# Shreyas Doshi on The Three Different Types of Product Leaders and How To Hire Them The 6 Different Product Metrics You Need To Know and What Good is For Each of Them & Table Stakes Features vs Wow Features; What To Prioritise 20Product · Aug 3, 2022 · 46 min · 9,031 words Speakers: Harry Stebbings, Shreyas Doshi Source: https://www.996.fm/episodes/20vc--ep-46f4fbe4/ ## Cold open **Harry Stebbings** [0:00]: Welcome back to 20 Product with me, Harry Stebbings. Now 20 Product is the monthly show where we interview the world's leading product minds to reveal their tips, lessons, and strategies to scaling the best product teams, and I'm so excited for the show's day. I'm one of the biggest fans of this guest on Twitter. Their threads on all things product are legendary, and if you haven't checked them out, then it really is a must. With that, I'm so delighted to welcome Shreyas Doshi, investor, advisor, and all around product OG. Most recently, Shreyas spent over five years at Stripe, where he was Stripe's first PM Manager and helped define and grow the Product Management function from five to more than 50 people. Before Stripe, Shreyas was the Director of Product Management at Twitter. And prior to Twitter, he spent over six years as a group product manager at Google. Today, Shreyas has invested in and advises some of the best, including Airtable, Kalshi, Lendflow, to name a few. But before we dive into the show's ## Sponsor read **Harry Stebbings** [0:50]: day, you have to check out builder.ai. They make building software so easy that anyone can do it. If you have a vision, you can build it with builder.ai. And one of my favorite products of theirs is Studio Rapid. I always think the number one reason people fail is they don't start, and Studio Rapid is the perfect tool for when you need an MVP fast. And when I say fast, you can build simple, beautiful native apps in less than one day. 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If you're not using UX cam, what are you waiting for? Go to uxcam.com/20vc to claim your free two month extended free trial. But that is enough from me, so now you can hear me at fanboy over the incredible Shreyas Doshi and some of his great, great wisdom. 3210. You have now arrived at your destination. ## Conversation **Harry Stebbings** [2:34]: Shreyas, this is such a joy to do. I've been a fan of yours from afar on Twitter for a while, but thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks for having me, Harry. Not at all. As I said, I've loved some of your Twitter threads, and they've been pretty informative to me. So you've been part of some of the most incredible orgs from Stripe, Twitter, Google. How did you make your way into the world of Product First? **Shreyas Doshi** [2:53]: Yeah. So I started my career back in difficult, tough days of the Valley. This was 2001 as an engineer. And as an engineer here in California who needed a visa, it was very difficult to get jobs back then. It was a drastically different environment than the one we found ourselves in over the last decade. I was lucky enough though to join some really great teams early on in my career as an engineer. I moved to Silicon Valley in 2003 to join a team that used to formally be Loud Cloud, the Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz company. When I was there, I got introduced to Product Management mainly because I found myself getting sent to customer interviews and customer meetings and whatnot by my manager. And I didn't quite understand why. I was just an engineer, very early career. But I think my managers back then saw in something in me that I did not yet. And I found myself getting very interested in learning about what customers are doing with the product, particularly coming up with more creative solutions about solving the customer problems. And that's when I realized that maybe I should try this Product Management thing. Traditionally, back then, people would do their MBA in order to get into Product Management. And I decided I did not want to do that. I considered it, but decided I did not want to do that. And I just said, oh, let me just apply to some consumer Internet companies, talk to Google, Yahoo at the time, Yahoo during its better days. And that was my first real product management experiences when I joined Yahoo as a Product Manager back in 2000 Since then, it's been a really fun ride. **Harry Stebbings** [4:22]: There's a lot that I would just wanna unpack. I wanna start with just some nomenclature. Product management is thrown about quite a lot as a term. When I say Product Management to you, Shreyas, how **Shreyas Doshi** [4:31]: do you define it? So my definition is Product Management is the art, science and practice of making successful products and making products successful. There are two aspects here and it's not just a play on words, both are very important. Making successful product means that you often have to start with nothing and then make a successful product. So that's kind of the early stage to reaching Product Market Fit and beyond scaling. So that's one aspect of it. The other aspect which is making products successful, is when there is a product that already exists and maybe you weren't there at the beginning, but it's at a stage where it's either poised for a lot of growth or it's not. And maybe it's even a turnaround story. Product Management, again, is the art, science and practice of actually making that happen. When I share this Harry, a lot of times people will ask me, Oh, but wait, what is success? My view of success is it's not complicated. Product success. You need to start with three things to begin evaluating product success, which is User Adoption, Customer Satisfaction, and Business Impact. Any product, you need to start with each of these three or a subset of these three to determine product success. Now the exact metric may vary depending on your product, depending on its stage, and whatnot. But ultimately, building successful products is about user adoption, customer satisfaction, and business impact. **Harry Stebbings** [5:52]: This is why I love the show because, like, this was never obviously structured. Like, user adoption is the first one. There are so many different metrics that one can choose as a focus point. I speak to many who have number of users, and I'm like, no. No. No. We don't wanna grow users as much as possible. That's not a sign of