Doshi: Written culture enables permissionless organizational communication
Shreyas Doshi · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · Sep 5, 2023 · at 46:04
Shreyas Doshi, former product leader at Stripe and Twitter, explains how document-driven corporate cultures eliminate the meeting gatekeepers required in non-writing organizations.
0:00 / 0:54exact quote · 54.4s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“When you have a writing culture, it becomes more of a permissionless environment. You know, say non-writing culture where perhaps the way big decisions are made or proposals are shared, it's usually in some meeting where perhaps you know, we have a discussion Or I walk you through a slide deck. Well, the observation is that all of a sudden, if that's the way that big proposals need to be made, or even small proposals need to be made, now you need permission, right? You need permission to join the meeting. You need permission to present at the meeting. You need permission. You need to ask for permission to take a synchronous, meaningful slot of everybody's time to be able to share what you want to share. And a true writing culture kind of removes a lot of those constraints, right?”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Shreyas Doshi
Doshi: High Performers Must Excel Even Under Mediocre or Absentee Managers
“When it comes to yourself, you should turn yourself into a person who can do really good work, even without having a great manager. Even if you have an okay or absentee manager, you should turn yourself into a person who can do really great work.”
Doshi: Optimizing for ROI Causes Product Teams to Build Safe Me-Too Products
“What that leads to is a lot of me too products. It leads to us kind of just meeting table stakes. It leads to kind of picking the safe things. Because the safe things are you know, easy to quantify and they're safe because they're easy to quantify. And look, I…”
Doshi: Demanding metrics before taking action causes hidden organizational damage
“Used in the wrong context, they tend to you know, cause a lot of damage that we don't even realize, because we feel like we're being smart when we say, oh, this thing must be measured before we can improve it.”
Doshi: Qualitative evaluation is often enough when measurement costs are too high
“In some cases, the effort To measure something is so large that it sometimes dissuades us from performing the action that makes sense. The fundamental sort of observation here is that sometimes evaluating how something is going is enough.”
Doshi: Great teams need only a few high-agency people to drive impact
“You don't need the entire team to be extremely high agency, but the ability of at least a few individuals on the team to have and embody this high agency approach such that, oh, actually, yes, we do have this obstacle, but here's how we're going to creatively …”
Doshi: Hire High-Agency 'Go-Getters' Over 'Frustrated Geniuses' in Ambiguous Roles
“Given a choice between hiring a frustrated genius and hiring a go-getter if it is a role that has a high degree of ambiguity, I would rather hire the go-getter than the frustrated genius, because I know the go-getter will work hard to resolve the ambiguity ver…”