Lenny's Podcast: 4 questions Shreyas Doshi wishes he’d asked himself sooner | Former PM leader at Stripe, Twitter, Google

☑ "Why am I so busy?"
↳ Shreyas highlights that when busyness feels endless, “scope” might be the real issue—not just productivity habits.
↳ Strategy hack: A well-aligned product strategy makes annual planning easier and faster, turning weeks into days.
↳ Planning burnout? If you're clear on priorities, you can avoid time-consuming tasks that add minimal value.

☑ "Do I actually have good taste?"
↳ Good taste means recognising quality early—not just when an idea is popular or validated by social proof.
↳ Avoid “authority bias” and “alliteration appeal”—don’t just buy into catchy phrases like “fail fast” without questioning if they add real value.
↳ Developing taste helps with better decision-making and building unique perspectives that set your product apart.

☑ "Why does my job feel so frustrating?"
↳ Shreyas explains that frustration often comes when we work outside our strengths, especially in areas like optics over impact.
↳ Superpower match: Align your role with your core strengths for a career that feels energising rather than draining.
↳ Avoid “LinkedIn envy” or career expectations that push you toward titles or work that don’t align with your strengths.

☑ "Am I really listening?"
↳ Most of us think we’re good listeners, but real listening requires tuning into unspoken cues and motivations.
↳ Great leaders move beyond simple recaps and eye contact—they understand the underlying needs of their teams.
↳ Leaders who master true listening create trust, inspire their teams, and make better product decisions.

Reflecting on my career as a PM leader over the years, there are some questions I wish I had asked myself sooner, but I did not, and I had the great luck of having a life, a PM life full of suffering, and I have zero complaints about it

I have spent most of my career just being completely stressed out, just absolutely stressed out every day. And there were many reasons for it, but one of the core reasons was I was always super busy

At some point in our product career, we reach something, we reach an immovable force that will just overwhelm us, no matter what we do. And that force is a scope

As we grow in our product career, our scope grows, and we kind of like that, which is all great, but at some point, if you haven't already gotten there, many of you have, but for those of you who haven't, you will get there, where your scope will be so large, that no matter what you do in terms of efficiency...you are still going to be incredibly busy

I needed to change that at some point, and actually found a solution, again, late in my career, but I found a solution, because I asked myself this question, which is, 'Why am I so busy?'

That's when I realized that actually, if you have a real product strategy, a real one that everybody is aligned with...a lot of this nonsense we tend to do with annual planning actually goes away

If you do have a strategy that will make a lot of your prioritization problems go away, it will make a lot of planning problems go away

I realized that I am so busy because I'm not making good product decisions

Most doors that look like two-way doors are actually one-way doors. They are two-way doors at Bezos' level, but as a PM leader, for you, they are a one-way door, and that's making you busy

Do we have good taste around the beliefs we choose to create within ourselves as product leaders? And then, those beliefs end up dictating everything we do, including how we manage, how we lead, how we make decisions

It requires zero taste right now for anybody to say, 'Oh, that CEO of NVIDIA is a genius, right? Jensen is a genius.' If you are saying that in 2024, it actually requires zero taste, because you can just look up NVIDIA stock price

If I really want to be [a critical thinker], I have to shed a lot of these just patterns that were just built in me, and I kind of have to evaluate the idea separate from all of its social proof, and authority proof, and whatever else

Our jobs get frustrating when we behave, most of the time, in misalignment with our superpowers and who we truly are at our core

As I spent day in and day out, just mostly doing optics work, I realized I was not happy and I was getting frustrated

Identify your superpowers, and like Shakespeare said, 'To thine own self be true.' Just be honest to yourself

Am I really listening? Okay, and this is perhaps the hardest one for me, because I thought, of course I'm a good listener because I listen, then I recap, and I make eye contact, and I tell them, 'This is what I heard.' And all of that nonsense

I realized there is an entirely other level to listening, which once you understand that there's an entirely other level to listening, that is what enables you to be a world-class leader