Shreyas Doshi

Led a couple of Stripe's most successful products from early days. Prev Twitter, Google, Yahoo. Now advising & teaching. Tweets useful for some—not for everyone

[Shreyas Doshi @shreyas]

“You are great at execution, the team loves you, but you need to be more strategic”

Hearing this feedback from your direct manager or your skip manager can be very confusing.

And for highly capable product people who consistently get things done, this theme of “you need to be more strategic” is extremely common. It is perhaps the most common feedback given to otherwise-competent PMs at some point in their career.

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It starts showing up after you’ve rapidly ascended your company’s career ladder up to Sr. PM or Group PM. And once it starts showing up, it just will not go away. That is, until you fix it.

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But here’s the trouble: it is incredibly confusing to know how to act on this feedback. As a further complication, while many managers / skip levels are happy to deliver this feedback, most of them either do not have the expertise or the time to create more clarity on how the employee should act on this feedback.

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So let’s solve that.

First, if you receive the “you need to be more strategic” feedback, it doesn’t automatically mean that you should be looking to take a product strategy course or read a product strategy book.

Product strategy and being strategic are not always the same thing.

In practice, not all “you need to be more strategic” feedback is the same.

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There are 3 distinct categories of this feedback:

1) More Product Thinking: You need to do more Product Thinking and less Project Thinking (see the image below if you’re curious about the differences between Product Thinking and Project Thinking)

2) New Opportunity Creation: You need to spend more time on creating new opportunities and the next big new business for your org & company (instead of being mainly focused on executing on and optimizing the current cash cow)

3) Actual Product Strategy: You need to clarify the vision and product strategy for your product (and make sure that the right people at the right levels in the right functions understand this vision & strategy, and are aligned to execute on it across the company)

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#1 is usually the case for Sr. PMs / GPMs when they want to get to Director level.

#2 is usually the case for Director level folks who need to demonstrate impact above and beyond what would organically happen anyway.

#3 is usually the case for GPM / Director / VP level folks who are very good Operators, but haven’t yet found the time or built the skills to clarify a real product vision and strategy and get the broader org aligned towards it.

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So if in the next perf review season you get the “you need to be more strategic” feedback, I suggest you use this framework to get more clarity from your manager on what you actually need to do to respond to their feedback.

[Jay Lampert @MortChristenson]

Ok, who did this?

[Pete Mundo @PeteMundo]

Seinfeld episode 2026: Jerry gets tickets courtside and brings George, who decides, with the Knicks down 20 with 10 minutes left, he will leave the game early to beat the rush out of MSG.

As the Knicks mount a comeback he tries to get back into the Garden. He waves his ticket, name drops James Dolan, but nothing works and he ends up getting arrested.

Meantime, Kramer sneaks into the Garden and helps Mike Brown draw up the game winning play.

[Ujas Thakkar @thakkarujas5]

Just wrapped up with @shreyas Product Sense cohort. My mind is still percolating everything that I've learnt in the past two weeks.

The creativity section was something which blew my mind. A lot of what I thought was correct were just mental barriers getting in the way.

[Prashant Kumar @prashant_kr12]

Most courses hand you a playbook. This one dismantled mine.
No frameworks, no "top 5 tips" - just honest, uncomfortable work on how you actually think. Creativity. Taste. Judgment.
Going back to the recordings every few months. @shreyas - thanks for world class product sense !

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

The greatest assembling of product leaders in history

[Shreyas Doshi @shreyas]

Looks like a few spots are still open for the Lenny and Friends Summit. Sign up now if you haven’t already 🚀

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

The Lenny and Friends Summit returns on Thursday, September 10, in San Francisco

[Shreyas Doshi @shreyas]

Do you have colleagues or a boss who’s using AI for everything, but with zero taste, creating more work and confusion for others?

[Seth Rosen @sethrosen]

I just open sourced my "Is this slop?" simple test

[Hiten Shah @hnshah]

The more successful a product and business gets, the harder it is change what people think of it as. That’s because of word of mouth. You have to reignite word of mouth for the new message in order to overcome this issue. And the larger the customer base is, and length of time the company has existed for, the harder this is.

Not to mention that when a company is always dogfooding their own products, especially the latest and greatest features all the time, the distance from a new user increases. This makes it take even more effort to understand the current sentiment about the product versus the vision the team lives in. Takes a ton of coordination when at scale to successfully navigate this. Founder mode is probably the closest description. But that energy across the entire company.

[Shreyas Doshi @shreyas]

@Ferbin08 It’s mainly the content of the coaching.

[Shreyas Doshi @shreyas]

🆕I am starting to do more Executive Coaching now that some more space has opened up in my personal life. Now coaching 3 founders (this is different from my startup advising work) and I am now opening it up for senior product leaders.

Details are here: https://t.co/dqQxAqILdW

[Shreyas Doshi @shreyas]

Excellent observations from latest @lennysan podcast episode with @tfadell

None of these 4 points is new to an experienced product builder, but nearly every product builder still severely underestimates the degree of differentiation and success that’s possible with these skills.

[Jen Abel @jjen_abel]

there are two critical functions in sales ...

- get them into "imagine" mode
- project manage their buying process like a psychopath

[Shreyas Doshi @shreyas]

Your periodic reminder

[Shreyas Doshi @shreyas]

If you work in a company with many 100s or 1000s of employees, the best networking strategy actually lies in plain sight within your company.

Here’s how it works:

[Dean Gannon @deangannon]

I wasn't so sure.

Just completed the Product Sense course https://t.co/3sRqXF1sMk by @shreyas you can learn a systematic approach to product decisions.

It was an amazing course.

Learn a world class approach that cannot be pieced together by videos, books, or tweets.

[Rash @byrashmi22]

I rarely post, and recommend even less—but I wholeheartedly recommend @shreyas’s course on Product Sense. If you want to cut through the fluff and learn how to truly build world-class products, this course is it. Bonus: the AMAs are absolute 🔥

[Aniruddh Menon @aniruddhmenon29]

@shreyas' product sense course should be mandated at every product company❣️ Never before has a course deconstructed topics like "taste" and "creativity" so elaborately. The quality of your thinking can only improve once you are ready to see the TRUTH!
https://t.co/6UZZ65JQ5l