product market fit. What is is number of sessions per day, number of tasks created. I don't care about top line growth of users, but the tasks that they do to signify their product love. How do you think about, like, finding the right metric within user adoption when there are so many? **Shreyas Doshi** [6:27]: Yeah. I think metrics is a highly misunderstood concept and there's just so much nuance to it. This kind of question gets debated endlessly within many companies, including extremely successful companies. It's like, what's the right metric? And let's do a bunch of these meetings to make it happen. And it's not because it's easy. It's not. But I think we need a more fundamental view here when we talk about things like user metrics and user adoption and those types of things. So so the way I look at it, Harry, is I think overall product metric metrics fall in six categories. So that's a good place to start. And they are Health Metrics, Usage Metrics, Adoption Metrics, Satisfaction Metrics, Ecosystem Metrics and Outcome Metrics. We don't need to get into each of these six. But first thing you need to recognize is there isn't one metric. There are many different types of metrics or categories of metrics that you need to be cognizant of. One of these metrics is adoption metrics. And that's where we get into things like user adoption, user growth, and those sorts of things. One thing to observe about adoption metrics is that adoption doesn't happen on its own. There need to be certain conditions that preconditions that need to be satisfied so you can get to adoption. So when I'm talking to an early stage team, product or startup, and we are talking about adoption, I often encourage them to have some sort of a North Star on adoption, whatever that is, number of active users or users that are retained or new user sign ups. Those are all variants of adoption metrics. But I think it's even more important. A lot of teams just stop there. A lot of teams say, okay, this is our adoption metric and now we are going to make it better. And that's the mistake. The mistake there is again, adoption is an end result of something else you do. So you're better off measuring those things those other things and that's where things like usage metrics come in. So usage metric is about how people are actually using the product and a lot of teams don't actually have a lot of visibility into that. Only if you understand what type of usage leads to adoption will you actually be able to address the inputs. Because in some ways, is the output of your activities. Absolutely. **Harry Stebbings** [8:39]: Is. **Shreyas Doshi** [8:39]: This is **Harry Stebbings** [8:39]: always what frustrates me when they give me, like, output metrics. It's like, no, no, I want input metrics. I want number of tasks created in Notion, number of new projects. What was health metrics, Shreyas? **Shreyas Doshi** [8:50]: Yeah. Health metrics are, you know, another way to define it is like they're hygiene metrics. The way I like to describe a metric is what key question is this category of metric answering? So with health metrics, the key question that it's answering is this product available and performing in the manner that users would reasonably expect. Users are not using your product in isolation. They use many different products and human beings compare how your product does compared to other things that they are used to using. Users implicitly tend to have a certain type of expectation for the type of product you are. And those expectations vary. If I'm using an e commerce product, my expectations are very different. And I'm using a social product versus if I'm using some internal enterprise product as just an example. So is this product available and performing in the manner that users would reasonably expect is the key question. And some examples of health metrics are latency, initial load time, data loss rate, errors that you see. So these are things that are really important for you to keep track of. Oftentimes we fixate on the growth funnel and all of those things. If we lose sight of like basics that we're not getting right in the product that are perhaps not very evident, we might wonder why adoption is not where we want it to be. Health metrics by themselves will rarely drive your business forward, but health metrics, if you don't pay attention to them, can drastically impede your business. **Harry Stebbings** [10:12]: When you speak and you advise incredible companies that I spoke to many of the founders that you advise. But when you speak to founders and work with founders today, what do you think is the most misunderstood metric category? And why do you think that **Shreyas Doshi** [10:24]: is? I think one category that is highly misunderstood is a lot of people talk about the North Star metric, the NSM. What's your North Star metric? I'll tell you I get a lot of emails and messages over all DMs from folks who ask me, hey, I have this product, I have this startup and you know, have some ideas on what my North Star metric should be. So what do you think? And the reason I say this concept is misunderstood. The North Star metric is not a panacea. Some people who want to train you on North Star metrics may make it seem that way but the North Star metric is not a panacea. Finding the perfect metric as your NSM is actually not necessary. Especially when you're early stage, what you're mainly looking for is, is my product resonating? So what I often advise founders, don't try for perfection with your North Star metric. If you found something that generally works and is measurable, just pick it as your North Star metric. You don't have to try to tweak it and get into immeasurable categories because oftentimes what happens is the perfect metric is very hard to measure. Then you try very hard to fix that. And you're spending time working on a metric instead of spending time actually like shipping product and actually improving your usage metrics and your adoption metrics, which are the things that actually matter and will feed into your North Star metric. That aspect is very misunderstood. The other thing I'll say related to North Star metric is especially for early stage product, you're gonna get a lot more signal from the qualitative inputs than you are simply from your North Star metric. And I'm not saying just do one or the other, but again, for early stage products, it's really