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

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“Is like, what is that sort of learning or career acceleration or ability acceleration loop? And at the Corrigan, at the top of the loop is execution. You have to have a real problem. You're working on with real customers that you want to solve in some way. So you're executing. You're delivering. You're learning at the beginning. It's all about execution. So we'll start with the pie chart at the beginning. It's almost all execution. What are the problems you give a junior of brand new PM?”
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 let's start at the first one in the pie chart idea like what percentage spent on different things unsurprisingly because reforge is all about growth loops. I think of this in terms of a loop actually.”
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
“Exercises. You can't do fake stuff. You have to work on real products that real companies with real customers, with real data to get better at product management. And so any kind of like training, mentorship, reading, et cetera, that you do is just the layer on top of that. The real acceleration happens from doing it and getting more reps. There are ways that I think great PMs use to go faster on this loop. you still have to do the work that the core is you have to actually execute and deliver great products you have to do it over and over and over again”
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
“Management. You can learn how to be a good PM at Google. You can learn to be a good PM at Facebook. But it is up to each individual PM to figure out how to generalize what they're doing to move from different kinds of product across different kinds of product work as they get more senior to solve bigger problems, et cetera. And so what we tried to do at ReForge is we are focused on helping people accelerate that learning loop. It's not, hey, if you take this class now you're qualified to be a PM It's not really like that. I don't know if that's possible. I hope it will be someday, but it is very difficult. I think it's more, hey, we want to help you when you encounter certain kinds of problems, not have to solve them from first principles, but sort of follow in the footsteps of the people who have done great work in the past, generalize those lessons, but at the end of the day, you still have to get down and do the work. You can't do homework. You can't 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
“that you get better by doing it and so you sort of start in the same place that makes sense and of course there are different skills Until they start doing that work. So I think that's one of the pieces that's very hard. The second is the thing I just alluded to, which is breaking in and getting your first role. It's just like a very difficult situation for a lot of companies. And there are a couple of different paths to it, but none of them are straightforward. There's no like clear linear path except for maybe being like a Stanford or Harvard grad top tier school grad in CS with an internship goes to Google to do an APM program. There are a couple of these things that are surefire, but I don't think they guarantee success and they are actually like very limited in terms of the number of people that they lend to the business. And so I think this is what makes it so hard is that there's not any upfront training. You can really do to prepare yourself or even knock down the door to break in. But then also like it's not clear there's a lot of training within a company that would help you be successful generally on the job of product.”
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 on the trickiest bits about it is that there's no clear, obvious pre training you can do that gives you like a baseline set of understanding that you can use to be a product manager. People come from MBAs, people come from certain kinds of like majors and colleges, et cetera, but it's not like engineering where like, okay, with a couple of weeks of boot camp or a couple of years of a computer science education, I have some foundational knowledge that helps me go from zero to one in my first job. Not only does it help me break in because I like have a credential that helps me land that job and we can talk about why landing your first PM job is so hard. But also there's not a lot of stuff that one-to-one directly correlates to the work you're going to do on a day-to-day basis. I think there's an idea that Naval Arabicon talked about on Twitter and in blog posts a long time ago, this concept of specific knowledge that can only be gathered by actually doing the work. And a lot of product management really is 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, we talked about instant buy, I think you create. I can't remember the name Instant Book. Sorry, on the Reforge platform for experimentation and testing program, which was actually also my first program that I helped lead at ReForge. I think you were my first guest.”
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
“Partners, we call them experts and operators in the space who contribute to our programs in different ways, either as guests or as mentors or helping us develop content behind the scenes.”
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 hard to count how many employees because it's growing so fast. I believe we are at just around 150 total employees across the whole company right now. Doesn't include our executives and residents, subject matter experts and the partners we work with. That's full-time employees working on the business. Of course, we have a large product development, product design, engineering, and data teams, but also the teams that I run. We call them strategy leads, content producers, content strategists, content designers building all of that content as well as our partners team and operations team. So it's a relatively large company at this point. It was when I first started working with it, it was a scrappy operation of just a handful of folks, but we've grown quite a bit over the last year. With that, we support, I believe, now 19 total cohort-based programs across product engineering, marketing, and growth related topics, as well as a bunch of new experiences that we're working on for the coming future here in the next year. We have well over 10,000 active members on the platform, about a dozen executives and residents that work to help us deliver those programs, and hundreds of”
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
“Been not that precious about titles, career, roles, et cetera. I've really found myself drawn to, is this an interesting problem that I believe I can bring something valuable to the table? Can I help solve this in some meaningful way? And will I learn something great and new from this role? And at every step, I made those decisions. I've gone up and down the title stack from VP down to ICPM, from engineer to product, from product to this new thing and content. And in every single one, I think it's a lot about what are you bringing to the table to help solve that problem? What are you taking away from the job and learning from it? And how do you turn that into the next step?”
