High Leverage LLC

Advising, Coaching, Teaching, Writing, Speaking
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More than 2500 senior PMs & product leaders worldwide [1] have taken my weekend course on Managing your Product career:
https://bit.ly/shreyas-course

Reviews are outstanding. You can check out the posts that many students have shared about their experience with the course.

[1] Just a sample of companies in the last cohort: Google, Meta, Stripe, Twitch, Amazon, Square, HashiCorp, Okta, Freshworks, Airbnb, PayPal, Slack, Walmart, Atlassian, Microsoft, Flipkart, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Shopify, Gojek, Nike, Uber, Wish, Reddit, Adobe, Plaid, Faire, Workday, Tripactions, Vimeo, Dell, Salesforce, VMWare, Goldman Sachs, Walgreens, General Electric, Wayfair, Splunk, Doordash, LinkedIn, Grammarly, Yelp

Founder

Anthropic

Advisor

Insider.

Board of Advisors

SaaS Labs

O'Shaughnessy Ventures

InVideo

Chainlink Labs

Kalshi

Array

Various Startups

I advise fast-growing startups on strategy, scaling, and product management.

Product Advisor

Led a couple of Stripe's most successful products from their very early days (Stripe Connect, Stripe Terminal). Built the PM 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.
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Find more of my links at: linktr.ee/shreyasdoshi

When you ask someone for career advice (or just about any advice), don’t frame it as “What would you do in this situation?”

This is pretty common way of asking for advice (at least in America), but unless the other person is a world-class coach / advisor (very few are, by definition), you will likely end up getting pretty irrelevant or bad advice.

Why avoid the ”what would you do“ framing?

It does not matter what someone else would do in this situation.

You are not them.

You do not know what they care most about.
(and there is no way you can know for sure)

Much better approach:
“<This> is my situation.
Here’s what I care most about. 
Here’s what I am most confused about. 
How should I think through this situation?”

Shreyas Doshi

The Coinbase dashboard is the best designed at-scale dashboard product I’ve seen recently.

It’s easy to build a simple & intuitive dashboard UI when you have 1 or 2 products, but it gets exponentially harder when you offer multiple products through the same UI.

Most companies screw it up over time, as the Dashboard real estate becomes a turf war between various Directors / VPs / GMs all pushing to maximize exposure for their own products & features, without much regard to the user experience, as the designers try their best (and usually fail) to talk common sense, and as the Dashboard platform team routinely does card sorting exercises to figure out the right information architecture for the left nav, and out of optimism presents a new proposal every quarter, all of which usually falls on deaf ears, until the situation gets so bad that after 5 years there is a CEO-mandated complete overhaul of Dashboard, which is promised as a 1 year effort and during this time all feature development is halted on the old Dashboard, and the actual project & user migration ends up taking 2-3 years minimum, and then we get to resume the very same insanity that got us here in the first place, until the next such overhaul.

As a user, it seems to me that Coinbase has done a good job of avoiding this predictably common problem.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, writing things down will not *automatically* create clarity.

While it is great to see more companies & teams move towards a writing culture, I have seen plenty of written documents (by otherwise competent & well-meaning product people) that do not create the clarity you’d hope for, leaving executives confused about the exact problem(s), the insights, and the key asks & next steps.

For clearer writing, ask yourself these questions:

1. What Am I Really Trying To Say

2. Why Should People Care 

3. What Is The Most Important Point

4. What Is The Easiest Way To Understand The Most Important Point

5. How Do I Want The Reader To Feel

6. What Should The Reader Do Next

This approach works for pretty much any business document you’re writing. As you consistently employ this approach, over time it will become instinctive and you won’t have to consciously think about it.

Last point: until you get there, I’d suggest leveraging the help of the right AI tool(s). 

Use AI writing tools as an assistant and an editor, not the director or the producer.

An approach I’ve recently found super-useful for business writing is to use Grammarly‘s new AI features — they do a great job of helping predict the feedback or questions your readers are likely to have for your writing.

Often, your readers sort of understand what you’ve written, but they are left wondering:
“So what”
“What should I do with this information?”
“What action or decision are you expecting me to take?”

To address such confusions, it is totally okay to get AI help (along with human help) as you write your proposals and memos. What a wonderful time to be alive and to be writing! 

