How to avoid getting stuck in your career with Shreyas Doshi
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Culture Impact
Company culture significantly shapes the role and definition of product management within organizations. shares his experiences at companies like Google, Twitter, and Yahoo, highlighting how each company's culture influenced the expectations and responsibilities of product managers 1. At Google, product managers were seen as support for engineering, while at Twitter, they were expected to drive initiatives, sometimes causing friction with other functions 1. At Stripe, a customer-centric approach was embedded across all functions, making product management more collaborative and less about convincing others of the product's value 2.
Product management is such a broad function that works with so many other functions that both the features and the bugs that come up are often just features and bugs of the culture itself.
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This cultural embedding at Stripe facilitated a smoother product development process, as everyone was aligned towards building the best possible product 2.
Stripe's Approach
Stripe's unique approach to product management involved integrating this function into its existing culture as an experiment. recounts joining Stripe when the company was just beginning to explore the role of product managers, despite its prior success without them 3. This experimental phase allowed Shreyas to test his belief in the value of product management, leading to the creation of a concise role description that resonated with the team 4.
The role of a product manager is to define what product to build and to orchestrate actions across the organization to make it successful.
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This definition helped clarify the purpose of product management at Stripe, emphasizing the importance of orchestrating efforts across the organization to achieve success 4.
Role Adaptability
Adaptability is crucial in product management roles, requiring cross-functional collaboration and flexibility. explains that product management should be the most adaptive role within a team, allowing for dynamic collaboration with engineering managers and other functions 5. This adaptability is essential for addressing the unique challenges and opportunities that arise in different organizational contexts 5.
Trying to put product management as a role in a spreadsheet with cells and specific rules doesn't quite work, in my opinion.
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At Stripe, this flexibility was evident in the customer-centric culture, where product managers worked closely with other functions to enhance product quality without rigid boundaries 2.