Shreyas Doshi shares frameworks for thinking about product work: pre-mortems to surface risks before they happen, the LNO (Leverage, Neutral, Overhead) framework for prioritizing your own time, and why most execution problems are actually strategy problems in disguise.
Shreyas Doshi on pre-mortems, the LNO framework, the three levels of product work, why most execution problems are strategy problems, and ROI vs. opportunity cost thinking
Shreyas Doshi · Lenny's Podcast
Talk to at least 5 users before writing a single line of spec. Real discovery starts with conversations, not hypotheses.
"The best PMs I know spend 30% of their time talking directly to customers. Not with customer data — with actual customers."
ICE score alone is not enough to prioritize. Always add a reversibility factor: how much damage does being wrong here actually cause?
"Most PMs prioritize thinking about the upside. Great PMs prioritize thinking about the downside of being wrong."
Be the PM who makes everyone else's job easier, not the one who stacks features on a roadmap. Influencing is your highest-ROI skill.
"The PMs who grow fastest are not the ones with the most ideas. They are the ones who get engineering and design to have the best ideas."
A PM operates in 3 modes: execution (shipping), influence (aligning others), and strategy (shaping direction). Most PMs only master one. The elite master all three.
"The higher you go, the more your value comes from influence and strategy, not from executing features perfectly."
The root cause of most PM failure is a trust deficit, not a skill gap. When stakeholders don't trust your judgment, they micromanage your roadmap.
"Trust is built in drips and lost in buckets. One missed commitment at the wrong moment can set you back months of relationship-building."