One principle I learned too late is that if you write someone a note appreciating their work, write it in such a manner that makes it very easy for them to forward your note to their manager.

Looking for a PM job? Know someone who’s looking?

Check out openpmjobs.com for a handy list of PM jobs shared by hiring managers here on LinkedIn & on Twitter.

Do forward & share this resource if you can.

(huge thanks to Vidit Goyal + Héctor Reyes Flores at Coda for setting this up)

Today marks a pivotal moment for Kalshi and prediction markets:

Susquehanna International Group, LLP (SIG), becomes the 1st institutional market maker to commit to Kalshi.

Prediction markets have (finally) surmounted their most elusive challenge: liquidity.

With ~$2 Trillion in yearly volume, SIG is one of the largest market makers on the planet. They now have a dedicated trading division to trade prediction markets on Kalshi. This is the first time in prediction markets history that a prestigious Wall St institution commits to the asset class.

The launch of SIG has the potential to transform prediction markets by making them similar to traditional markets — liquid and dynamic. You can now trade significant volumes, 100,000 shares at a time (up from 1,000) in Kalshi’s major markets. 

While this looks like an overnight announcement, it is not. Launching SIG is the culmination of years of tireless effort and perseverance. It is the result of obsessing over our customers, relentless iterating, putting great love into our craft, and consistently choosing to climb the steeper mountain. 

The ethos is shared by all Kalshians, with whom I am honored to be in the trenches. This team is one of the most talent-dense in the country and is committed to building event contracts into a boring asset class.

Kalshi’s vision is to capture anything of social or economic value into a tradable asset and bring more truth to the world through the power of markets.

Alongside SIG, Kalshi is building a next-generation ecosystem that can define a new paradigm in the industry.

We are already on track. Since the beginning of 2024, Kalshi’s active customer base has grown by 5x, exchange volume is up by 50%, and we have listed more markets in Q1 than all of 2023. With that, we are now more than 90% of the markets the industry listed in Q1.

With SIG in the ecosystem, Kalshi unlocks significant liquidity: we have upgraded from a knife to a sledgehammer…

Kalshi is accelerating the derivatives industry. We can now double down on our distribution efforts, both direct (via http://kalshi.com and the app) and intermediated through brokers (soon 👀 ). 

For hedge funds and prop shops. 
If you want to become a market maker on Kalshi, apply at: kalshi.com/market-makers

For brokers. 
If you are interested in integrating, visit the brokerage portal: kalshi.com/brokers

Will Kalshi define an entirely new category? 

We don't know yet, but we have the potential to. This market might be "priced in" in a few years. Join us before it's priced in... and come help to define the future of the financial system. 

We are hiring across the board: engineering, product, growth, BD, regulatory, and so on. If you are interested in building the first serious shot at disrupting financial exchanges in decades, you know where to go: kalshi.com/careers.

https://lnkd.in/eZb5dX9X

The Immutable Law of Zoom Recording Requests:
The number of people who frantically demand a recording of a missed meeting is always at least 10 times greater than the number who actually watch said recording after receiving it.

There are 3 levels of product work:
1) Impact
2) Execution
3) Optics

Each is important.
AND
Everyone has a default level they enjoy.

One mistake I made pretty much throughout my career was to downplay the role of Optics and to tell myself the story that my Impact & Execution will speak for itself. So for others who are like me, here’s a 3 minute video on How to Get Better at Managing Optics:

Enjoy this playlist (with 96 videos & counting) anytime you’re looking to watch or listen to (or binge on 😄) advanced product & leadership content.

(link in comments, thx to the annoying LI logic that suppresses external links)

Most adults are actually babies in disguise. This means that most of the people we work with are babies. It is important to understand this idea and then decide if you want to work in companies that tend to prefer fully formed adults instead of babies:

3 years ago, I started this next chapter of my career to create room for more flexibility and a much higher flow:frustration ratio in my work.

This meant opting out of the “expected career path”, after a total of 20 years of building products as an engineer & a PM.

People often ask me what made me make this switch and if I am happy with my decision.

While basic financial security & a high degree of competence are prerequisites to making such a switch, they are by no means the dominant factors in keeping you happy after you make the switch.

The key to ongoing happiness with a non-standard career path is your accumulated wisdom & your clarity around why you are doing it, what you are willingly sacrificing for it, and staying disciplined with staying in your zone of mastery (which requires saying No to many otherwise-tempting & ego-boosting opportunities).

