By Shreyas Doshi · shreyasdoshi.substack.com · @shreyas on X · LinkedIn
Shreyas Doshi argues that many behaviors large companies encourage, such as answering support tickets, talking to many customers, and responding instantly to email and Slack, are designed to keep average performers productive and aligned. These rituals optimize for visible, short-term responsiveness rather than deep, high-leverage product judgment. Top product people, he suggests, often need to deliberately deviate from these norms to create outsized impact. The essay matters because it challenges the default assumption that more customer contact and faster responsiveness always equal better product work.
01Key takeaways
- Question whether a company-encouraged activity actually drives the outcome you care about.
- Protect blocks of time for deep, high-leverage product thinking rather than reactive responsiveness.
- Prioritize a few high-quality customer conversations over many shallow ones when insight is the goal.
- Recognize that organizational rituals optimize for average performance and may not suit exceptional work.
- Be deliberate about which norms to bend, and accept the trade-offs that come with it.
02Key sections
- Why companies encourage certain rituals
- Activities like support triage, customer calls, and quick replies are promoted by leadership because they are easy to measure and keep many people busy. They serve the organization's immediate needs rather than long-term product outcomes.
- The hidden cost for top performers
- Strong product people who follow these norms can lose time for deep thinking and high-leverage work. Average performance gets scaled while exceptional contribution quietly gets squeezed.
- Talking to fewer customers, deliberately
- Customer contact is valuable but not automatically so; choosing a smaller, more informative set of conversations can yield better insight than broad, shallow outreach.
- Bending the rules to create impact
- The author suggests top performers should consciously decide which corporate expectations to bend, accepting some friction in exchange for focus on what matters most.
03From the post
“You need to understand that every activity that a big company & its CEO encourages — answer support tickets, talk to customers, respond immediately to email/Slack, etc. — is intended to push this now…”
Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.