How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar)
Guest Fareed Mosavat, Chief Development Officer at Reforge and former product leader at Slack and Pixar, discusses the journey of becoming a great PM. He shares insights on accelerating learning through real work, crossing the IC-to-manager canyon, and creating opportunities for impact and sponsorship.
Deep Dive Analysis
11 Topic Outline
Fareed Mosavat's Diverse Career Background
Pixar's Influence on Product Thinking
Fareed's Role as Chief Development Officer at Reforge
Challenges of Product Manager Career Development
The PM Learning and Career Acceleration Loop
Sponsorship and Building Trust for Career Growth
Avoiding the Manager Death Spiral
Understanding the Four Types of Product Work
The Trend of Senior PMs Diversifying Impact
Downsides of Portfolio-Based Career Paths
Advice for Aspiring Full-Time Advisors
5 Key Concepts
Specific Knowledge
This concept, popularized by Naval Ravikant, refers to knowledge that can only be acquired by actively doing the work. A significant portion of product management falls into this category, making it inherently challenging to prepare for or train in advance.
PM Learning Loop
This is a continuous cycle that accelerates a product manager's ability and career. It involves executing tasks, generalizing learnings from those experiences, effectively communicating insights, and then scaling opportunities to tackle larger or more ambiguous problems.
Sponsorship
Sponsorship occurs when a leader or influential person recognizes a PM's strong performance and advocates for them, entrusting them with bigger opportunities. Unlike mentorship, which offers guidance, sponsorship actively creates pathways for career advancement.
Manager Death Spiral
This is a common pitfall for new leaders who, having excelled as individual contributors (ICs), continue to hoard critical or interesting work. This behavior leads to personal overwork, blocks the team's progress, and prevents team members from learning and growing.
Four Types of Product Work
This framework categorizes product work into: Feature Work (adding new capabilities), Growth Work (driving customer connection and acceleration), Product Market Fit Expansion (attracting new audiences or selling new products to existing ones), and Scaling (addressing challenges that arise from growth, such as technical debt or user-related issues).
7 Questions Answered
It's challenging because there's no direct pre-training that fully prepares you for the day-to-day work, and much of the essential 'specific knowledge' can only be acquired through hands-on experience in real product environments.
PMs can accelerate growth by following a continuous learning loop: executing and delivering products, generalizing learnings into mental models, effectively communicating their work and insights, and then leveraging these to scale their opportunities to tackle bigger, more ambiguous problems.
Earning trust involves consistently performing well, clearly communicating the impact of your work, and demonstrating curiosity by understanding the priorities of your manager, their manager, and cross-functional teams.
The manager death spiral is when new leaders, who were excellent individual contributors, continue to do all the critical work themselves, leading to burnout and hindering their team's growth. To avoid it, leaders must transition from 'doer' to 'editor,' trust their team with tasks, and focus on marshalling necessary resources rather than just working with what's given.
The four types of product work are Feature Work (adding new capabilities), Growth Work (driving customer connection and acceleration), Product Market Fit Expansion (attracting new audiences or selling new products to existing ones), and Scaling (addressing challenges that arise from growth, such as technical or user-related issues).
Downsides include the absence of traditional benefits like health insurance and 401k, uncertainty about the long-term relevance of one's expertise when removed from daily operations, potential market saturation, and the constant need for sales and business development to secure new engagements.
To prepare, focus on developing a unique intersection of deep and broad expertise, aiming to be a top-tier expert in a specific, nuanced area. Additionally, working at well-known, reputable companies is beneficial, as their brand recognition helps in leveraging your experience later on.
21 Actionable Insights
1. Master Execution & Delivery
To truly improve as a Product Manager, focus on working on real products at real companies with real customers and data, as this hands-on experience and repetition is where real acceleration happens. Start by focusing on execution, delivering solutions to real customer problems, and learning from the outcomes, especially early in your PM career.
2. Generalize Learnings from Execution
After executing, generalize your learnings by identifying patterns and hypotheses from your work that can apply to other products or problems, building mental models for future challenges.
3. Communicate Learnings to Scale
Actively communicate your work, generalizations, and learnings to others, as this is crucial for scaling your opportunities and advancing your career.
4. Cultivate Broad Organizational Curiosity
Develop deep curiosity about how your work connects to the entire company, understanding priorities two ‘stack levels’ up (e.g., your boss’s boss) and down (e.g., technical details), as well as left and right (e.g., other teams).
5. Build Company Mental Model
Develop a comprehensive mental model of how the company operates, its key drivers, and priorities, then identify how your work creates leverage within that system to build trust.