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
“Lenar, Adam Fishman, or Casey, who plugged into our system to help us build all of those things. Because at the end of the day, our job is to help unlock the expertise that's locked in the heads of the greatest operators in the world. So who do we work with? How do we develop that content? How do we make their ideas shine? How do we solve real member problems? How do we help people do work? A lot of that is a product experience that in some way is like a Pixar movie. There's like the technical aspects and the UX aspects, but there's also all the content and the partners that we work with and those pieces that I kind of own all of that piece, like the production content and new product experiences and all the pieces that fit in there. So we have a team of really talented, amazing people that work on these things. And I lead those teams.”
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 funny because in a lot of ways it's kind of not a made up title, but like trying to figure out how a role that I ended up slotting into as I grew my engagement with the company, how do we describe what it is? And so I think what's unique about ReForge versus a traditional sort of software startup or a SaaS company or all the other things you see is that we're not just a software company. Of course, we have a website. You go to it, you see things, you deliver it. But we also build a lot of stuff and experiences that fit into that. We build content. We build programs today. We're going to build all kinds of other content. We have live cohort experiences that are designed and platform. And we like build and try to make solve certain customer problems. We have a member slack that we try to design to solve certain problems. We have the people like yourself and a lot of the guests that you've had on the podcast.”
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
“Actual problems? Like, what's the end goal that you're looking for? And I feel like that's the lesson that I just keep going back to for my time there.”
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
“Means to that end. So, of course, we used real physics and real map behind the scenes to do stuff. But if you had to budge the numbers to make it look right, that's the right thing to do. And so I remember like as I was working on early effects, bubble, sand, silt, this kind of stuff, I was trying to do things the way it would really work. And then like the camera would look at it. And it almost the first lesson I learned there was like, no, what matters is the end result, the end product, the end feeling. I feel like I go back to that a lot as I think about product development, not just from an engineering and technical standpoint, but from, you know, what's in your strategy doc isn't that important? It's actually just an input into the end experience that you're trying to deliver for customers when we're thinking about content development in our programs like it's not important that all of the principles fit perfectly together into this me-c framework, it matters that you help people solve.”
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
“At the foundation of it is when I first got there, I thought what was important was like modeling how things work in the real world. They're making things look right, so to speak. And what I learned there is that like actually you're trying to deliver an end experience and product and story to your viewers, to your audience. And it doesn't actually matter what's real. It matters what you see on the screen. It matters the emotion that it creates, the story that it creates, how it creates.”
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
“The beginning of how I got interested in solving high level strategic problems across a bunch of different people doing different kinds of work. And maybe how I got relatively good at it was because even as an engineer, I was sitting in the middle of those pieces. But I got bored, which sounds crazy and decided to jump into a startup that nobody had ever heard of and had a deployed in 2006 and the rest is history from there.”
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, yeah. Basically, I started there right out of college. I was super interested in computer graphics. I'd actually been an intern there. I was very lucky to be interested in that in the moment where they were really accelerating the growth of the company, going from like the whole company is working on one film to like, okay, we're trying to release a film every 18 months. And so they really scaled up. And I had been studying computer graphics and I was an engineer focused on a computer graphics and a little bit of research at that in college. was an intern there and joined and just got to see a fun growth period at that company and really i think in a lot of ways is the root of why i love doing product management because everything i worked on was like at the intersections of like interesting creative problems interesting technical problems and interesting storytelling problems and so in a lot of ways it was like i think if i connect the dots backwards to steve jobsism is”
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 got acquired into Zinga and actually started my career with almost seven years at Pixar Animation Studios working on visual effect, software tools, and other creative tech to try and solve problems for a bunch of wonderful films you've probably seen or your kids have seen.”
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, previous to this, I spent almost four years as the director of product through a team called Life Cycle. It's LAC that is effectively a growth team. We were responsible for the self-service business at Slack all the way from first sign out, first team creation through to the first invite activation, expansion, monetization, and even connecting the dots with our SMB sales team to help nurture some of those small self-service teams into larger commitments through our sales team. I came to that through a variety of different growth and product leadership roles at a bunch of different startups and larger companies. I built one of the first growth teams at Instacart for about a year and a half in the middle of their acceleration. I was VP of product at a company called Rankkeeper before that in Boston, health and fitness tracking company. I was a general manager at Zynga. I got there through a startup that I was an engineer at, basically started as an engineer, ended as a head of product over the course of a couple of years.”
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
“Great. Hi, I'm Farid Mosabat. I live in Berkeley, California with my wonderful wife and two children, but I've been a product leader across a variety of different companies over the course of my career. Today, I am the chief development officer at ReFlage, where I help run all of our content teams, parts of our operations, and our partnerships with wonderful experts like yourself.”
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
“You can't do homework. You can't do exercises. You can't do fake stuff. You have to work on real products that real companies, with real customers, with real data to get better at product management. And so any kind of like training, mentorship, reading, et cetera, that you do is just the layer on top of that. The real acceleration happens from doing it and getting more reps. There are ways that I think great PMs use to go faster on this loop, but you still have to do the work. At the core is you have to actually execute and deliver great products. You have to do it over and over and over again.”
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