This Framework Will Change How You Think about Your Career | Shishir Mehrotra (Coda)
This Framework Will Change How You Think about Your Career | Shishir Mehrotra (Coda)
My favorite career growth framework, how a PM applied it to grow a YouTube product from 0 to $1B, and other rituals to level up your product strategy and leadership
Dear subscribers,
Today, I want to share a new episode with Shishir Mehrotra, CEO of Coda.
Shishir is the co-founder and CEO of Coda and was previously YouTube's Chief Product Officer. We had a great chat about the best framework to grow your career, how a PM applied it to build a 0 to $1B product in 18 months, and other rituals to level up your strategy and leadership.
Watch now on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify.
This episode is brought to you by Amplitude - Get the North Star playbook for a step-by-step guide on defining your North Star metric.
Shishir and I talked about:
(00:00) From 0 to $1B in just 18 months
(01:41) The best framework to grow your career
(03:35) Scope is the wrong metric to evaluate PMs
(10:13) Breaking into PM at Google using PSHE
(17:34) Solving obvious problems without stepping on toes
(24:23) The most underrated skill for PMs
(26:16) The WOW framework for strategy and planning
(31:26) The $100 exercise to get teams to think strategically
(41:53) Selfless leadership and lessons from the trillion-dollar coach
Read on for the interview takeaways.
The best framework to grow your career
Welcome, Shishir! Let’s start with what I think is the best framework to grow your career. I share it with everyone who I mentor. Can you describe what it is?
Sure! The framework is PSHE: Problem, Solution, How, Execution.
We developed it in 2011 when Larry Page became Google CEO and removed the functional org structure.
At the time, we mainly judged PMs on scope – how broad an area they covered. However, that was a poor way to evaluate PMs because it created conflicts and led people away from risky projects.
So, we came up with the PSHE framework for career progression:
Initially, you’re given the Problem, Solution, How, and need to Execute.
As you advance, you’re given the Problem and Solution to figure out the How.
Later, we hand you the Problem, and you devise the Solution and How.
At the top, we hand you the space, and you must find the Problem.
This framework worked so well that we applied it to engineering, design, and sales. For example, the best salesperson isn’t always the person who beats their quota. It's the person who can handle any curveball like a faulty product, a shrinking market, or a struggling team. They can pinpoint real issues, develop solutions, and get results.
What’s your one-line summary of this framework?
The best people create clarity out of ambiguity.
We're all handed situations where the signal's not perfect and the data's not ideal. Our job is to bring clarity from that.
Using the PSHE framework to build a $0 to $1B product in just 18 months
Do you have an example of a PM who grew their career using the PSHE framework?
Lane Shackleton is now CPO at Coda but he started his career in sales at YouTube.
One day, he came to me asking to be a PM. However, Google had a rule that you can’t be a PM unless you have a Computer Science degree. So he was stuck.
Nevertheless, he kept bothering me, so I challenged him to work on what was then an impossible project — YouTube skippable ads.
Why was this project impossible?
Well, I had written a paper about why video ads were broken and why we needed skippable ads so that advertisers would only pay if the user didn’t skip.
But the sales team hated the idea — they argued that we’d lose 80% of revenue.
So, I gave Lane what I thought was the manual - the problem (convincing the sales team), the solution, and how to execute. But after a few weeks, he returned to me and said, "I think you've misunderstood the problem.”
And I thought: “Ok, this is what I get for asking a salesperson to do product work.” But then he explained that: