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Doshi: Optimizing for ROI Causes Product Teams to Build Safe Me-Too Products

Shreyas Doshi · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · Sep 5, 2023 · at 1:05:17

Product leader Shreyas Doshi discusses how standard ROI prioritization models trick product teams into pursuing small, safe wins instead of high-impact bets.

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“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 have nothing against those kinds of improvements. I think those are important. Those incremental improvements are absolutely important, but I find that a lot of product teams, when they're making decisions about where to spend their time, they are solely working on those kind of high ROI things, and typically things which kind of just reduce the denominator and they are afraid to pick up the ambiguous thing, which might have a very large return but might require some effort.”

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