Shreyas Doshi’s and Lane Shackleton’s next-level tactics for product managers

Shreyas Doshi (ex-Stripe, Twitter, Google) and Lane Shackleton (CPO at Coda) share their advice to ship faster and scale successful teams.

Teresa de Figueiredo

Product Manager at Coda

Shreyas Doshi’s and Lane Shackleton’s next-level tactics for product managers

By Teresa de Figueiredo

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Product teams · 8 min read
As a product manager, the demands on your time are seemingly endless, especially when it comes to wrangling everyone involved in a project. PMs are constantly pulled between stakeholders, always balancing their team’s capacity against the requests of cross-functional stakeholders. If the sound of an incoming Slack notification has begun to leak into your nightmares, read on for tips on managing any project’s stakeholders. Coda’s Chief Product Officer, Lane Shackleton, recently sat down with Shreyas Doshi, a speaker and coach who’s been a Product Manager at Stripe, Twitter, and Google, to talk about the most common challenges they’ve seen PMs face. Both Lane and Shreyas have spent years helping other PMs ship faster and scale more successful teams, and their conversation struck the perfect blend of sensitivity to a team’s needs and attention to efficiency. It was an illuminating look at the difficulties of getting everyone on the same page and the often surprisingly simple fixes they use to cut through ambiguity from the beginning of a project and streamline communication throughout. Several years into my own PM career, I’m still excited to learn from more experienced PMs and to share their advice with you. Here are the top three areas where Lane and Shreyas see even rock star PMs get bogged down.

Aligning on prioritization.

 Prioritization is a struggle for every PM at every level, mainly because of how many stakeholders have a say in every project. Friction occurs when stakeholders on different teams or levels have different visions for a project, often on micro and macro levels, and it’s the PM’s job to figure out how to take all of those visions into account. Lane sees PMs working out of two common failure modes when it comes to prioritization. The first is setting strict priorities before actually connecting with every stakeholder. “I think a lot of us have probably been in meetings where you go do a ton of prioritization work and think you’ve created the perfect set of priorities, only to have the head of engineering or another adjacent team or design lead just kind of blow it up,” he says. “And that is amongst the worst feelings in the world when you feel like you’ve rallied your team toward a very specific prioritization that has a specific strategy, only to see it unwound.” The second failure mode Lane regularly sees is related: playing telephone. Yes, it’s important to get as much feedback up front as you can, but setting up 20 different one-on-ones and trying to communicate the results of each conversation to everyone else involved—before real plans have even been made—can be a wildly inefficient nightmare. The way Lane deals with this is by running the major stakeholders through a $100 voting exercise with a specially designed Coda template. Lane sets up a table with whatever ideas, problems, or features they need to prioritize and gives each person involved an imaginary $100. Stakeholders allocate their funds in relation to their priorities, “spending” more on the things they feel are most vital.
The $100 voting template is widely used at Coda whenever we need to understand the temperature of our colleagues on or between teams. It’s a great way to cut through any ambiguity amongst colleagues, start important discussions, and ensure everyone is heard. “It allows you to take what is typically implicit, typically behind closed doors or in an executive staff meeting, and make it explicit,” Lane says. An important element of this template is that it’s a visible, sharable record of everyone’s earliest stances on the project. Anyone can see what their superiors or colleagues think about the direction of things without spending too much time wondering or pinging everyone involved. Lane has found the template effective in forcing people to take a stance without changing the whole planning process. Shreyas loves that this tool serves the team as explicitly as it does the PM, as everyone involved in a project knows they’ve been heard. “That is the challenge in the PM role,” he says. “Because we’re so busy and getting pressure from everywhere to make the right call, we can tend to sometimes not make everyone feel heard, despite our best efforts.” Using the $100 voting template does often spawn some surprising results and interesting discussions, but any follow-up meetings are automatically more aligned since everyone has the temperature of the discussion already recorded. “You can make specific follow-ups based on people’s input, too,” Lane says. “If someone votes $50 on something that doesn’t get prioritized, you know to talk to them.” It’s a neutral way to call out polarities and make observations without making judgments, ensuring priorities are set for everyone involved with minimal back and forth.

Setting stakeholder expectations.

