The Exchanges

Q a ton of about yourself and your kind of background where you grew up, where you're, where you're born and things like that. So I'd love to Learn a little bit more about the human that is Shreyas. And so maybe you start there. Like, where were you born? Where'd you grow up? What'd your parents do for work? Or what did you want to be when you grew up?

A So I was born in Mumbai, Bombay, India, and I lived there for the first 21 years of my life. I actually did not really even get to see many parts of India while I grew up in India, and basically just was in Mumbai the whole time. And then I moved here to the United States for graduate studies at age 21. My parents, my father was a businessman. And so he started his own business. He manufactured spices and marketed them. So growing up, I saw him work on packaging and pricing. And I used to, when he was short on staff, I used to be packaging the spices into the little box. Or creating some marketing material for him, not the creative part, but the grunt work. So I kind of grew up in that environment where the lines between what was my dad's business and our personal lives were very blurred. My mother, you know, just growing up was a homemaker. And so my dad was largely kind of just busy and all consumed in his business. And I ended up spending a lot of time growing up with my mother. And so both of them have had a pretty significant influence in different ways, but both significant influence on who I am. What I wanted to be when I grew up, I changed that a lot. When I was very young, uh, one of my uncle is a doctor, so I kind of saw him and I was like, oh, maybe I should be a doctor. And at some point later, I changed that. In high school, I took French and I ended up being reall…

AI assessment note: “I was born in Mumbai, Bombay, India, and I lived there for the first 21 years”

Q So there's these three levels of product work. Do you have advice for, should I just like default to one of these normally based on just like as a PM, I should always be thinking about impact or is it more, just make sure you're aligned with your leader, with your team. Is that, is that the more important takeaway?

A Yes. I think that's the more important takeaway is, uh, again, it's about now we have a vocabulary that we can talk about in an objective manner. Without kind of pointing fingers. It's like, oh, you tend to be, you know, fixated on all these execution details. And like, that's not the right thing. That's the type of feedback sometimes that gets shared. So, so now we have vocabulary to talk about this. And once you have that, you sort of can, as a team decide what is most important given your context. I'll give you an example, like for early stage teams. Yeah, of course they need to be thinking about the eventual impact. Right. But what they should actually, I think, most early stage teams should actually optimize for execution. Right. Assuming that they have come up with a reasonable hypothesis about what's going to win, their main emphasis Net needs to be on execution because you will not see impact readily on a one week horizon or a one month horizon, or perhaps even on a quarterly horizon. So that's an example of a situation where let's be explicit, right? Like we need to get great at execution. We have a set of core insights that were informed by our desire to make an impact. But now that we are like responsible for converting these insights into a product, let's be largely operating at the execution level. As an example, say there is a platform team and that platform team …

AI assessment note: “Yes. I think that's the more important takeaway is, uh, again, it's about”

Q can't. Come on, man. We're trying to try to move some metrics here. But I love that you took that as like, okay, I really find this really important. And this is a really important question to think about. And, and as a lesson of how to approach this kind of stuff. So I love that. And, oh yeah, I think you were going to talk about Stripe too, right?

A Yes. Stripe. I worked a lot with Patrick and John. John was my manager for a while. And from John, I learned a lot about marketing. John is a master marketer among many other things that he's absolutely great at. He's just a great marketer. And, um, I just learned a lot about how to think about talking about the product in terms that, you know, again, obvious stuff, but talking about product in terms that customers really understand. And then sometimes emphasizing things that we as product people might not think are really important. Because maybe we didn't spend much time on building it. And we want to talk about things that we spent a lot of time that are sort of truly innovative, et cetera, et cetera. And John would often make these, again, these kind of observations about, well, if we just talked about the product in this manner, that will likely resonate a lot more with customers. And, you know, that got me thinking a lot about how I need to kind of reframe my approach to Basically separate the effort involved in kind of building something with the effort you want to put behind talking about said thing. And that, that doesn't have to be the same features that you talk about. So, so that's something I learned a lot working with John. From Patrick, I think, you know, the main thing I learned was just how to think and communicate more clearly. Patrick did that extremely well.…

AI assessment note: “Yes. Stripe. I worked a lot with Patrick and John.”

Q Just one more, one more question along this line. Tactically, every PM ends up with like a spreadsheet of their ideas and ROI and cost benefit and all that stuff. Do you recommend folks create kind of a, a column for, uh, opportunity cost or, or is this more of a broad thought process you go through when you're looking through your list of ideas?

A Yeah, it's more the latter. I do not recommend trying to like quantify opportunity costs because it's a lost cause. Instead, what teams need is just the, sometimes the freedom and sometimes just permission to explore and attack these things that minimize opportunity cost. And so as leaders, that's the best thing we can do is to give The teams that freedom or the permission to pursue these things. And the way it manifests is, and the way I've kind of tried to do it is when we are planning, I often give guidance to the team around what percentage of our time we want to spend on what type of activity, right? And I learned this from Google's classic, where during its fast growth years, Google had the 70% search and ads, uh, you know, uh, 20% apps, which was like things like Gmail and whatnot, and 10% on, uh, Kind of other big bets, right? So I have found that approach very useful during planning, where what I will say is like, look, yeah, we need to spend, and it again depends on the context, but when the team is starting to plan the next quarter or the next half or the next year, my role as a leader is hopefully I've already clarified the strategy. So they have that as an input. But the other thing that I see in my role as a leader is to clarify the rough allocation. Right. So what I'll share as a guidance with the team is given our situation and given our strategy and given what'…

AI assessment note: “Yeah, it's more the latter. I do not recommend trying to like quantify opportunity costs”

Q important, well-run, successful companies, Stripe, Twitter. Google, Yahoo. What's one thing you took away from each of these companies that you've worked at that has kind of stuck with you? I know you share a lot of this on Twitter, but if you just think about, like, something I took away from each of these companies, or even the founders that ran these companies, what, what, what might those be?

A Yeah, let's do this rapid fire style, because, you know, me, I could, like, spend an hour just talking about this topic. But just starting with Yahoo, I think I learned the importance of building Multiple services under a single account. I think that was, you know, the one Yahoo ID was such a powerful thing. It wasn't easy to pull off back in the day. And Yahoo was perhaps the first company that kind of like pulled it off really well. And so that idea of bundling under a single account, which then Google really did extremely well later on. Was, was something that I got to experience very firsthand because I was working on the identity team at Yahoo.

AI assessment note: “starting with Yahoo, I think I learned the importance of building Multiple services under a single account.”