YouSaid · the spoken record

Fareed Mosavat

lines on the record: 71
first: 2022-10-23
most recent: 2022-10-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“You're interested in these kinds of topics, please. I don't want to make this a sales pitch, but like we have a lot of programs that are dedicated to deep dives into the problems that we've talked about here. I'm dedicating this next chapter of my career to helping a wider range of product leaders be great at their jobs. And that's what we do for a living. And I hope that we can help folks there. As to what people can help me with, I don't know. I'm always looking for people working on interesting stuff or with interesting unique problems. If you're a founder working on something interesting and you're looking for an advisor, practical advisor, not for me, but we have a wide range of network experts that I'd be happy to connect folks with. And if you're a product manager on a team that's looking to figure out how to break through on certain problems, reach out. Maybe we can help with reforger. Maybe I can help individually.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hope You can find me on Twitter almost most days, FAR33D. It's been my handle since I was a young man. Check me out there. It's just threes and set of E's. And that's probably my social network of choice and best place to communicate or hear what I'm thinking about or what I'm doing. Obviously, I do a ton of work at ReForge on our events. I toast a bunch of different things, do a lot of stuff.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Better or for worse? Where are you worked matters to people and for two reasons? One, it's easier to do great work at a place that is fundamentally working. When the tide is rising, there are tons of opportunities to make meaningful, deep, awesome impact. And the second is what you talked about. Like you're going to be in the sales business eventually. And it's a lot easier to sell experience at places people have heard of than places nobody's heard of. Unfortunately, that's, I think, a big piece of this puzzle as well. I don't have to spend a lot of time talking about what Slack is. You probably don't have to spend a lot of time talking about what Airbnb is. And I think that helps. And it is a meaningful part of the puzzle.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is another way to think about it, but you have to come up with a unique intersection that is clearly you are in the top tier of the people who know how to do that. And that's a little bit nuanced. There's an art to it, I think, in some respects, but I think that's an important piece of the puzzle. Second, work at great places. I think this is good advice for almost all product managers in particular, but really anybody working in tech.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is this generalized step I talked about in the learn loop becomes even more important if what you want to do is not just do your current job well, but be able to communicate why that expertise is valuable to other people, other companies across a wide range of things. So I would say choose your opportunities carefully to be building the right balance of depth and breadth across different things. You need to connect dots. So you do need different data points from different types of product work and different types of organizations because you don't want to be so narrow that like only D2C e-commerce company that sell once a year purchases or whatever is the only thing you can work on. That's just an example. I could have come up with a bunch of others. You need to have some breadth, right? But it's like same problem, different industry is one way to think about depth that's focused, different problem, same industry.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's why it has not been attractive to me personally, I will say. I like being focused on a singular problem for some amount of time. I do a lot of portfolio-y type stuff outside. I advise casually, I do some coaching, not coaching exactly, but mentorship for a couple of different up-and-coming product leaders. I do some angel investing, those kinds of things. I like to see what's happening around me, but I do like having an anchor with like my main thing. Really, just it turns out I don't. And so you have to like that, I think, to do some of this stuff. But I think there are things like our platform at ReForge will be able to do for these kinds of offer curbs a long period of time to make that easier and easier. No promises. Stay tuned. Okay”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“maybe spending a day a week with these companies, you are still doing, you're helping grow the next generation. I don't like to say generation, but like next crop of up-and-coming leaders. So the question mark for me is longevity. Is it possible to build more and more amazing companies if more and more amazing operators are leaving the full-time workforce? I don't know. But I hope that it's better than what it's been because they're actually building and doing, et cetera. So I think that's the other question mark and downside. And I think we think about this as part of our ecosystem. I think as long as people are doing and generalizing and executing, as I talked about at the beginning, I think they can still be valuable in a meaningful way and maybe provide access to that kind of knowledge for a broader range of companies. The other is just like.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the second is it's unclear what the longevity is. Like, how far can you be removed from your full time experience and still be valuable? This is why I actually think this is a better path than what used to happen, which is all the great operators turned into VCs and venture capitalists, right? And there you're like pretty disconnected from the ops. I think this advisory type path, I'll leave the creator piece alone because I'm not as familiar with it. But in the advisor path, you are still.