Aug 3, 2022 · 1h 1m · news
Shreyas Doshi: The 6 Product Metrics You Need To Know; The 3 Types of Product Leader | E913 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
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Product expert Shreyas Doshi joins host Harry Stebbings to share foundational frameworks on product management, analyzing the six essential categories of metrics, the three archetypes of product leadership, and strategic approaches to growth.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Harry holds 11.8% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Harry as informed peer 3.2 Guest teaching 3.9 Guest disagreement 1.0 Harry pushing back 2.0
speaking balance: gold is Harry, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 33:45 Dismissing process as the sole driver of product success
Shreyas reframes the premise that process and OKRs create success, arguing forcefully that process alone cannot replace high creativity and visionary instinct.
Hardest push from Harry ▶ 33:39 Challenging visionary assessment criteriaHarry pushes Shreyas on how to distinguish competent from incompetent visionaries when both are making claims about an unproven future.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 7:00 Reframing adoption as an output rather than an inputShreyas corrects a common industry mistake by demonstrating that adoption is merely an output metric, educating the listener on focusing on underlying usage and health inputs instead.
Harry holds his own ▶ 44:54 Harry argues for playing above table stakesHarry demonstrates strong product domain expertise by challenging the strategy of chasing incumbent feature parity, arguing that startups must immediately differentiate.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Harry as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Harry pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shreyas Doshi's Background and Entry into Product | 1 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Harry warmly introduces Shreyas and asks about his background. Shreyas recounts his journey from engineering during the 2001 tech downturn to product management at Yahoo in 2006. The tone is entirely welcoming and conversational without debate. | |
| Defining Product Management and Product Success | 2 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Harry asks for a baseline definition of product management. Shreyas delivers a structured definition around making successful products and making products successful, supported by three criteria: adoption, satisfaction, and business impact. | |
| The Six Categories of Product Metrics | 5 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Harry shares his own strong view on session count versus top-line user growth as evidence of product market fit. Shreyas validates the topic and introduces his framework of six product metric categories, distinguishing inputs from outputs. | |
| Understanding Health Metrics | 3 | 5 | 2 | 2 | Shreyas breaks down health metrics and dispels common misconceptions about North Star metrics, warning against perfectionism over execution. Harry asks targeted follow-up questions regarding who in the executive team should set the metric. | |
| Product Leader Archetype 1: The Operator | 3 | 4 | 1 | 3 | Shreyas introduces the Operator archetype, detailing their strengths in cross-org alignment and weaknesses in original product insight. Harry presses on the specific inflection point when a company needs to transition to hiring an operator. | |
| Product Leader Archetype 2: The Craftsperson | 2 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Shreyas explains the Craftsperson persona and why they excel at product insight but struggle with corporate tax and large org management. Harry guides the conversation by probing into the first organizational break points when scaling. | |
| Product Leader Archetype 3: The Visionary | 4 | 4 | 2 | 4 | Harry directly challenges Shreyas to distinguish between competent and incompetent visionaries when dealing with unproven future ideas. Shreyas explains that visionaries need craftspeople to break down big ideas into concrete steps. | |
| Balancing Customer Feedback with Strategy: The BTD Framework | 6 | 4 | 1 | 3 | Shreyas reveals his BTD framework for strategic feature choices against incumbents. Harry actively inserts his own investment preference for products that jump straight to differentiation rather than playing catch-up on table stakes. | |
| Assessing Founder Capability and Profiling the Stripe Founders | 3 | 4 | 0 | 1 | Harry asks Shreyas to apply his product leader archetypes to Patrick and John Collison based on his time at Stripe. Shreyas analyzes both founders, categorizing Patrick as a Visionary-Craftsperson and John as a rare combination of all three. | |
| Time to Value and Customer Motivation | 3 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Shreyas explains how customer motivation dictates acceptable time to value, contrasting mandate enterprise software with consumer tools. Harry concludes with a quick-fire round on common founder mistakes and key advice for product leaders. |
Statements from this episode (23)
Doshi: Product success requires user adoption, customer satisfaction, and business impact
“You need to start with three things to begin evaluating product success, which is user adoption, customer satisfaction, and business impact.”
Stebbings: User growth does not indicate product-market fit; daily usage does
“We don't want to 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.”
Doshi: All product metrics fall into six foundational categories
“Overall product metric metrics fall in about 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.”