important not just to stare at a metric. It's very important to get access to qualitative feedback. Well, you know, throughout my career, one of the best learnings I've had is when I've just exposed a feedback form for users with one field, which is like, tell us what you think about the product. What works, what doesn't work? Some question to that effect. And then I created a morning routine where there would be an email system where these users' inputs would show up in my email. So my routine was just to look through those qualitative pieces of feedback. And I got so much more user empathy and insight from those than I could ever get from a dashboard. So yes, North Star metric is useful to have. It's useful to create targets against, etcetera, but don't try to perfect it. And that part, I think, is very misunderstood along with not taking into account the importance of qualitative inputs. **Harry Stebbings** [12:46]: Before we get into the different types of product leaders, speaking of that North Star metric and you're advising me in my hypothetical startup journey, should I, the founder and CEO, be the one to determine the North Star metric and prioritize product metrics? Or should that be the responsibility of my CPO Head of Product? **Shreyas Doshi** [13:04]: Do you feel competent enough to do it? That's the main question. If you do, as a founder, by all means define it yourself. If you're not very competent in the area, it is still ultimately your responsibility. Now you might delegate aspects of it to somebody else on your team, whether it's the Chief Product Officer or somebody else. But ultimately, because this is such a top level metric that you're going to create targets against that you're gonna hopefully track on a regular basis, you have to be deeply involved. In either case, whether you're competent with it or you don't feel highly competent with it, your involvement as a founder is extremely necessary, especially for an early stage product. Do **Harry Stebbings** [13:43]: you feel competent? I'm glad this is a hypothetical discussion, Shreyas. I do wanna discuss because the show is actually in the verticalized way here, like, products started because I felt that founders didn't know what truly great looked like when hiring great product people and great product leaders in particular. When we spoke before, you said that there are three product leaders in terms of different types. I'd love to just understand. I'm, again, the founder and CEO. I'm hiring my first CPO, head of product, product leader, whatever we wanna call them. What are the three different product leader personas that I should know about when entering this hiring process? **Shreyas Doshi** [14:18]: So just in the last year, I've spoken with more than 50 founders about the general area of, oh, my product is growing really fast, and I think I need a CPO or a VP Product, or my board tells me or my VCs tell me that I should go hire a VP Product and delegate various aspects of the product, they reach out to me and sometimes we'll get on a call. Every single conversation is actually very different. Fundamentally, if product is what's going to drive your startup success, you have to create your own script around what you are looking for. And that can only be done if we understand how your business is going to be driven forward. From those conversations, I have been able to extract some patterns. One of the patterns is the three types of Product Leaders, and they are the operator, the craftsperson, and the visionary. When I kind of start sharing these names or these labels, founders will start asking me like, oh, so like, which one is right for me? Just tell me which one is right for me. And I was like, no, no, no, not so fast. What is really important is there is no one right answer, first of all. It really depends. But the second thing is that it's important to recognize that it's not like a certain person can only be an operator, highly competent senior product leaders. They can wear each of these hats. So you can think about them as hats, but still people have a primary hat and that's the hat that makes them most comfortable. That's the hat they would rather wear. I'll just briefly go into what each of these is. But the operator is excellent at scaling teams, driving cross org alignment and unblocking execution. And the operator's superpower is communication. On the other hand, one of their challenges is actually original product insight. So this is very important to remember. There are oftentimes there are operators who just like have amazing resumes and they've scaled companies and products extremely well, whether it's larger companies or midsize companies. But despite all that experience, they do not have the ability to come up with really original product insights. This is where often things go wrong with a CPO hiring or VP product hiring. Sometimes your situation is such that you don't do not yet need an operator. Eventually, almost everybody starts needing an operator in their head of product role, but you don't yet need one. But you bring somebody on with the expectation that like, oh, business is gonna quadruple at some point. So at some point we're gonna need somebody like this. So why not bring them early? But the problem is now this operator starts operating instead of helping you get to a better position with your product market fit. To get to a better position with your PMF, that requires original product insight. And without much help, the operator is not going to be able to do it on their own. So that's just an example of where things go wrong. **Harry Stebbings** [16:57]: When does that transition happen from not needing the operator to needing the operator? Is it post Product Market Fit? Is it Series C and beyond? Is it post international expansion? Like when is that transition of now you need an operator? **Shreyas Doshi** [17:13]: Personally went through that transition myself when I was leading Connect, which is Stripe Connect, which is a major, major business for Stripe. I started leading it when the product was already being used by quite a few of Stripe customers. The team was only four engineers at the time. So it was like early ish in its life. And the business just I was leading it for three years and the business and the product was just like scaled tremendously. And then at some point I realized that, oh, this is getting too big for me