The Three Levels of Product Work
Align your role with your default level — impact, execution, or optics — instead of climbing into frustration
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 88%
Product work happens at three levels: impact, execution, and optics. Everyone has a preferred 'happy place' level. Climbing the corporate ladder forces you to spend more time at the optics level, and if that isn't your default, most of your days drain finite willpower and breed daily frustration — even when you love the job overall. The fix is to identify your superpower level and structure your career around it rather than around external expectations.
Origin
Shreyas Doshi's framework for diagnosing career frustration, developed during his time at Stripe when his managed team reached a fan-out of about 50 people.
Core principles
- 01Product work operates at three levels: impact, execution, and optics
- 02Your 'happy place' can be any of the three — none is superior
- 03Seniority is a law of corporations: bigger teams force more optics work
- 04Willpower to operate outside your default is finite and depletes daily
- 05To thine own self be true: make career decisions from your superpowers, not from envy or expectation
How to run it
- 1
Identify your default level
Determine which of the three levels — impact, execution, or optics — is your natural happy place, where you do your best and most energizing work.
Pro tip Doshi's happy place is the impact level; many strong product leaders' is the execution level.
- 2
Diagnose the source of daily frustration
If you love the macro of your job but dread the micro, check whether most of your week is spent forcing yourself to operate outside your default level.
Watch out It's not a willpower or skills gap — you may have both — but willpower is finite and runs out when you operate off-default all day.
- 3
Restructure the role around your superpower
Rather than following the expected ladder into ever-more optics work, deliberately choose roles and team sizes that keep you at your default level — even if that means stepping back to an earlier-stage product.
Pro tip Doshi capped his team around a 50-person fan-out because beyond that, optics work becomes unavoidable.
Watch out Making the choice out of LinkedIn envy or 'what will people say' leads you into the frustration, not out of it.
In the wild
At Stripe, when Doshi's managed org reached a fan-out of about 50 people, he recognized that larger teams inevitably demand heavy optics work — his non-default level — so he chose to move back to more of an earlier-stage product rather than keep climbing.
→ Eliminated the chronic daily frustration and let him do work aligned with his superpower.
Common mistakes
Climbing out of expectation and envy
Chasing the next rung because society, family, or a LinkedIn peer expects it pushes you into a level that isn't yours and manufactures frustration.
Treating it as a willpower problem
You can have the willpower and skills to do optics work and still burn out, because willpower is finite — the answer is realignment, not grit.
Is it for you?
Best for
Senior product leaders feeling daily frustration despite loving the job, deciding whether to keep climbing
Not ideal for
People early enough that they haven't yet discovered their default level or whose current role already matches it
From the transcript
“product work happens at three levels there's the impact level there's the execution level and there's the Optics level”
“I have a preferred level at which I like to operate but if most of the day and most of the week and most of…”
“willpower is finite”
“identify your superpowers because if you identify your superpowers and work in accordance with them you will do the best work of your life”
“to thine own self be true”
From the episode
4 questions Shreyas Doshi wishes he’d asked himself sooner
Former PM leader at Stripe, Twitter, Google