven’t scratched the surface of a lot of the gold there. Learning from Shreyas is learning from a successful product leader who has thought deeply about his craft, and has a gift of teaching that wisdom. 

It reminded me why I love product management in the first place, and empowered me with all the knowledge I need to build world class products. Now to build them!

https://lnkd.in/gNYEg6rZ

The grit and creativity that Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara bring to their work as founders at Kalshi is extraordinarily rare. While Kalshi is everywhere these days, most won’t realize that this huge milestone has been years in the making, as they built an excellent product and a top tier team against the odds. Congrats Tarek, Luana, and the entire Kalshi team!

CEO at Kalshi

Kalshi raised $1B at an $11B valuation.

A decade ago, only a few thousand people knew what a prediction market was.

Eighteen months ago, most prediction markets were banned - until we overcame the government to set them free.

Over the past seven years, our community has opened up an entirely new category.

Today, Kalshi is trusted, used, and loved by millions of people. It’s a part of everyday culture, and it’s driving one of the most important shifts in consumer behavior in recent history.

The time has finally come for prediction markets to achieve their full potential and we are intent on making that happen.

To all the believers and the early adopters: thank you.

Which ONE of these options feels closest to what your company encourages & rewards, in practice:

i.e. in actual day to day choices and behaviors, not just aspirational company values plastered on the hallway walls

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