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really effective in a small amount of time. So, what works for you, I don't know a lot about the mechanics of your newsletter, but it's not just writing. You're writing about a very specific set of topics that you have unique experience in that has harnessed a very focused community. And I think we're seeing this across a bunch of different things, that there's a lot of sub-expertise. Like no one can be an expert at like company some people claim to be. But like when you get down to it, I feel like an expert on bottoms up, SAS activation strategies. Like I can speak pretty confidently about that. Somebody has a problem in that space, I can usually in an hour accelerate their learning pretty dramatically. And I think as we're finding like what these things are and people are getting smarter about what they're looking for, I think it's opened up this space where you can be like the best in the world at a relatively narrow topic and make a real meaningful.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, let me talk about why I think the generalization, there's no money in writing, is kind of true, but I think it's true because it's in general, maybe not, but what's happening, I think, is people are figuring out what is my specific knowledge, just to tie the knots back to the thing we started at the beginning, that because I've taken so many reps at this is actually not easily replaceable in a focused area. So modernization or like building zero to one paid channels as a marketer or whatever it is, like just narrow enough that I know I'm one of the five best in the world or I can make the case that I'm one of the five best in the world at it. You as a company probably can't hire that person because you're too early, don't have enough money, you don't have enough clout, et cetera. And that I have generalized and knocked on my mind that I can actually like.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One, because they want to try before they buy, so to speak, in terms of like, even if you do end up somewhere full-time, it's nice to be able to like really work with them and get to know them because at the executive level in particular, it's a really high level of commitment. You have a lot of opportunities. So you want to be really careful about it. But also too, because it may not be the best use of your energy. Like when you have a lot of frameworks and you have a lot of broad understanding, you have a lot of examples, your value to the ecosystem is often by helping lots of companies be successful, not just one. I suspect that's how you feel about what you're doing as well.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it is. And the hypothesis I was one of the first EIRs. So I started as a PIR at the company and then ended up joining full-time as an executive as the hypothesis was, hey, let's give people six months to a year so that they don't just hop from one really high stress, really difficult job into the next one. We also want great operators teaching and meeting our programs. How do we build a win-win situation? And so what we did was we created the executive and residence program as a way to help top operators have like a transition point. But I think the hypothesis was that most of them would like take on the next VP product role or CPO role or CMO type role. And what we're finding is that more and more of them are using that space in time. They are building up their understanding of where they're experts and what they're like real TEDx value is. And then finding ways to do that across a variety of different companies and organizations versus just a single one.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Approach to not just the time and energy, but also the upside and opportunities that are there, as well as the fact that they're just so in demand. For senior leaders who have been in meaningful seats at well-known companies, you're getting hit up by recruiters all day long. And the decision, what do I want to spend the next four or five, six years of my life on if it's just one thing is a very difficult one. And so what we're finding is people seeing, hey, you don't need me full time. What you need is me here a day a week to help your up-and-coming leaders be awesome. And we're just seeing more and more of that in the industry. And it's been a really interesting trend to observe. Of our executives and residents, I would say most now are exploring this kind of like advisory, fractional, or otherwise portfolio-based approach to their futures, whereas most of them came from full-time roles beforehand.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Startups, but really seeing an improved management of a shift towards the best use of my time in my career is to work across a portfolio of problems that are a variety of different companies. And so we are seeing a larger percentage of our executive network. It's still small, but working on things like newsletters, podcasts, those are sort of the like at the edge of the like content creator side, but also full-time advisors, fractional heads of growth, fractional heads of product one day a week, et cetera, long-term advisory relationships, running workshops, these kinds of things that are more like a la carte. I think they love it because of the flexibility that it creates for them. They love it because of the high upside and sort of like nonlinearity of possibility of results now instead of having equity in one company for four years of 100% of my time, it's a portfolio.