[The Knowledge Project Ep. 175] Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products

Shane Parrish: When I was thinking about where to get started, I want to start with the three levels of product work—so the execution level, the impact level, and the optics level. Can you expand on these levels and where conflict arises?

Shreyas Doshi: Yeah, for sure. So this took me many years, almost two decades of working on products, mainly at high-tech companies, to really realize [that] oftentimes conflict between people and teams arises mainly because we’re not talking at the same level. And we might have similar missions, and similar goals and OKRs [(objectives and key results)] and whatnot, but if we are not aligned on the level at which we’re talking, that can lead to a lot of confusion, a lot of distress among individuals and teams.