and not big in terms of just my ability to manage the business or my ability to manage the team, but more in terms of just what I'm passionate about. During those three years, product grew. I don't know how many X, but like significantly, team grew correspondingly as well. And I just realized that I was doing things. My day was spent in doing things that I did not enjoy. And in many cases I found boring, but that was the job at that point. Then I went to my manager, John Collison was my manager back then. And I said, within the next several months, I think I need to go back to something that's earlier stage. We ended up actually doing that. I went back to something that was like very early stage at Stripe and helped grow that business, which was Stripe Terminal, it's in person payment solution. So from that experience, what I learned and having then seen many founders and product leaders go through similar experiences, it's definitely post product market fit. It is nearly impossible for an operator to solely or mainly bring your product to Product Market Fit. Now it can happen, but it's extremely rare and you should not bank on it. But once you hit Product Market Fit and as your product starts scaling and as the demand for it starts growing and as the cross organization complexity increases. Now what happens is in addition to managing the product, you also have a real big organization to manage. Oftentimes it's cross team, right? Like you're not owning everything. And that's where operators are tremendously valuable because they are extremely skilled at orchestrating cross organizational action. They're extremely skilled at communication to make sure that everybody's aligned. They're fairly skilled at setting targets, setting goals, and creating a sort of a rhythm in terms of how you launch things in this complex internal environment. So really that is the point. Now, you know, it's not necessarily corresponding to the series C or series D or series A or B, right? Like, as you know, there are many late stage companies that are still pre PMF. So it really depends on sort of like what you're trying to do, where your product is at, what challenges you're facing. But at some point it becomes very clear that you need an operator and then you need to go find one. What's the Craftsperson in terms of like that profile then? Walk me through that one. So the Craftsperson is excellent at defining products and strategy and mentoring other product people. And their superpower is product insight. So if the craftsperson is able to translate an extremely ambiguous goal or an extremely ambiguous vision into concrete product that has a very high chance of winning. That skill of translating something high level and ambiguous to actual product, actual user experience, the pixels, the customer support experience, the interplay of the various things that need to happen to make a product and a business successful, they are able to translate that really well. Again, their superpower is Product Insight, but they're not excellent at dealing with large orgs and its taxes, right? Because any large org comes with all sorts of taxes that you have to deal with. They just don't enjoy that. Over my career, I started off as a visionary, which we can talk about later, but then I morphed myself into being a craftsperson. As organizations started getting large, I was just uncomfortable with managing that. Like I said, I found that boring. They love spending time with the team and users. It's interesting. Operators, they love spending time with their peers, other functional heads, and company execs, and the board. Whereas, scraps people absolutely love spending time with users and customers and the team. And they get really excited about product deep dives. And, oh, let's walk through this flow and how can we make it better? And that sort of conversation, which is very different from a conversation you might have with your cross functional executive team or with the board, for instance. So that's the Craftsperson. It's a very essential ingredient in any team. Whether it's a product leader or even individual product managers, you need these people so that you can translate something ambiguous into something concrete. **Harry Stebbings** [21:35]: If I'm hiring my first CPO, head of product, whatever we wanna name it, the senior product hire, is that profile the profile I wanna go for being the crafts person? **Shreyas Doshi** [21:45]: That is a reasonable default, especially if you're early stage, say, perhaps pre PMF or just about reaching PMF, then crafts person is of good default. But there, again, it depends on your competence as a founder. Particularly, again, when I go through these kind of sessions with founders, one of the core things I ask them is like, why do you want to hire a Product Manager? Whether it's at any level, an individual contributor or a leader, what is it that you want this person to do that you are doing right now? Because presumably you want to kind of like delegate certain responsibilities. So what is it? And is it the right thing to delegate? Sometimes Harry, the answer is, Oh, I want to delegate a lot of the operational work. I want to delegate the figuring out how the sprints are going to work or figuring out how customer support is going to get impacted by this new product feature that we are launching. Those types of things I want to delegate, but I still feel like I need to own the core kind of customer insight, the core product insights, and some of the definition of the product. In those cases, you may want to bring a sort of like a mid level or a junior operator type person and kind of delegate those operations while still holding on to the visionary and craftsperson hat yourself as a founder. So that is possible, but the default craftsperson is a good place to start. **Harry Stebbings** [23:06]: Before we move into the visionary, you mentioned like the craftsperson struggles with the scaling product team. What are the first things to break, Shreyas, in a Scaling Product Team? **Shreyas Doshi** [23:15]: There are two core things that tend to break across most situations. One is within the team and that is that as a team grows, a large part of your role as a leader becomes one you're basically a repeater. You just have to keep repeating the same thing. You may repeat it in different ways, but you're effectively repeating the same message. If