 Getting everyone on the right page at the beginning of a project saves a team from getting mired in ambiguities (not to mention saving a PM hours of relaying communication), but it’s only the beginning of managing expectations. Sure, the role is called product management, but some days it can feel like your job is just managing other people’s feelings. “Stakeholder management feels like it takes up too much time, and it often feels like a thankless job,” Shreyas says. But that doesn’t mean it’s not important. After all, managing stakeholders, especially those one level above you in an organization’s hierarchy, is a make-it-or-break-it skill for a PM.
The way you communicate and their perception of how you do your job basically decides your career trajectory.
Shreyas Doshi
PM Leader
Setting expectations for who should be on what call or how important a given task is on the roadmap is central to the PM role. Understanding where everyone is on a project isn’t always as easy as it sounds though, is it? Many of a team’s issues can be traced back to frustration with unexpressed or under-expressed expectations. “I think it is as true in business as in your personal life: other people cannot read your mind,” Shreyas says. At Coda, PMs are all about offering as many opportunities for conversation as possible—without spending nine hours a day chasing down individual stakeholders. Once priorities are set, Lane continues to host structured but informal “tag-ups,” or small meetings with top stakeholders, instead of a dozen one-on-one conversations to gather and manage expectations. It goes back to consolidating feedback: “So you, the PM leader, are not trying to be this go-between, telephone tag person,” Lane says. That is a first principle I believe in very strongly.” You can read more thoughts from Lane on tag-ups here. One of Lane’s favorite tag-up tools is Coda’s sentence starters template. This is a simple feedback collection table that prompts stakeholders to start with how they’re feeling. The starters could emphasize anything from a person’s enthusiasm (“I’m excited about...”) to discomfort (“I feel uneasy about...”) or even indicate neutrality (“FYI”). This allows a PM to structure discussions by urgency level, instead of defaulting to organizational hierarchy or something equally arbitrary. The sentence starters template is a proactive way to source opinions without disrupting other spaces, and it cuts down on Slack messages potentially by the hundreds.
Lane’s other favorite tool for managing expectations is using a table template to note upcoming decisions. It’s as simple as it sounds. An easily integratable table lists any upcoming decisions a team needs to make, with space to add next steps and a button stakeholders can press to indicate that they want to be involved in the decision going forward. No longer are PMs messaging six different team leads for their schedules while planning the invite list for half a dozen meetings. Instead, the process takes seconds, and everyone knows exactly what the central question of their next meeting will be. These templates simplify complex meetings, discussions, and emotions by setting explicit expectations. This in turn eliminates hours of stakeholder management and gives a PM the tools they need to run a better team. After all, the job isn’t actually checking off tasks on a to-do list. “One of the realizations that helped me become a better manager of teams was very straightforward: management is about setting and aligning on expectations and managing those expectations, rather than managing situations, and tasks, and schedules, and processes, and whatnot,” Shreyas says.

Making decisions efficiently.

 Practicing better alignment with the easy templates linked above means your team raises the most important questions without spending hours of meetings trying to figure out what those questions are. And answering anchoring questions, or as Lane calls them, “those questions that will answer 100 other downstream questions,” can change the course of a project. Answering those questions leads to the most efficient possible decision-making. The last template Lane and Coda teams use to gather and rank essential questions is a combo: Dory and Pulse. Dory, named after the inquisitive fish in Finding Nemo, is a way of naming and organizing a team’s questions about any subject, with the option for team members to upvote the questions they think are most urgent. Pulse is another way to collect and record everyone’s sentiment during a meeting. “It’s something you’ll see in almost every meeting at Coda,” Lane says. These templates democratize decision-making without letting a meeting descend into chaos. When a team knows their hesitations, enthusiasms, and objections to a decision are welcome as a quick text tag, they’re more likely to present them objectively, quickly, and collaboratively. And Dory’s upvote feature is the quickest way I’ve ever seen to gather lots of feedback in minimal time.
And these templates aren’t limited to meetings! They’re great for gathering a team’s questions and feelings asynchronously too, instead of chasing down each team member in a separate conversation. At Coda, PMs will sometimes even drop Dory and Pulse into docs they expect their teams to read. In this context, the templates do double duty, acting as both a record of feedback and indicating who has actually read what. The last thing Lane loves about the template is that no one’s voice is lost. These two-second interactions ensure that everyone’s opinion on the overall decision is known and means quieter team members are heard, whether they choose to express opinions verbally or not. “You get really thoughtful responses back,” Lane says.

Ready to employ next-level tactics on your next project?

 For a PM, understanding your many stakeholders’ opinions and their resulting emotions is a crucial part of the job. While keeping teams in alignment can feel like a delicate dance of maintaining everyone’s expectations, it just makes good business sense. Luckily, there are plenty of tools to cut through the ambiguity that can become so rampant in multi-stakeholder projects. For even more on each of the templates used by top PMs like Lane and Shreyas (or if you’re ready to add the templates to your doc and start experimenting!), visit this collection of resources.
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