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's interesting. The whys are hard to like pin down, but it's definitely happening. I think some of it is maybe COVID-induced. Some of it is remote work driving these trends. And some of it is just like there are a lot more leaders who are a lot more in demand. So just to like recap the trend that I think we are seeing and that has been really interesting is a trend of like senior leaders, people with like meaningful operating experience, first diversifying their impact. Maybe while they're still at a full-time role, someone like yourself, Lenny, maybe was full-time at Airbnb or a similar company and said, hey, I'd like to do some advising, some angel investing, some speaking. Maybe I'll start writing a newsletter on the side and then moving to this new category that I don't feel like really existed. Maybe it did in certain pockets of executive leadership around tech.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For instance, to figure out how we can be working on things together, helping drive their roadmap and vice versa. Same with sales, same with the data org, same with finance, those kinds of things where I don't think I was driving enough of the high-level outcome I owned, which is like driving growth of the self-service business across the other parts of the company that needed to do that. I was a product leader side, did product work, you know, and I lessened learned.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've learned different versions of this lesson now multiple times. I learned it at Instcar. I had a very small team and we've got a lot done. But honestly, I think I failed to make the case that we should grow it faster. And only it was only like once someone was like, we should add more people. It's like, great. Yeah, let's do that. I don't think I was hurt by that. But I think like it was a, oh, you have permission. You should have asked kind of thing. And I think at Slack, the lesson I learned was about cross-functional like I think we did a good job of making the case for why we needed new teams or add more things to drive more impact. But I still took a very like product approach to solving activation, monetization, expansion type problems, but I think is I look at what could have moved the needle more and what could have made me a more successful leader at that company. It would have been partnering more closely with Mark.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and that goes from would be nice and makes you a better, more junior or even senior PM makes you a more effective one. It's extra credit. At the leadership level, it's like baseline. The baseline is, okay, I believe this is the outcome we need to get to by this time. And this is what it's going to take. Here are the trade-offs. Here's what I need. Here's what I can get you if I can't do that. And the reason I drum this one home is I feel like this is the mistake I have made. Now multiple times in my career and I can't like at this point I'm embarrassed to have seen it happen over and over again because you just get caught up in like, okay, here's the team I have. I got to build a roadmap. I got to make sure everybody's got work to do. And you stay focused on feeding that beast and you forget to ask, is this even the right group to solve this? It may be you need a smaller team even. Maybe you need a bigger team. It maybe you need different people.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And the last one's really important because you have now, you have moved to owning the impact. As a leader, you now own the business outcome, the impact, the delivery, not some sub-problem or known answer. You have to define the solutions. You have to talk about how many people you need to do them. And you need to figure out what do you need from the rest of the organization to do that. So yeah, I think those are the three big buckets of things that I see trip people up.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Any product leadership org has some pieces of these different kinds. And I think building a mental model for what are the things we need to do? What's the right portfolio allocation across these different types of product work? And do I have enough of a baseline understanding of the different ways to evaluate and think about those and what the goals are in order to drive leadership across work? I might not be able to do myself very well. I am not a good technical PM despite having out of engineering background. It's been too long. But I hope that I can lead technical scaling a technical debt restructure on my team or at least understand whether it's important to do or not.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think there's like a framework thing and then there's like a what practical advice. So from a framework perspective, I think it's important to ask the question for each of the things that I am responsible for, what category does this fall into? What's important about it? What are the right ways to think about building that, given that it is different than what I've built before? So some of this you can do within an org. If you're working on core product stuff. You probably have an adoption problem on one of your products and there's growth work associated with driving usage of that thing. And so I think there's a piece at which even within a certain subsegment that this can be valuable. You could be working on enterprise, which looks a lot like a lot of scaling work, right? And a lot of feature work”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An expert in one of these. So for me, growth to needing to think about all these other ones. And you've probably never done them before, right? So how maybe you've done two, but how do you lead across a bunch of different things? And how do you make sure not to be overfocused on the one that you care the most about? And we've all seen this, right? It's like growth leader takes over and everything's a growth problem. Everything's an experiment. Everything like should be measured. That's not necessarily true for some of these other kinds of work. And so how do you start to lead and grow and build a portfolio across those? And I think that's where some of the stuff we talked about before, deep curiosity, looking across, asking a lot of questions, getting to like a foundational understanding of what's important there, et cetera, is really important.