you're managing a team of 25 people, you can have a sort of personal relationship, some amount of trust, some amount of like just mind meld with a group that's say 20 or 25. Now your team is 50 people, including engineers, designers, etcetera, or like the team is 80 people, right? Like there's a team that's kind of building a product that has 80 people. It's impossible to create that mind meld. So you need to change your approach. Now, instead of relying on one to one or one to few interactions, you have to rely on one to many interactions. But people don't remember as much as we think they remember. So you have to keep repeating the vision, the goals, the strategy, etcetera, etcetera. And like that becomes a really important part of your role. A craftsperson can do this, but as the team scales, a craftsperson, most craftspeople don't enjoy that because a craftsperson derives energy from being in the product, from having intimate conversations about evolving the product. So it's not the kind of thing that a craftsperson wants to do as a major part of their job. So that's one thing that kind of starts breaking internally for a craftsperson. Externally, so outside of the org, outside of the team, what ends up happening is as the business scales, are other parts of the business, other departments like sales and support and BD and marketing and various other parts of the organization begin relying on you. And you begin relying more on them as well. You're no longer kind of self sufficient and scrappy. And so as the company has grown and as your product has grown, there are a lot of just like alignment issues. There are a lot of dependencies that you need to resolve. At that point, when you reach a certain scale, that becomes an extremely large part of a Product Leader's role. And at that point, you are basically just in many, many meetings. Again, craftspeople can do meetings and they enjoy meetings. But if a craftsperson spends three weeks going to these various alignment meetings, they are going to get frustrated. So that's the part that starts breaking outside of the team. At which point, if you're a self aware craftsperson that wants to remain a craftsperson, you start thinking, oh, maybe it's time for me to go back to something more scrappy, something more early stage. **Harry Stebbings** [25:45]: I'm wondering what visionary is. If Craftsperson does have the original product insight, does have that creativity within them, what is the profile of a visionary? **Shreyas Doshi** [25:53]: Yeah. So a visionary is a very interesting one. And among these profiles, the visionary is the most rare. The visionary is excellent at big picture thinking, inventing what's next, and their superpower being that they can see what others cannot see. It would seem like this should be a fairly common trait, but again, a competent visionary is extremely rare. **Harry Stebbings** [26:13]: What's the difference between a competent and an incompetent visionary? Given so much of their beliefs of future held, what's the difference? **Shreyas Doshi** [26:20]: So you cannot define it looking forward simply because ultimately, it's not gonna be a satisfying answer, but this is true as far as I've seen, is you're just more right about where the world is headed. And there are people who are more right than others. This is actually why I love Amazon's one of Amazon's leadership principles. Leaders are right a lot. And it's my favorite of they have really great leadership principles. This one's my favorite because this is so misunderstood because there are many people who say, well, like there is no such thing as being visionary, being right a lot. You follow a process, make sure it's a good process, make sure you set OKRs, make sure you execute well and success will be yours. No, that is not how anything works in the real world. That is actually the operator speaking when that operator has taken a product from say 20 to 60 or 60 to 100. And it's easy to say that, oh, success is all about just following processes, setting structures, setting goals, and diligently following them. And all of that is very important. But they forget that it's actually a high degree of creativity and instinct that gave you the luxury to be able to take a product from 20 to 60. Then that could have only happened with the vision of a visionary and the craft of a craftsperson who are right a lot. Sometimes it gets confusing like, okay, so what's the difference between a visionary and a craftsperson? One of the challenges with a visionary is that a visionary finds it difficult to translate that big vision, which by the way, again, definition, very few people can see that vision. Even many craftspeople cannot see that big vision. A visionary finds it hard to translate that to concrete product steps Like, okay, so I want to do this. I want to revolutionize, I don't know, spreadsheets. And I have a certain vision in my head of how that is supposed to happen. But what is the first step I take? What is the next step I take? And what's the step after that? That is where a visionary works very well with a craftsperson because a craftsperson can translate that into concrete steps. And again, there are many visionaries who are also craftspeople. And I've worked with many such folks. So they can do that job, but only to a point. These really great visionaries, they often find it hard, not always, but they often find it hard without the support of craftspeople and operators to do it consistently. Should the founder not be the visionary and the CPO not be the craftsperson? On founding teams, I've found that it's usually one of the founders that's the visionary. Perhaps, you know, there's another founder that's more like an operator and maybe even a third that's more like a craftsperson. But typically, there's one founder who's the core visionary who then takes ownership of the product early on and sometimes wears the craftsperson hat. And like I said, they can be fairly good at it to kind of translate that vision into certain kind of product manifestations. But at some point it becomes harder for them. Because once you start getting users and once you start getting usage, what ends up happening is users are pulling you in many different directions. The visionary has a very clear view of the future, but being responsible people, they also now take into account user and customer feedback. And that can get confusing