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Shreyas Doshi
Startup advisor. Coaching PMs through courses.
Shreyas Doshi is a prominent figure in the tech industry, currently serving on the Board of Advisors at Insider since June 2023. He is also the owner of High Leverage Labs, a role he has held since October 2022. Doshi has extensive experience in product management and advisory roles across various startups and established companies.
Professional Background
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Previous Roles: Doshi has held significant positions at major tech companies, including:
- Product Manager at Stripe (February 2016 - May 2021)
- Director of Product Management at Twitter (June 2014 - January 2016)
- Group Product Manager at Google (June 2008 - May 2014)
- Senior Manager of Product Management at Yahoo! (August 2006 - June 2008)
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Advisory Positions: In addition to his role at Insider, he advises several companies, including SaaS Labs, O'Shaughnessy Ventures, InVideo, and Chainlink Labs, among others.
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Education: He graduated from the University of California, Irvine.
Contributions and Expertise
Shreyas Doshi is known for his insights into product management and leadership. He actively shares his knowledge through writing and speaking engagements, focusing on coaching product managers and enhancing their strategic thinking skills. His expertise includes navigating the challenges of product strategy and execution within various organizational contexts.
Overall, Doshi's extensive background in product management, combined with his advisory roles, positions him as a significant contributor to the tech and startup ecosystems.1
Highlights
A founder asked me on a recent advising call: “why do you teach?”
Here’s what I shared with him:
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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It works with my priorities at this stage in 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 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 (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 💙 🙏
Couple of observations on this poll:
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Time to maximum impact received <5% votes. Everyone would agree that maximum impact is the supposed ultimate goal. So consider what you might do differently in your decision making & execution if you kept time to maximum impact in the back of your mind, while maintaining your desire to ‘move fast’.
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A clear majority of companies that pat themselves on the back for moving fast in practice optimize first for “(B) Time to write the first line of code” not for “(C) Time to shipped feature” which got the most votes in the poll.
In fact, it’s because they optimize for “(B) Time to write the first line of code” that they don’t actually ship the feature as fast as possible.
Experienced engineering managers, tech leads, and product managers understand this, but the pressure to say “yes, the engineers are already building this feature” to upper management is often too high.
The other issue here is the false notion that if an engineer isn’t always writing code, you are wasting precious eng time and you are therefore a bad PM / EM, so you must get them to start writing code asap.
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