6. Seek Sponsorship, Not Just Mentorship
Focus on building relationships with people who deeply trust you and will advocate for you, providing opportunities to solve bigger problems, rather than just seeking day-to-day managerial guidance.
7. Drive Organizational Impact & Trust
To attract sponsors, consistently deliver impact not only for customers but also for the organization, changing how people think about problems and bringing valuable learnings to the table.
8. Work on Top Company Priorities
Select roles and projects that are among the top priorities of the company, as this increases visibility, makes it easier to find sponsors, and amplifies your leverage.
9. Tailor Communication to Leadership
Understand your leaders’ priorities and tailor your communication to highlight only the most important aspects of your work that matter to them, knowing when to seek their input and when to operate autonomously.
10. Prioritize End-User Experience
When building products, focus on the end experience, emotion, and story delivered to the audience rather than strictly adhering to what’s ‘real’ or technical perfection.
11. Guide Career by Problem & Learning
When making career decisions, prioritize interesting problems where you can add value and learn new things, rather than focusing solely on titles or traditional career paths.
12. Shift from Doer to Editor
As you transition to management, change your mindset from doing the work yourself to editing, reviewing, and enhancing the work of others, focusing on making their contributions better.
13. Trust Your Team’s Capabilities
Overcome the instinct to do everything yourself; instead, learn to trust your team members with tasks and responsibilities, empowering them to grow and contribute.
14. Optimize for ROI, Think Lazily
Adopt a mindset of efficiency by asking what’s the minimum amount of work you can do to achieve the best possible outcome, rather than maximizing your personal effort on every task.
15. Marshal Necessary Resources
As a leader, proactively identify and advocate for the resources (e.g., additional team members, cross-functional support) needed to achieve maximum impact on a problem, rather than just working with what’s given.
16. Own Business Outcomes & Solutions
As a leader, take full ownership of business outcomes, defining solutions, determining necessary resources, and coordinating with the broader organization to achieve impact.
17. Understand Four Product Work Types
Familiarize yourself with the four types of product work (feature, growth, product market fit expansion, and scaling) to better categorize, evaluate, and lead diverse product initiatives.
18. Lead Diverse Product Work Portfolio
Progress from specializing in one type of product work to leading a portfolio across all four types, ensuring balanced focus and understanding of each to avoid over-emphasizing your area of expertise.
19. Generalize Expertise for Advisory
If aiming for an advisory or fractional role, focus on generalizing your expertise and clearly articulating its value to diverse companies and problems, beyond just excelling at your current job.
20. Cultivate Unique Expertise Niche
Develop a unique intersection of expertise by gaining breadth across different product work types and organizations, allowing you to be recognized as a top-tier expert in a specific, valuable niche.
21. Work at Reputable Companies
Seek opportunities at well-known and successful companies, as their reputation can significantly enhance your credibility and marketability for future advisory or fractional roles.
6 Key Quotes
You have to work on real products at real companies with real customers, with real data to get better at product management.
Fareed Mosavat
What matters is the end result, the end product, the end feeling.
Fareed Mosavat
You can't just do the work. You have to actually communicate the work.
Fareed Mosavat
The core of trust is people, your manager and their leaders need to feel like you will do a good job and a bigger responsibility and what gives them trust?
Fareed Mosavat
You have to shift from doer to editor is the way I think about it. You have to shift from my job is to do the work to my job is to make the work better.
Fareed Mosavat
As a leader, you now own the business outcome, impact, the delivery, not some sub problem or known answer.
Fareed Mosavat
2 Protocols
PM Learning and Career Acceleration Loop
Fareed Mosavat- Execute: Work on real problems with real customers, deliver products, and learn from the outcomes.
- Generalize Learnings: Reflect on your execution to identify broader lessons, frameworks, and mental models that can be applied to other problems.
- Communicate: Clearly articulate your work, generalizations, and learnings to your manager, peers, and the wider organization.
- Scale Opportunities: Leverage your communication and generalized learnings to earn trust and gain bigger, more ambiguous problems with greater autonomy, then return to execution.
Avoiding the Manager Death Spiral
Fareed Mosavat- Shift from 'Doer' to 'Editor': Change your mindset from doing the work yourself to making the work of your team better through guidance and review.
- Trust Your Team: Delegate effectively, understanding each team member's expertise and providing the appropriate level of input and autonomy.
- Think in Terms of ROI: Focus on doing the least amount of work necessary to achieve the best possible outcome, rather than doing as much work as possible to ensure perfection.
- Marshal Resources: Actively propose and secure the necessary resources (e.g., additional team members, cross-functional support) to achieve desired business outcomes, rather than being limited by existing constraints.