at times. Even if it's not confusing for them, they may find it hard to kind of like bring the team along on like, okay, given all this kind of conflicting feedback and this plethora of ways in which we can take the product, here's what we're going to do as step one, step two, step three. Here's how we're going to actually build out the product. These are the flows that matter. These are the flows that don't matter. That's when, whether it's a CPA or a VP Product or even a Director of Product or an individual Product Manager, Craftsperson becomes a great asset for a visionary. **Harry Stebbings** [29:44]: How do you determine when to listen to customer feedback versus when to progress with expected and planned roadmap and ignore it? **Shreyas Doshi** [29:52]: Perennial question of product management. And my view on this is there are some teams that say that they are highly customer driven. And that's seen kind of as a virtue, which is like, oh, we are very customer driven. But in reality, what ends up happening when you kind of label yourself way that you are customer driven, you end up just following what customers are telling you. And sometimes that can be the right answer. Especially once your product has already reached a certain scale, you can be customer driven and build what they ask you to build and because you already have some assets, differentiation. So that works. But I have found that it's very important to ground what you do in terms of a core strategy. So the strategy becomes the piece, the artifact, the guideline for when you listen to customers and when you don't listen to customers. And this is best explained perhaps via an example. One of the products I managed at Stripe was Stripe Terminal, which is an in person kind of point of sale payment solution. Point of sale payments have been around for a really long time and Stripe was creating its own solution like that. One of the challenges that we faced is that we were competing against very powerful incumbents. And again, because point of sale payments had been around for a long time, there was a massive gap that we had to fill in terms of just basic table stakes features. To give you a concrete example, when you are accepting payments for events, it is complicated because sometimes the event might be occurring, say it's a concert or something else, the event might be occurring in a place where there's no network access. How do you do that online auth authorization that this card is good for the $100 ticket that it's purchasing for whatever goods that they're purchasing at the concert. You can't. So there is a solution to that, which is offline mode, and it's not easy to build that. So as we were trying to get Stripe Terminal to get adoption, we would get all these feature requests, which is like, oh, we need offline mode and we need all sorts of other kind of security features or all sorts of additional customization features. Like for instance, the point of sale terminal that you see, the payment terminal that you see at the grocery store is highly customized. It has the branding, various other things. Customers were asking us for all of these features. Our team was very tiny. If we were to just build all of these, what I call table stakes features, it would just take us five years just to even just basically meet the table stakes. We could have done that. But at the end of those five years, you end up with a product that's just a poor substitute for one of the incumbent products that have had a ten year, fifteen year lead on you. So yes, I can follow what customers are saying and I can launch these features that'll make them happy, but now I have a product that's hardly differentiated. So in this situation, what we decided to do was something different. We said, you know what? We are actually going to I have this framework called I haven't talked much about it or at all about it, like sort of externally. So this will be the first time. I have this framework called the BTD framework, which is essentially for any important aspect of your product, you decide whether you want to come in below table stakes, that is B. You decide if you want to come in at table stakes, that is T. Or you decide you actually want to differentiate, that is above table stakes, above what is expected, and that's differentiation. Just use BTD, which is be intentful about certain customer requests and say, you know what, for this type of request, we are going to come in below table stakes. In other cases, you may decide, oh, I want to meet table stakes. And in some other cases, you may go well beyond what customers are saying or build something entirely different that customers aren't even asking for, which is a lot of what we ended up doing with Terminal. That becomes the basis of your strategy. And that's why I think being strategy driven is very important. **Harry Stebbings** [33:34]: Can I ask you a hard question? When Angel investing and advising companies today, when you look at that framework, which are you most attracted to and do you find most compelling as a Product Leader, Product Investor? Which one are you most attracted to today? **Shreyas Doshi** [33:48]: What I found most interesting is, and I think this generally works for most products and new products and new startups. You are entering a fairly crowded space where maybe there's a very powerful incumbent, the customer segment you target becomes really important because what you want to do is you want to target kind of customer, a segment of customer that the incumbent is not doing a very good job of satisfying. For that target customer, then you determine, okay, what are their unfulfilled needs? So yes, the incumbent has a bunch of like features and they're doing well, etcetera. But you will find pockets of customers and segments, these segments that are highly dissatisfied. So that's a good strategy for a new product where you find those pockets of customer segments that are highly dissatisfied with certain features because they're not important for the incumbent across its customer base. But they're very important for this specific segment. And that's where I like companies that are very clear on targeting certain segments and then creating highly differentiated experiences for them. And when you do that, and this is essentially what we did it with Stripe Terminal is when you target a specific segment and meet their unfulfilled