Welcome to The Lens, a newsletter focused on Product Management and related topics.
Avoiding Failure
Shreyas Doshi, PM at Stripe, introduced the concept of the Preventable Problem Paradox: organizations inadvertently reward solving problems over preventing them. Problem prevention is invisible when it works. Problem-solving is visible, dramatic, and praiseworthy.
The root causes are structural: human behavior, institutional incentives, cultural factors, and accountability gaps. Solutions require deliberately adjusting incentives, building organizational awareness, and using tools like pre-mortems.
Checklists are underrated. Early in a software career, checklists feel tedious — bureaucratic overhead slowing you down. In practice, they build organizational muscle memory and consistency that compound over time. The inversion principle is a useful starting point: build checklists from past failures and near-misses.The balance to strike: avoid becoming so risk-averse that you stop innovating. Starting from best practices while exploring context-specific improvements beats simply copying competitors' approaches.
Tiers of Engagement
Reid Hoffman's framework on executive engagement tiers applies directly to Product Managers. PMs rarely manage a single product — they juggle multiple products, projects, and stakeholders simultaneously, each requiring different levels of attention.
The critical skill is correctly identifying which tier each project deserves. Treating every initiative as high-priority leads to burnout and underperformance across the board.
When you're managing multiple genuinely high-priority initiatives, that's a signal to have a direct conversation with management — either to realign priorities or to protect capacity. "Everything is a priority" is the same as saying nothing is.