04:41
product management
The main job of a product leader who manages product managers is to create clarity for the team — on prioritization, company direction, executive thinking, and product strategy — not to manage status and tasks, and this is precisely what is missing from PM management today.
There isn't much differentiation from AI tools when it comes to managing product managers today.
What's lacking in PM management is not a process issue or a tools issue, it's an issue of creating clarity.
A manager of product managers (or a founder managing PMs) has as their main job the creation of clarity for their team.
Clarity includes prioritization: what to work on first, next, and after that.
Clarity includes translating what the company and executives are thinking into something actionable for the team.
Clarity includes product strategy: how the team/company is going to win in the market, especially important for someone managing across multiple features/PMs.
Clarity also extends outward to the rest of the company: helping PMs present well to executives, and helping the company understand the products being built.
Clarity includes coaching PMs on communication and stakeholder management.
Status tracking (spreadsheets, red/yellow/green updates, escalating delays) is table stakes — necessary, but something 'any smart human being' can do, not the unique value of a product leader.
Most product leaders currently fail to create compelling product strategies or to help PMs navigate difficult stakeholder situations.
Doshi shares that he was a bad manager of PMs, avoided people management, was pushed into it by his companies, and only improved once he realized his real job was creating clarity — eventually becoming rated among the highest-quality managers at his company.
Doshi's stated approach to advising smart people is to tell them what not to do, since smart people can figure out what to do themselves, and everything he advises against is something he did himself and regretted.
AI tools can help with clarity but only to a marginal degree (5-10%); the rest has to come from the manager themselves.
Product leaders should think of themselves as a 'clarity machine' for their team, operating at both a macro and a micro level.
Doshi draws a hierarchy of competence in which status-reporting and process fluency are baseline/table-stakes skills, and the real differentiator justifying a product leader's compensation is a distinct, higher-order skill of sense-making and clarity creation.
He anchors the claim in personal failure rather than theory: an explicit before/after arc (bad manager forced into the role → top-rated manager) is used to argue clarity-creation is a learnable shift in self-understanding of the job, not an innate trait.
He frames AI's usefulness for management as capped at a marginal 5-10% contribution to the actual differentiator, implicitly pushing back on narratives that AI tools will meaningfully change PM management.
His stated pedagogy for smart audiences — teach what not to do rather than what to do — is presented as itself a form of 'clarity creation,' consistent with the video's own thesis about how to lead capable people.
«your main job as a product leader is to create clarity for your team.»
— 00:42
«Your main job is not to manage things and manage products. Your main job is to create clarity and that is what is lacking right now.»
— 01:50
«that is table stakes of any job. Frankly, any smart human being can do.»
— 02:14
«I was so bad that at some point I realized I was so bad that I told the companies I worked for that I don't want to manage people cuz I know I'm bad.»
— 03:06
«I believe the right advice to share and the right perspective to share is what not to do because smart people can figure out what to do.»
— 03:30
«if AI tools help with clarity I mean you can use them but they will help to a 5% or 10% marginal degree»
— 04:08
«I want you to be thinking about how am I this clarity machine for my team both at a macro level and a micro level.»
— 04:22
Reception
The single comment strongly agrees with the video's message, praising the importance of bringing clarity as a product leader.
The video delivers one compact, memorable reframe — clarity, not task management, is the product leader's core job — supported by a personal credibility anecdote and a pointed claim about AI's limited (5-10%) role, though it names the domains of clarity (prioritization, strategy, stakeholder communication) without laying out a concrete method for producing it.
04:41