needs in surprising ways, and you go way above table stakes, you differentiate, they will give you a lot of leeway. They will be willing to live without a bunch of other conventional table stakes because your product performs so well on their core use case where the alternatives are not that great, frankly, for them, that they will be willing to live with some pain. They'll give you a lot of just leeway to catch up on some of the table stakes. **Harry Stebbings** [35:18]: I totally get you there, especially in kind of the verticalization. When you think about your angel investing today, how do you think that has changed your product mindset, having had the exposure that you now have from advising and investing in so many? **Shreyas Doshi** [35:32]: I think the core thing that this one's very obvious in hindsight, but previously when I started angel investing, was very attracted to the idea. What I realized over time that that is unnecessary, but by no means a sufficient condition. In fact, it's not even one of the main conditions. And instead, I realized that the core thing that matters is how great is this founder? And this is why it's obvious, right? Like, it's not like I'm the first person to realize this, but I had to go through that journey to really accept that realization that if the founder like, and now the core question I ask is, is this person among the most capable people I've ever encountered? And it's a very simple litmus test, obviously, that requires conversation, that requires asking good questions and whatnot. If that is true, and that's the bar I apply for advising as well, because I want to keep the number of companies to a manageable size. So one of the core things I look at is, is this person one of the most capable persons I've ever come across? And do I think that they will be able to create and hire a top notch team? **Harry Stebbings** [36:33]: Can I ask, if you look back at the Kalsons in particular, what profile would you put them in, in terms of craftsperson, visionary or operator? **Shreyas Doshi** [36:41]: They're both brilliant people. So my assessment would be Patrick is very much a visionary craftsperson. Every time I've interacted with him and I learned a lot about product from interacting with him, that's been the conversation. Is the visionary craftsperson mindset. What is the big idea here? And how are we going to differentiate? How are we going to get user adoption? How do we get product details right? How do we surprise users? How do we further the brand? How is this brand aligned? Those types of things were a constant aspect of my interactions with Patrick. So he would be that visionary craftsperson archetype. John is interesting. He's one of the rare people who can do, I think, who can do, and I've seen him do all three really well. There were many times when, like, John was managing certain teams on an interim basis at Stripe that clearly had never managed that type of team, whether it's sales or something else before, but he was able to do it really well. John is harder for me because I've seen him kinda do each of these three. And not just do each of these three, but, like, actually just enjoy doing it, at least from the way I was looking at it. **Harry Stebbings** [37:47]: Final one, it's bit random. How important is time to value in a customer experience? Often, I speak to founders like, oh, we need to reduce the time to value. It needs to be quicker. It needs to be more emotive and valuable faster. And sometimes I think yes, and sometimes I think you have to go slow to go fast, and you do need to connect your data sources, different accounts, whatever the process is. How do you think about time to value when advising companies today? **Shreyas Doshi** [38:10]: I think it goes back to what is the core customer motivation and how strong is that core customer motivation. And I think this is something that very few teams do on a consistent basis. Some of the companies I advise, I love to see after I've advised them for a while, they'll run some products by me. They will actually start with, okay, so the core customer motivation or the core user motivation we think is X. So in order to help the customer fulfill that motivation, here's the product. So this lead with the motivation rather than leading with the actual product experience. So I love that. Now just expanding on that a bit, when the core customer motivation is extremely high, you can afford to lend them that time to value. But when the core customer motivation is not that high, and particularly you have to remember, it's not just about what they hope to accomplish. It's also about what alternatives they have. So the alternatives factor into the degree of motivation around fulfilling that motivation with your product. So if I have a lot of alternatives, including the alternative of continuing with the tool or the app that I already use, which may be suboptimal, then my core motivation as a customer is not going to be that high. So then in that case, you've got to show me the value sooner. So let's take B2B because I just love this question and there is so much value to be created by companies and startups if they understand this consistently. You take some B2B products. My observation is some B2B products, what I call mandate products. And what I mean by mandate products, when an executive gets hired in a specific role, that executive makes a company mandate and certainly a mandate for himself or herself to roll out that product across their department. So that's a mandate product. What's an example of a mandate product? Workday is a great example of a mandate product, which is in many parts of the world. If you are a chief people officer that has joined or VP of human resources that just joined a scaling company, say more than 500 or a thousand people, often a lot of the work is happening in spreadsheets or some tools. And you come in and the first thing you say, we're going to roll out Workday. So Workday becomes a mandate product. If you are a CFO, if you're hired as the first CFO, you'll come in and you will likely roll out NetSuite as the mandate product. And there are many other examples like that if you're the Chief Data Officer or whatever. But the point here is a mandate product usually has a very long time to value because you have to roll it out across the organization. You have to train people. You know, it's like a six month process, sometimes even a year long process, for instance, to roll out NetSuite. So that time to value is very long. But the observation here is that the credibility has already been established, which is like, you cannot go wrong if you roll out this product within the organization. You will not be fired. In fact, you might get promoted for rolling this out because you'll create a whole lot of cost savings or you'll create a whole lot of efficiencies. And that's what you wanna do as a new executive within the company is to start showing how you are being a lot more effective than the company was before you. So in those situations, like the marketing and the branding also matters, the positioning matters. So when your positioning is very unique and very strong, you can have a much longer time to value as well. So again, it's like, I don't think there's one right answer. And sometimes on Twitter or other places, people will just say, this is the one way to do it. And it's like, no. No. No. You have to be really thoughtful and intentional about these things. **Harry Stebbings** [41:27]: Shreyas, the trouble I have with you is I could talk to you all day about a lot of these things because I have a lot of, like, product questions where I've thought them for a long time and needed your wisdom. But we can do a part two in another segment. I wanna do a quick fire round now where I say a short statement and then you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay? Alright. Let's do it. Okay. So what in the realm of product **Shreyas Doshi** [41:47]: have you changed your mind on recently? The role of metrics. There isn't one type of metric. There are actually several types of metrics and you have to really decide what type of metrics are really important for you right now versus what will become important later. **Harry Stebbings** [42:00]: What are the biggest mistakes you see founders make when hiring their first product hires? **Shreyas Doshi** [42:06]: They overemphasize background, resume, titles and companies that the executive has worked at. They often ignore their instinct about the executive during the interview process. Unfortunately, end up regretting the choice six months, twelve months down the road. What piece of advice would you give to a new product leader starting a new role today? Focus on understanding the customer and the domain extremely well. Don't pressure yourself into creating value within the first thirty days or even the first sixty days because you are playing the long game. And also start building relationships and strong relationships across the organization, but especially with your team from day one. Do not postpone that. **Harry Stebbings** [42:50]: As a Product Leader yourself, what was your biggest strength and what was your biggest weakness? **Shreyas Doshi** [42:55]: Biggest strength was Product Sense, the ability to often be right about what product is going to work. Biggest weakness was about making the broad organization aware about all the progress that my team and my product was making. **Harry Stebbings** [43:11]: Final one. What recent company product strategy have you been most impressed by? **Shreyas Doshi** [43:16]: There's a company that's based out of India. It's called Lead School, and I've been advising them for more than a year and their product strategy, really exciting for me. What they're doing is they're bringing high quality, really high quality school K through 12 education to smaller towns and smaller cities. So not the big metropolitan areas in India, but the smaller towns and smaller cities in India, where what they want to do is they want to create greater parity of the quality of education you can get being part living in a smaller town as a child in India, and kinda and they are doing that via a combination of curriculum, technology, and operations to support the curriculum and technology. So it's been great to sort of, like, watch them kinda not just formulate that strategy, but also execute on it for the last year. **Harry Stebbings** [44:01]: Shreyas, I knew this would be a great show. Shows like this make me really appreciate why I love what I do so much. So thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for putting up with my basic questions, and I've so enjoyed having you on. Yeah. **Shreyas Doshi** [44:12]: Likewise, Harry. This was a blast, and looking forward to our next chat. **Harry Stebbings** [44:18]: I mean, so many incredible takeaways from that episode with Shreyas. I hope you got your notebook out. I hope you enjoyed it. If you wanna see more from Shreyas, you can find him on Twitter at Shreyas. Likewise, I'd love to see you behind the scenes. You can find us at 20vc.com. But before we leave you today, ## Sponsor read **Harry Stebbings** [44:32]: you have to check out builder.ai. They make building software so easy that anyone can do it. If you have a vision, you can build it with builder.ai. And one of my favorite products of theirs is Studio Rapid. I always think the number one reason people fail is they don't start, and Studio Rapid is the perfect tool for when you need an MVP fast. And when I say fast, you can build simple, beautiful native apps in less than one day. But don't just take my word, Fred. Take the words of BBC, Pepsi, Fujitsu, some of the world's leading brands all loving and using the builder.ai product suite. Head over to builder.ai to find out more. And speaking of creating beautiful customer experiences and products, if your business runs on a mobile app, you have to check out UXCam. Designed specifically for mobile product teams, UXCam helps build better apps by making user motivations and frustrations loud and clear. Product teams love this app experience analytics platform that empowers them with clarity and speed. UX Cam auto captures billions of microinteraction level data like screen swipes and taps with tools like session replay, heat maps, funnels, crash analytics, and auto capture of user frustrations and bugs, it has never been easier to uncover real user behavior. Join over 30,000 apps such as Costa Coffee, Nando's, Delivery Hero, and Rappi, who optimize their product with UX cam. If you're not using UX cam, what are you waiting for? Go to uxcam.com/20vc to claim your free two month extended free trial. As always, I so appreciate all your support, and I cannot wait to bring you a fantastic episode this coming Friday.