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To come to that. So that's the third kind of product fork. And then there's the fourth that is always forgotten by a lot of PMs, which is scaling. So what is the stuff we're doing that is because we are growing, there's new product work we need to do. Most people think of this as technical scaling, but I actually put things like trust and safety and other kinds of what we call user scaling problems in this as well. There are a lot of problems that come up at Airbnb just because instead of having 10 hosts, you have 10,000 hosts, right? There are a lot of problems at Twitter and Facebook that are well puzzled sized that are a result of their scale. And I think that's a chunk of work that I put in the same category as technical scaling, which is like, how do we make sure the product continues to work for the people who are using it? And so the challenge of the four kinds of product work, okay, great. We have a framework. How's that useful for read? It's not that useful. It is to know what kind you're doing, but I think as you go up the stack of product leadership, you are going from being prompt.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you have had many guests on to talk about growth type work. The third is related to growth, but I think is slightly different, which is what we call product market expansion. So it's not exactly feature work, which is like, hey, now that I use your product more, I have this thing I need, you know, in order to keep using it because I'm a power seller. I'm, you know, those kinds of things. But instead, we want to attract whole new subsegments of markets to the product by adding something. And there are two forms of product market fit expansion. There's either taking the same product and finding a new audience, things like internationalization or vertical, like I'm going to sell the same product to a different vertical because we're a verticalized product. And the other is selling a different product to the same audience. This is what like bundling strategies basically look like, right? So adding new marketing tools to a marketing suite, et cetera, that attract a different kind of customer and that either drive upsell or drive new audience.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Don't worry. I think the other is what I call the four types of product work. And I think this is not always right at the manager stage. But for every great product leader, you go from being an expert in some type of product work. And I'll describe what those are, to now owning a portfolio of work across a bunch of different dimensions. So the way I think about product work, and Casey Winters and I worked on this framework together, a lot of it comes from him. So I don't want to overstate it, but it's all part of our product strategy program at ReForge is first feature work, adding new features, product experiences, et cetera, into a product in order to drive engagement with your existing customer base and solve a wider range of problems. The second is growth work. How do I help my customers or a broader range of customers connect with the experiences we already have and drive acceleration and either top line growth or monetization or whatever the most important metrics are?”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Versus going broader. So it's like, hey, how do I maximize my output? I can do this myself faster than I can explain it to someone else. So I'll just do it. And then finding that you're blocking your team because you're in the middle of every single decision, finding that you're totally overworked and finding that people aren't learning or growing because those opportunities have been taken from them. So what do you do to break that? You have to just like slowly start to give up trust, do that. So I think that's the one bit is that like desk spiral of what's getting stuff.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do we ask you to solve this problem? So adding four more people is what you needed, where you needed the marketing team to do X, Y, and Z, you need to go out and do that work now. It is not just your job to get what you can get done with the resources in front of you. It's your job to marshal resources both inside your org and across your organization. I think that's another big area that's related to the trust bid because it's, again, it's this habit of, oh, I got here by doing everything myself. You have to start realizing that like Your job is to convince other people to do work too.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“on what level of input is the highest leverage for me. I actually think of it as start thinking in terms of being lazy with the least amount of work I can do to make this thing as good as possible versus how do I do as much work as possible to make sure it's great. So it's like looking in terms of ROI. The other is just like hiring, bringing on great people you trust, making sure you're staffed appropriately. So this is a second bit. I think one of the bigger mistakes that new ICs make on teams is they still treat problems the same way they did as ICs, which normally when you run a pod, basically your job is how do I deliver the most value with the resources I have? When you're a leader, it's now your job to propose what are the resources we need to have the most impact on this problem? And I think I personally have messed this up a bunch of times where like at the end of the course, I'll be like, yeah, but like we only had four engineers and this is like what we could do. And like that wasn't what we asked to do.