4 questions Shreyas Doshi wishes he’d asked himself sooner

Shreyas Doshi, a former PM leader at Yahoo, Google, Twitter and Stripe who began as an engineer, discusses his career path and several practical product ideas. The conversation covers pre-mortems, the LNO framework for prioritizing tasks, the three levels of product work (impact, execution, optics), strategy versus execution problems, minimizing opportunity cost, and high agency.

01Key learnings

• Run a pre-mortem before launches by imagining the project has already failed, then surfacing tigers, paper tigers and elephants so teams can raise concerns safely.
• Classify tasks as leverage, neutral or overhead; spend extra effort only on leverage tasks, and do less polish on neutral and overhead work like routine notes or bug reports.
• Beat procrastination on high-leverage work by doing a couple days of low-stakes placebo tasks first, then working from a different location on the day you tackle it.
• Recognize that PMs and leaders often think at different levels (impact, execution, optics), which can explain conflicts; name the level explicitly to align before debating details.
• Treat repeated execution problems as possible strategy, culture or interpersonal issues; if a fix keeps failing and the problem returns, the root cause is likely elsewhere.
• Prioritize by minimizing opportunity cost rather than just chasing positive ROI, so ambiguous but potentially transformative bets don't get crowded out by quick wins.
• Set explicit planning allocations for teams, such as roughly 60% incrementals, 30% big initiatives and 10% stability, to give room for high-impact work.
• Build high agency as a PM by taking ownership, creatively working through constraints, and staying resilient rather than waiting for ideal conditions.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.