Doshi: Product teams should track usage inputs rather than output adoption metrics
“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 or even health metrics come in. So usage metric is about how people are actually using the p…”
Doshi: Health metrics rarely drive growth but ignoring them impedes business
“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.”
Doshi: Early-stage startups do not need a perfect North Star metric
“The North Star metric is not a panacea. Just defining, finding the perfect metric as your NSM is actually not necessary, right? Like you when you're, especially when you're early stage what you're mainly looking for is, is my product resonating, right?”
Doshi: Early-stage products get more signal from qualitative inputs than metrics
“Especially for early stage product. I often say that you're going to get a lot more signal from the Qualitative inputs than you are simply from your North star metric.”
Doshi: Early-stage founders must be directly involved in setting key metrics
“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.”
Doshi: Operator-style product leaders struggle to generate original product insights
“The operator is excellent at scaling teams, driving cross-org alignment, and unblocking execution. And the operator superpower is communication. On the other hand, one of their challenges is actually original product insight.”
Doshi: Stripe Connect's engineering team was only four people initially
“I started leading it when you know, the product was already being used by quite a few of Stripe customers. The team was only four engineers at the time.”
Doshi: Operator Product Leaders Rarely Achieve Product-Market Fit Alone
“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.”
Doshi: Craftsperson is the best default product leader hire for early startups
“That is a reasonable default, especially if you're early stage startup and say perhaps you know, pre-PMF or just about reaching PMF, then craftsperson is a fairly good default.”
Doshi: Product leaders cannot maintain direct team mind-meld beyond 25 members
“If you're managing a team of 20 or 25 people you can, like, have a, sort of, you know, personal relationship, some amount of trust, some amount of, like, just mind meld with a group that's, say, 20 or 25. But now your team is 50 people including engineers, des…”
Doshi: Process and OKRs alone do not drive product success
“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. Right? That is actually the operator speaking when that operator has taken a product from say, 20 to 60, or 60 to a hundred, and…”
Doshi: Visionary leaders need craftspeople to execute big product visions
“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, right? Like, and I have a certain, certain vision in my head of how that is supposed to happen. But wh…”
Doshi: Spending years matching incumbent table stakes produces an inferior product
“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. And we could have done that. We could have done that, but at the end of those five years, you end up w…”
Doshi: Underserved customers forgive missing features if core needs are exceeded
“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, b…”
Doshi: A great product idea is secondary to founder capability in startups
“What I realized over time is that, that is a necessary, but by no means a sufficient condition. In fact, it's not even one of the main conditions. And instead I realized that like the core thing that Matters is just, you know, how great is this founder?”
Doshi: Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison fits the visionary craftsperson product archetype
“My assessment would be that Patrick is very much a visionary craftsperson type person, so, you know, every time I've interacted with him, and I learned a lot from, you know, about product from interacting with him. That's been the conversation is, is the visio…”
Doshi: Stripe co-founder John Collison excels at all three product leadership archetypes
“John is interesting in that, like you know, he is He's one of the rare people who can do, I think, who kind of can do, and I've seen him do all three really well. In fact, there were many times when like John was managing certain teams on an interim basis at S…”
Doshi: High customer motivation allows products longer onboarding time to value
“When the core customer motivation is extremely high, you can afford to lengthen that time to value. Right? But when the core customer motivation is not that high, eh, and particularly you have to remember, it's not just about what they hope to accomplish, it's…”
Doshi: Founders overemphasize resumes and ignore instincts in product hires
“They overemphasize background, resume, titles, and companies that the executive has worked at and they often ignore their instinct about the executive during the interview process and then unfortunately, end up regretting the choice six months, 12 months down …”
Doshi: New product leaders shouldn't rush value creation in first 60 days
“First, focus on understanding the customer and the domain extremely well. Don't Pressure yourself into creating value within the first 30 days or even the six, first 60 days because you are playing the long game and also build, start building relationships and…”
Shorts cut from this episode
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▶ How to compete AGAINST an INCUMBENT - Part 1/2 · 20VC with H (@45:52)
▶ How to compete AGAINST an INCUMBENT - Part 2/2 · 20VC with H (@46:55)
▶ Bringing better education to small towns in India · 20VC wit (@1:00:39)
▶ The Three Types of Product Leaders · 20VC with Harry Stebbin (@19:03)
▶ The B-T-D Framework for Product Development · 20VC with Harr (@43:25)