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the first is honestly just you have to start trusting other people, which is not common to where you've been till today, but you have to start trusting. 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. My job is to plus the work, to review the work, to help other people solve problem. Sometimes that's by being directive, right? Sometimes that's by letting them run because you're like, Lenny, you're great. Please go solve this problem.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, manager death spiral. This is not unique to product management. This happens in almost every leadership role. You're in a position, you have broader responsibility. You got there by being the best I see on the team, probably. So your instincts are to, I see a bunch of important stuff and do management stuff too, right?”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“really directive about what to do and get into every single detail and make sure you deliver the best product. But long run, you've taken a learning opportunity away from someone else and you've taken the opportunity for you to be a leveraged person that is more valuable than just their time away as well. So I think that's one piece that drives a lot of failures. Just this like, okay, now I have more problems to work on. I'm going to go deeper on it. And handing the people on your team, the least interesting, least leveraged, least fun stuff to do, thinking that's how you get to like, oh, now I get to work on the fun project and the interesting and high leverage ones and I'll leave all the other ones to other people.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“good at that right you've gotten there by getting in the weeds getting in the details sweating what matters like working hard at it and so someone says we'd love for you to lead this team great It's really easy to look at that and say, okay, now instead of owning free to paid conversion, I own growth overall. And the first thing you do is like start to figure out what are the most interesting and valuable projects that I can work on as an IC because I only have one person on my team to go dive in and like work on those things to make a lot of leverage. And this kind of can create a little bit of a spiral of like failure because it's the hard job. The IC part of the job is really hard. So now I gave you more work across more things and you're already working 56 hours a week. And now you got to keep track of more projects across more teams and more people. And maybe you kept the two or three most critical ones to yourself. So that's one angle is like learning about, yes, it's probably the right thing in the near term for you to focus and work on this and be.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we talked a little bit about like the first sort of very hard part in product management career development, which is like, how do I land my first job? Not a pro at that. We can talk about that more. But then this sort of path from I see to more senior IC working on bigger problems that are more business impact, et cetera. It's a relatively straightforward path. We just talked about some of the ways that you do that. You get a deeper understanding across a wider range of business problems. You solve more unknowns versus being handed problems to solve, et cetera. And you do that by being good at your job. And you do that by being good at your job basically as a solo product manager like on an island. We talked about communication and those kinds of things, but at the end of the day, like we described, like most of the work is execution. Most of the work is partnering with your engineering manager and partnering with your designer and your team to build stuff and deliver stuff. And you've gotten there by being really”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think the hard part of this is I have not figured out how to do this well in a remote environment without throwing a lot of one-on-ones on people's calendars because sometimes you figure this out just by hearing conversations, hang out at lunch and asking questions and those kinds of things. But it's certainly not impossible. You just have to work out a little more.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not only do a good job there, but I'm going to figure out how to communicate what I'm doing to be only the parts that are important and matter to them. I'm going to know that when I hit a certain decision that needs to be made, whether I need their input or not. There are all these different pieces like understanding. When to be heads down, when to be heads up, when to communicate, when not to. But I think like understanding how all the pieces fit together, you're really just trying to, I always think of it as trying to build a mental model of how the company works and what's important to it. And what's the equation, so to speak, or what are all the boxes and then figure out like how is my work creating leverage in that? And I find that when you are thinking at that level, people tend to trust you.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Advise on in terms of modernization, or they could advise me on what they're thinking and what might be coming next. How do we fit together with the enterprise part of the business, even though I'm working on self-serve? How do I think about sales? Do they have input, like interesting customer conversations or input? It's this curiosity, like walking around, getting to know what people are doing and being seen as an expert. Are you the desk people go to when they have questions? Are you a person that people ask the opinion when you're trying to figure out how the dots connect? I have found for me, maybe this is just because this is a strength of mine, that connecting the dots of how the whole company works in all the pieces fit together has been one of the ways that I've driven that sponsorship. I think for each individual, you have to figure out what your superpower is and where you can be actually top 10% and then lean into opportunities and also problems that help you show that and shine it that way.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“activation on growth let's say or modernization it doesn't matter one of those two pieces when I say two stack levels down I like to understand how we build customers how it works in strike what are our donning policies what are the technical things that work and don't work in the pieces like maybe down to the database right like technical curiosity those kinds of things but also like mental models for what's above you how do we grow How does modernization fit into that? What are the trade-offs versus free growth versus paid growth? How important is this to the company? How does it fit into our long-term strategy, those kinds of things? So it's like the strategic things above you. I like two stack levels because it's like you should understand your boss's priorities and your boss's boss's priorities. Eventually, that means you have to know what the board is thinking, right? And then left and right is what are the core product teams working on that I could help.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Problems. I think the other piece is knowing when you go into an organization is this a role that's important to the company? Is it on the list? I think it is easier to find sponsors, communicate and create leverage. If the thing you're working on is in like the top four or five most important things the company is working on. And I find myself drawn to those kinds of problems. And I think that's one way because then all of a sudden CEOs notice what you're working on. As a product, notice what you're working on and your peers notice what you're working on. And the other bit is curiosity. I think to be in the seat where people want to sponsor you, I think you have to show a handle on not just what you're doing, but how that relates to all of the things around you. So I call this like going two stack levels up, two stack levels down in terms of your curiosity and what you understand, also knowing what's to the left and what's to the right. So let's use the example of if I'm working on.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This idea that it's what you do and that's multiplied by your ability to show that work and communicate it. And that's the impact that you can have. But you have to have not just impact on the customers, but also on the organization. And I think it is impact on the organization, changing the way people think about problems, helping generalize what works and what doesn't work, bringing learnings to the table. For me, I've worked a lot on growth and I've treated a huge part of my job as not just moving the numbers, but also teaching the organization how our growth model works, how the pieces fit together. What our customers care about, what's working, what's not working. And that creates a lot of, A, leverage in other parts of the organization because they can do better work by having more information, but also be trust, trust from leadership, trust from your peers, and otherwise. So now how do you get to that? Some of it's just luck. Someone's got to believe in you. You can create your luck by being good at communicating and solving hard.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“working on activation and growth on a team of three or four other PMs. And there were a couple of moments where by communicating my work and talking through how I was solving problems, people noticed that I knew what I was doing and gave me bigger and bigger opportunities. One of those was Mercy and Grace who I think has been on your pod and was a wonderful sponsor for me. And then again, when Mercy left, Abe Branderwood, who's the CPO, said, it seems like you have a handle on this. I'd like you to take on a bigger range of problems across all of this growth and not just the modernization piece that I've been working on before. So I think in each of those steps, it's about creating trust and knowing that you have a sponsor there, someone who's going to go to bat for you.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hey, you seem to understand the data better than anybody here. You're solving these problems. Help us figure out what we're going to do next, which now we call product management. It was called Conduit Labs. It's a game company. And then eventually in Zinga, I was the director of product for the Boston studio. The next one was at Slack. I was an ICPM.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First big one was when I switched from being an engineer to being a product. I didn't even know it was product management, but a product leader of some kind. And I think there are two things that happen. One is you got to be doing this stuff, but often somebody needs to see it. The scale opportunity piece of the step often requires someone from outside to notice that you're doing something really well and trust you with a bigger opportunity. I think of this as sponsorship, not mentorship. I don't necessarily find that in my career I've had a lot of managers where I'm like, wow, they're like day-to-day help with super awesome at helping me be a better leader. I hope that I've been that for some people, but I don't have a ton of examples of that. My career, but what I do have is a couple examples of people who deeply trusted me to solve big problems. And I don't know, mucky to have had that or otherwise, but one was CEO of that startup who's now a venture capitalist. Name is Nabil Hyatt, like was like.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you have some control, but you need to earn that right, you need to communicate, and that's why I think there's pieces of the loop you can control and pieces that are externalized.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's like, okay, I'm going to work on growth, let's say, or core product or zero to one products or technical scaling, whatever it is. I'm going to go deeper on that. And then over time, that sort of turns into width. But this is why the generalization step is important. If you want to be a product leader, you cannot be seen solely as a specialist in a certain kind of product work. And so the generalization step is really important. If you want to move from growth to core product, you need to show that you're not just running experiments and driving numbers up. You need to show and communicate that you're learning deeper lessons about how customer psychology works and what products people resonate with and how to think about the business more holistically. And then communication, no one knows what you're thinking if you don't tell them. So if you don't communicate, you don't have control over those scaled opportunities. Usually your manager or the organization or the company does, maybe by switching jobs.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's one moving from knowns to unknowns, so like you're being given hairier, harder to untangle types of problems with more unknowns and more autonomy. And I think the second is, yeah, of course, with, although I think for the beginning of your career, you tend to go deeper”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“None solutions, unknown problems, unknown solutions where you're actually identifying customer problems and moving towards on that. So scaling up your opportunity and then executing again. And I think of this as like a loop of learning. And so of course the percentages change over time as you move more senior in your career, but also depending on where you're at in the step, the percentages change.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About how that might generalize to other kinds of products or other kinds of problems that you approach. And I think some of that can come from seeing it from the outside, listening to a podcast, hearing me say it, taking a course, et cetera. But at the end of the day, you have to experience it to see how it applies in the real world. And then the next bit is communication. And I think this is a bit that a lot of product managers are honestly in any job miss, but you can't just do the work. You have to actually communicate the work. You have to talk about what you're doing, what you've generalized, what you've learned so that you can hit the next step, which is scale your opportunities. Go from smaller known problem known solution to maybe known problem unknown solution type work which is sort of the next step and then eventually to where you want to be is like senior great high level individual contributor pm to the not quite known problem maybe a goal with a set of problems and”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So, to use an example, there was a time at Instacar where we were working on onboarding, brand new onboarding and activation flow for customers. And we tried a lot of different stuff. We tried like the slimmest, fastest, lowest friction, least number of steps path in. And then we had this hypothesis about helping people get set up. And so we took like the opposite approach, which was like a really long onboarding with a bunch of different steps and wanted to see whether that more effective or less effective. And the generalization is, oh, four products that have a high bar to activation, sometimes more setup and higher friction, good friction can actually help those customers be successful. There are other kinds of products that are high intent where they know what they need to do to have simple actions where lowering friction might be the right thing. So that's a generalization. It's a generalization. Oh, I learned a thing. It's a hypothesis.”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Other one on one conversations with experts, et cetera. Like there are a whole bunch of different ways, but is that the generalization step? Hey, I did this thing. Oh, other people have done something similar. How do I connect the dots on that? How do I make this experience bigger than what I've just done and lead me to help solve other problems?”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“known problem known solution please work with engineering and design to deliver that thing on time and then tell us what happened so it's like a very tightly constrained problem as you level up then some of these things become more unknowns so there's execution but i think the next step that great product managers do is they think about how to generalize that execution a little bit so it's not just okay now i know what the best settings page for slack is it's what generalizations did you make what are the things that you can take that are applicable to other stuff some of that is execution oriented how to best work with engineers how to iterate on designs what customers do and don't do rules of thumb those kinds of things and i think that's where reading courses etc can help because sometimes by bringing”
2022-10-23 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Zynga, Pixar) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source