One aspect of this wisdom is to really internalize that that your mind will always trick you into thinking that what you currently have is not enough and that you must get to the next level of title & scope to finally be happy and solve all your problems.

So I wanted to share a different kind of video today, in which I share my journey towards being able to see through this trickery, through a number of now-embarrassing attitudes & thoughts I had in my 20s and 30s. I hope it is useful.

During the post-COVID boom, some PMs got prematurely promoted to Group PM / Director / Head of Product as companies & teams were irrationally expanding. That is not their fault. But if they continue to think that they must still manage other PMs in this climate, that can be quite problematic for their long-term career trajectory (and for the team members & products they manage). Watch this 90 second video on premature promotions:

“I want to work on 0-to-1 products”

Many product leaders have fantasies of wanting to lead a “0-to-1” product, not realizing that they are destined to suck at that job. The reality is that some people are just not cut out for 0-to-1 products but they can be (and often are) world-class at leading complex, mature products.

It is vital for product leaders to acknowledge their natural strengths and accordingly choose the right product stage and management approach for themselves. Here’s how to do it:

A common frustration as you start managing more scope is that there are tons of pairwise conversations on execution: new blockers, risks, prioritization, technical constraints, dependencies, etc.

Just take these 6 roles that are fairly common on product teams: PM, EM, Designer, PM leader, Eng leader, Design leader.

Mathematically, you can get 15 pairwise conversations between these roles. While that is a theoretical extreme, in practice it is not uncommon, even at the very best companies, for 4-6 pairwise conversations that are focused on whatever execution problem(s) the team is currently facing.

Each such pairwise conversation misses important context from whoever is not in the room (e.g. a designer or an EM who’s left out of the conversation), which then leads to an unintentionally biased view of the problem & the solution, which then leads to even more meetings and more frustration between eng, design, pm, data science, etc.

For nearly 10 years, I saw this problem at every company I worked at and didn‘t see a great solution. Until I saw a specific technique that worked quite well at Twitter: an execution-focused weekly 3 on 3 meeting, conducted with a specific vibe and purpose. It was so simple & effective that I then adopted it for every team I led during my 5 years at Stripe.

Here’s a video in which I describe the problem in more detail (warning: might feel too real) and how to fix the problem.

(and please feel free to adapt the specifics to your context — there is never The One Right Way with these things)

The meme game of this past weekend’s cohort of my PM Career course was quite strong. An example 😄 (this one created by Arnaud Delaunay) 

I found it very hard & frustrating to navigate interpersonal conflict & drama (at work & in life) until my late 20s. Check out this video, in which I describe how I’ve since had a better time dealing with conflict & seemingly difficult people:

yt.openinapp.co • 1 min read

How to Think Clearly About Conflict & Drama (at Work and in Life)

Getting messages from students every single week on their career success stories is among the most fun parts of teaching 🤩 

One flavor of question I often get: “My company is [too Sales led and not Product led]. What’s your advice for fixing this?”

Whatever the problem might be in the [square brackets] above, the solution for the problem is always about how to show real leadership:

Most managers’ feedback is not as useful as intended. And most managers’ career advice is rooted in the underlying, unstated assumption that everyone has (or ought to have) similar career goals & life goals as them.

Here’s the truth: most feedback is delivered via an implicit process of the manager comparing his/her own (present or past) skills & behaviors with a given employee’s present skills & behaviors, without much regard to what truly matters for success in the employee’s current scope, the employee’s unique strengths & superpowers, and the employee’s career & life goals.

Additionally, most managers do not do a great job of contextualizing peer feedback — they largely act as relays of peer feedback & 360 feedback instead of saying in some instances ”you‘ve received feedback from your engineering peer that you should do [XYZ] for the eng team, but in this case, I think you’re prioritizing correctly, and here’s how we can figure out how the eng team becomes more self-sufficient”. 

So what does useful feedback look like? What does mastery look like here as a manager? A feedback masterclass, in under 10 minutes:

Sitting down to articulate our product strategy is very scary for most of us. So to avoid this scary work while still feeling productive & busy, we’ve come up with 2 great excuses for why we don’t have a clear strategy. A short video on how to make excuses for not having a strategy 😬

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